Joshua Jones Kolloff CMS 100 14 April 2014

Slavery. The Apartheid. The Civil Rights Movement. The KKK. World War 2. They all have something in common and that is racism. Racism has been a problem for hundreds of years. There are so many different examples of racism, its unreal. Merriam-Websters dictionary defines racism as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. Today I will first discuss with you the definition of race, some background about race and racial divisions, and finally I will go into more detail about racism. To most people race is simply a division of humans by skin color. It is not really a necessary division, but at some point in time the idea was created and has swelled in to so much more. Race is defined as a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits. There have been many different ways of classifying race, but none could or can include everyone properly. The U.S. Census classifies people as White, Black or African, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. It also specifies that any of these groups can identify as Hispanic or non-Hispanic. This fails to properly recognize many groups of people, which may cause a problem for some. Another group of classifications as listed by a German dictionary in the late 19th century is the Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid races. The Caucasoid race covers a great area including people from Russia, to the Middle East nations, to Northern Africa, to all of Europe. If you know anything about this group of people there is a wide variety of skin colors included in this group. I have included a map to help give you a better idea of the skin color variation assigned to this group. The Mongoloid race was said to contain all groups in the eastern part of Asia, Oceania, And those native to the Americas. Once again this is a wide range of skin colors. The final classification was said include the rest of Africa,

aborigines, or natives to Australia, Dravidians, or natives to southern India, and the Sinhalese, or natives to Sri Lanka, also covering a wide variety of skin colors. These classifications were based on phenotypes, or physical features. I have included a picture to show differences in skull shapes between these groups. If such a wide skin colored variety of people can have such similar traits, then it kind of knocks the idea of race by color out the window, which would have exclusive traits per skin color, rather than having so many shared traits among skin colors. Now I ask you to look at this map again, and you will notice it displays the same skin colors on different continents. This does make skin color genetic, but not according to a race of people. Skin color is basically based on the amount of heat beating down on a persons skin. In hotter areas, the ones closer to the equator, people adapted to survive the heat, and one of those adaptions was darker skin. Furthest away from the equator, peoples skin color is a very pale white. Jeffrey Long and Rick Kittles have five errors of racial categories. These are that there are no agreed-upon criteria for when to assign formal names to groups that might more appropriately be considered aggregates of local populations, race classifications fail for phenotypically intermediate populations, they fail for individuals who trace their ancestry to two or more named races, They are defied by sets of characters that show independent geographic trends, and It has been difficult to relate many human populations as distinct evolutionary lineages. Now I would like to discuss with you the idea of racism. It is a relatively new idea. Racism is basically one group of people thinking they are better than another based on skin color. To me racism is mistreatment of any group of people in any way based on factors such as ethnicity, origin, and skin color. I also believe stereotyping is a form of racism because most of the stereotypes out there have bad stigmas for the races they are associated with. Many people associate slavery with racism, but slavery dates back much farther than definitions of race. In past great societies, skin color did not determine anything about a person. In the present, and past several hundred years, I believe racism can be defined as the western world, against everyone else. Pre-civil war slavery, the KKK, and Adolph Hitler are great

examples of this. It is basically fair skinned people of European origin believing they are better than everyone else due to more technological advances. Another important idea is racial essentialism. This determined that a persons character or conduct rested on his or her race. This was a very serious case of stereotyping. Hamilton Craven said Colonial Europeans knew in their bones they were the superior race, which justified slavery for them. Up until the colonial history of America, skin color was not an issue, and it had nothing to do with slavery. At some point in time slavery became related to skin color, meaning that whites decided they were enslaving blacks because they were black and therefore inferior. I would like to believe that racism is mostly a thing of the past, and that we could all agree that we are equals, but it doesnt seem that way. Many people believe that Americans have become color blind after electing a black president twice. Statistics show otherwise though. Through experimental testing of implicit views on racism, it was determined that 51% of Americans express explicit anti-black attitudes, and 57% of non-Hispanic whites express explicit anti-Hispanic attitudes. In conclusion, I have discussed with you what race is, a history of racial classification, and what racism is. There are two main reasons I chose to speak on this topic. The first is because I grew up in the south and saw how racist people, especially those from the older generations, could be. It really bothered me and even aggravated me that people still acted like that in this day and age. The second reason is that I came across a link on Facebook to the PBS website. It was for a page called Race-The power of an illusion. It was an extremely interesting interactive series on racism and race. One of the interactive features was a sorting game, where you sorted people by skin color into the major racial groups they identified with. I sorted everyone the way I thought was correct, and I only had like three out of sixteen correct. That really says something about what skin color really means. I really encourage you to check the website out. Just go to google and type race- the power of an illusion.