Race: the power of an illusion
March 14th, 2007
In my opinion, Race: The power of an Illusion is a must see documentary.
My favourite part of the documentary was when they proved that I (that is, me, myself, centophobia) may have more genetic similarity to someone of a different ‘race’ than someone of my own ‘race’. Which raises the question - what is race if not a word to explain differences between groups of people?
I could be part of the “dumbo race”
Having now found out that there is as much genetic similarity within a group of people as there is between groups of people, is race simply a term we should use to represent the few visual characteristics that distinguish groups of people - for example, different skin colours, eyes and hair texture. And if so, should we also perhaps use race as a term to distinguish between people with big ears, a large penis or bushy eyebrows.
So why are Ethiopians brilliant at marathons and African American’s great at singing? It isn’t because they are genetically different; it reflects the environmental, cultural and social discrimination which exists in our societies.
The documentary concluded that race - as an objective measure - no longer exists. So stop using it, you ‘racist’ prick.
tag: Race: the power of an illusion, race, dumbo race, documentary, race, racist
Tags:
Centophobia, Posts with video, Society , Media
2 Comments Add your own
1.
You ask, “So why are Ethiopians brilliant at marathons and African American’s great at singing?”
Huh??
Have you not noticed all the European Americans who are “great at singing”? The awesome Russian distance runners? What made you pick out Ethiopians and African Americans for those feats and ignore everyone else? That’s the problem with racism; it blinds us to reality because it causes us to filter through the lens of “race.”
I wish you could have acknowledged the fact that no race of people has proven itself superior at singing or running due to race.
2.
Thanks for your comment.
If I no longer agree with the term ‘race’ and believe that we are all part of the one human race, how can I possibly be suggesting that one race has “proven itself superior” over others?
Have you seen a marathon lately? A lot of them aren’t Russian…
Eight of the top ten Marathon Runners of all time have been from either Ethiopia or Kenya.
Although I don’t believe that this is due to ‘race’, but rather due to a whole heap of historic, environmental, cultural and societal factors, I am still able to observe that a larger proportion of people from Ethiopia (a country) are comparably better at long distance running than people from other places. The evidence would suggest that this is true!! However, I should not say, and didn’t mean to imply in the post above, that all Ethiopians (people from Ethiopia) are better at running than people from all other countries.
As for singing and African American’s (a group of people living in America from African descent), I can’t provide evidence of this. Of course, other people are fantastic singers (not myself, unfortunately) and I’m sorry that I implied that they weren’t.
I’d also like to point out that I’m not talking about heredity here either. Obviously, many of the characteristics people have, come from their parents and grandparents and this would contribute to their talents and abilities. Also, one would suspect that the diversity of environmental influences people are exposed to throughout their life would be on the decrease, due to globalisation.
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