Reflection 13

While it is important for people to categorize and make things different in order to survive, I don't think race is the smartest of the categories. No one can choose what race they are apart of so if there was a such thing as a superior race, I'm sure everyone would choose to be apart of that race. I can't imagine at conception being asked "hey, I know you're just a bunch of cells right now but do you know what race you want to be?" That's just plain silly. I loved the film that we watched in class that explained how skin color was an adaptation and this article seems to reinstate that. Your skin color is in correlation with where you are on the map; the farther you were from the equator, the less color you skin could have in order for UV absorption which controls vitamin D3 production. It seems as if people are always trying to divide us; especially in the cases of phenotype and genotype race groups. But in fact DNA mitochondria shows us that we modern humans all come from one women in Africa. I can understand though how this fact can be hard for people to swallow, mainly those who are in the denial stage of multicultural awareness. Some people, even those with black friends, will deny until the bitter end that they are the same as someone who has a different skin color than them. The classifications of race helped the Europeans deal with the immorality of the slave trade. When they started to assert that the African were somehow subhuman and different, their conscious became clear; they no long felt bad about what they were doing and they also felt that they had God on their side. After my readings I still feel that the idea of race is stupid; it only separates us as people. Its impossible to saying anything about a person if you don't get to knew them, separate of their man made race. Its sad that some children learn to look at a person's skin color to determine if they are a good person or not. It is my hope that a generation is being brought up that see's the value in each person as an individual.