I love my Anthropology class. I've never learned so much or gained so much perspective on the world. We've entered a new unit that covers Cultural Anthropology, and today's lesson was about Race. Today I learned how race is non-existant. And it was so hard to wrap my mind around it at first.
Here in America we define people's race by their skin color. In China it's based off how much hair you have. Eskimos define race based off the roundness or thinness of someone's body shape. Brazilians define race by looking at the different thinness of noses, size of lips, color of hair, color of eyes, and color of skin. Brazilians have over 40 different "tipos" which translates to types or races in America.
SO. Race isn't something that's set in stone, it's not a biological definition of someone. One's race can change by simply getting on a plane and landing in a new country.
I thought this was so crazy! We went over how biology really has nothing to do with race...which was complicated so I won't be putting it on here. But, seriously!! I love how we run all these studies and come to the conclusion that, "Okay. So this disease is more prevalent in black people than white people," or, "Okay, these white people may be smarter than these black people." NO NO NO NO NO NO! We can't say that. We can't test people on race?! They can put down that they are a certain race on a sheet of medical files, but we can't biologically test it.
Bleh. This is word vomit. But I was just sooooo blown away by this. As I always am in Anthropology. Seriously though. We've have so many racial problems, and we still classify people by skin color. When race is non-existant. And we'll keep running these studies, and conducting this research and come out with results like, "20% of white people, 50% of black people..." etc. Race is not genetic, it's a social classification.
So interesting. I just had to blog about it. Hope it was interesting for others to read too :)
----Side note: Went to go looking for pictures of different races in different coutnries. It's harder than you think! Race is so hard to define! BAH! Okay. Sorry, mind is still blown!
that is sooo interesting! i had no idea that different countries had so many different classifications for race! DANG! i want to learn more about that, thanks for such an eye-opening post :)
ReplyDeleteyeah, it's really confusing at first.
ReplyDeletecause i was confused about the line between race and ethnicity...
and we talked about it in class, and like in china most people look the same so they classify race by hair...and ethnicity and such by what food they eat, what language they speak, etc.
SO WEIRD. it's a really sweet concept. :)