The Race Myth

This is an assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of categorizing people by their race or religion. I will first go over the advantages of categorization and why it is needed. Then I will cover the disadvantages and give some examples throughout history that prove my point. Lastly, I am going to talk about how different we actually are from one another. I am trying to be objective while looking at this issue, and think that everyone should try to remain unemotional while looking at issues such as this.Ratiocinating without emotion I came up with the conclusion that there are some limited advantages to categorizing people by race and religion. The reason that there are advantages is that there is an inherent need for people to categorize each other into small groups in order to measure social norms and various other social factors that effect different groups within that society. Most social studies divide races up into groups based mostly on their ethnicity, or their genetic background. In most studies there are different results for each “category” that is based on race, with this said, this will be mentioned later on because with a deeper look it may only be because of social factors that are caused by years of oppression and racism and that makes it a disadvantage. Outside of science (sociology, anthropology, and medical science) there is no logical reason to categorize people by race or ethnicity that will not cause racism. There is also a logical reason to categorize people by religion because a religion is a main influence in a person’s values, norms, and beliefs. Most people of a single religion have similar norms and values therefore the people in that religion could be grouped together in order to make various social measurements. Again, there is no reason outside of science to categorize people by religion. The only real advantage there is to categorizing people by race or religion is in order to conduct scientific research, and sometimes that will cause racism (as in eugenics).In the 1930’s Nazi Germany was a proponent of eugenics and it led to the murder of 12 million Jews and also led to the sterilization of 400,000 people who were viewed as physically and mentally “unfit”. All of this starts from “categorizing” which promotes or causes people to use racial slurs, which then dehumanizes the group of people. For instance, if I am viewed as a “haole” or “cracker” in the eyes of another person they aren’t thinking of me as a human being, I become something more like an object or a “person without breath” (Haole by Hugh D. Mailly). Therefore something as simple as linguistics that most people shrug off really does have much significant meaning, I’m sure that when most people say “haole” they don’t really think that I don’t breathe, but they are looking at me as “different than they are”, which really means inferior. That is the seed of racism; the very fact that humans “identify” with one ethnicity more than another is what causes them to think of it as “us” and “them”, thus making everyone else less important. In Rwanda the Belgian colonizers created the distinction between the “Hutu” and “Tutsi”, the division is based more on social class than ethnicity, since there are no significant cultural or physical differences between the two. In 1994 the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s performed genocide on each other in a struggle for the power to control the state of Rwanda, simply because there was so much racial tension between two groups of people. There have been studies to prove that no two races are certainly genetically different.According to episode one of the documentary “Race-The Power of an Illusion” (By California Newsreel) no two people are that different after all. In the documentary the narrator says this about race “The idea of race assumes that simple external differences, rooted in biology, are linked to other, more complex internal differences, like athletic ability, musical aptitude, and intelligence. This belief is based on the idea that race is biologically real.” In the documentary a Microbiologist by the name of Pilar Ossorio says that no one has found any genetic markers that are in everybody of a particular race, and later she goes on to say that no one has discovered genetic markers that define race. According to the documentary genetically, we are among the most similar of all species. Only one out of every thousand nucleotides that make up our genetic code is different, one individual from another. Two look-alike penguins have twice the amount of genetic difference, from one from the other, than humans. Fruit flies have ten times more difference; any two fruit flies may be as different genetically from each other, as a human is from a chimpanzee. All of this substantive evidence supports the view of not categorizing people by race.Weighing the advantages of categorization against the disadvantages of it the only logical conclusion is against categorization. The benefits that recognizing race brings are so minuscule compared to the costs of racism. We are all made up of the same genetic material and we are all human beings. We need to be careful of the language that we use, even if there is not intent to cause harm to another person, because it is truly easy to dehumanize a person. Talking about peoples by categorizing them into groups is already making them seem less human than human. America has come a long way since the abolition slavery but it is up to us [Americans] to change the world once again and shift to a paradigm where we don’t think of people based upon their race, but we simply just think of “people”.Sources“Haole.” Encyclopedia Mythica. 2006. Encyclopedia Mythica Online.19 Oct. 2006 http://www.pantheon.org/articles/h/haole.html>.RACE – The Power of an Illusion. Dir. Larry Adelman. DVD.California Newsreel, 2003.