The Biology of Race

One major theme in American Studies this week has been the topic of race. We watched the documentary Race: The Power Of an Illusion, which discussed common beliefs about race. I decided to research this topic a little more in order to write a blog post for this week. I decided to look more at the biology of race and whether different races were biologically different. 

The first website I came upon was cartage.org, in which the article discussed skin color. An interesting point brought up was that the only reason that different skin colors developed was because of location. 

"In subtropical areas...the people living there develop extremely dark pigmentation.  In southern Asia...people’s skin darken[ed] to a lesser degree...As you move further north into the Arctic region, the sun becomes stronger and the glare off the snow mix to create a people more similar to the Asian people ( Dunn 318-320)."

This is very interesting because it makes the point that in the same was that animals in different regions develop differences in order to adapt, humans develop these slight differences. It is interesting to think that we classify different people just based on where their ancestors lived. 


Another interesting point was brought up by Joseph L. Graves Jr, in his "What We Know and What We Don't Know: Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race." He states in his conclusion:

"Human genetic variation is real. It is best described by isolation by distance, meaning that individuals who have ancestry in particular geographic regions are more likely to share genes than those from disparate regions. The overall amount of measured human genetic variation, however, is very small, yet this does not mean that it cannot be categorized."

This both strengthens and disproves the movie's statement about race, depending on how you look at the quote. The movie made a point that while there are genetic variations between people, they are not strictly between races. So I could have just as much variation with my white friend than I do with somebody in Japan. This quote says that while there is variation between races, it is because of, once again, location.

There are many different ways to define race, and it is very interesting to see how people categorize people by something like skin color: something that only came about because of location. It doesn't make much sense to me, and it makes me wonder why we have had this system of race for hundreds of years.