Why race doesnt matter

It's the basis of a manmade strategy for making sense of treating some people better than others. Americans bought into this idea, too. Why was it so appealing? Fields explained in a presentation to the producers of PBS's series Race: The Power of An Illusion which is worth checking out for more detailed information on all this.

If "whites" were in their own category — with innate differences backed by science — then that category could be deemed superior. As a result, they could justify their own rights and freedoms while enslaving, excluding, and otherwise mistreating people who had been placed in different racial categories.

So the division of people into groups based on general geographical origins of their ancestors or descriptions of the way they look, is the basis of a manmade strategy for making sense of treating some people better than others. If race were based on permanent, innate divisions of human beings, the American government wouldn't have to constantly scramble to change the definitions and qualifications for each category. But it does. All the time.

As political priorities change, American racial definitions adjust right along with them. So, for example, people of Mexican birth or ancestry were "white" until the Census snatched that privilege back. Since then, their status — white or Hispanic — has flip-flopped several more times , all depending largely on whatever the current thinking was about their role in labor or immigration.

Similarly, courts went back and forth in the early 20th century about whether people from Japan were white, finally deciding in that they weren't, based on "the common understanding of the white man. And what it took to be "black" once varied so wildly throughout the country from one-quarter, to one-sixteenth, to the infamous one drop of African ancestry that people could actually change races by crossing state lines.

Then, suddenly, in , the government decided that Americans could be more than one race, adding options to express this to the Census. In other words, one day you could be a single race, and the next day you could be as many as you pleased. With these constant changes, it's hard to make the case that the concept of race is anywhere near stable. Today, the term "European" is treated as largely interchangeable with "white" in America.

But that wasn't always the case. According a timeline published as part of the Race: The Power of an Illusion series , when immigration to the US from Southern and Eastern Europe increased in the late s and early s, many of the new arrivals worked low-paying jobs, were clustered in urban ghettos, and were seen as "not quite white. Germans, Greeks, Irish, Italians, and Spaniards have all — either legally or as matter of public opinion — been excluded from the "white" category at some point.

Today, the "white" census category is available to "a person having origins in any of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. The US Government uses the Census to determine the official racial makeup of the nation. That's important information because, although the idea of race has no biological basis, the various groupings we've embraced now shape social reality when it comes to law, public policy, and interpersonal interactions.

There's no question about whether race informs Americans' experiences with education, employment, the justice system, and countless other measures. The data collected can help paint a clear picture of how that works. But accurately polling an entire country full of people who have different ideas about race and what it means has been tough, bordering on impossible. Accurately polling an entire country full of people who have different ideas about race and what it means has been tough.

As many as 6. As a result, the Bureau undertook what it called "the most comprehensive effort in history to study race and ethnic categories," hoping to convince fewer Americans to skip the racial identification question by the Census.

One proposed fix that's under consideration: to make "Hispanic" a race of its own, which means changing it from its current status as an ethnicity choice that can be combined with a selection for race or "some other race.

In addition to the Hispanic question described above, the Census Bureau is currently taking into consideration the views of people of Middle Eastern and North African descent who have told the Census Bureau they don't want to be categorized as "white" any longer. It's unclear whether the Bureau will get behind these changes and, if so, whether the Office of Management and Budget will approve them in time for the Census.

But if the fix does take effect, plenty of people who are considered white right now won't be in six years. Those who migrated out of Africa were smaller populations, and so carried with them only a part of the genetic diversity. Evolution from a single ancestor has typically been portrayed as a tree, with different groups splitting off at different times through history, followed by no further interaction.

This suggests that several waves of expansion out of Africa occurred at different times, and there was gene flow back and forth between populations. Gene flow, or gene migration, is the transfer of genes from one population to another via immigration of individuals. On a biological level, it is a division lower on the scale than sub-species. All humans belong to the same species and sub-species, Homo sapiens. A biological race, by definition, is a genetically distinct division, usually across some geographical boundary.

Generally, it's found that people geographically closer to each other are more genetically similar than those geographically distant from one another, but the changes are gradual. So gradual that the more traits you measure and the more human populations you measure, the more categories of human beings you have to make! At one point it was even said that there were up to 65 human races.

In fact, as shown by Craig Venter and his team when they sequenced the human genome, it's possible for a Korean and a white American to be more similar to each other genetically than two white Americans. What we perceive to be physical racial differences are simply a result of adaptations due to natural selection over thousands of years. The subset of genes to which these differences are due is too small and is not variable enough to be classified as racially distinct.

If you want to learn more about this topic, take a look at the short video below created by the BBC and Open University:. Since race has been separated from biology, scientists and philosophers have argued that race is a social construct.

A social construct is an idea that is created and accepted by society or a social group. Some important examples include government, laws, and marriage, as well as race and gender.

While all these things are socially constructed, they still have a big impact on our daily lives. Also they're not fixed. Likewise, our understanding of race has changed a lot over time. It all depends on how you define 'real'. But there are lots of other social constructs that we would most definitely say are real. The value of money is a social construct, created by society so we could trade goods, and I think we would all agree that money is very real.

It can change over time as they come to understand themselves differently or as social understandings change. But how people are treated because of how they are racialised how other people understand their race also has very real impacts on their lives. Race may be entirely constructed but it is experienced by many people every day.

Should we stop using the word 'race' altogether? Here are some of the key arguments for and against this. Eliminativists argue that we should abandon the concept of race because the term race is historically linked to biological groupings, and there are no such distinct biological groups that match our modern day concept of racial groups.

For example, there are certain genetic markers, such as skin colour, that we use to identify race, but not every person of the same skin colour is part of the same race. Plus, there are people within races that have variation in skin colour. There are lots of other examples of physical traits, such as eye shape and hair texture, that only complicate this further.

However, other philosophers, called race constructivists, say that we should keep the concept of race. They, along with supporters of critical race theory CRT , believe that racial prejudice is already built into our society.

Society already labels and often discriminates against people according to racial categories. Many scholars and activists argue that we need the term race to recognise this racial discrimination so we can make social and political progress against the racial injustice that is built into many of our social systems.

They support race conscious policies that acknowledge racial discrimination in order to address it. We've seen some of the negative effects that systemic, institutionalised racism can have in the recent police brutality cases in America, and the development of the Black Lives Matter movement that followed. To learn about this, take a look in the additional resources at the short documentary, 'Black Lives Matter explained: The history of a movement'. Unfortunately, these measures have also been controversial.

In the United States, republican politicians have tried to ban CRT and similar approaches from being taught in public schools and universities. Twenty more states are attempting to do so. They object to anyone being taught that the US is fundamentally racist or sexist, or that members of a certain race are more inclined to oppress others.

Ethnicity is a term much more commonly used by governments, healthcare and in the legal system to identify different groups. Many people believe it's a better term to use as it's less influenced by a history of conflict and segregation.

If we were to eliminate our concept of race, ethnicity may be a good substitute as it would still enable us to track social progress and what still needs to change. Employers and other institutions, like universities and schools, use ethnicity data to ensure they are being fair in their recruitment and selection processes, and that people from all backgrounds are given equal opportunities.

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