Race: The Power of An Illusion Program 1: The Difference Between Us

Race as an Illusion
Name
Institution
Race: an Illusion
Folk taxonomy is a naming system linked to vernacular rather than the scientific taxonomy. Folk taxonomy comes up on a day to day speech as formed from social knowledge. The human race is considered a folk taxonomy as it is categorically brought about by choosing characteristics and variables arbitrarily. These categories are either cultural or biological as much as they are dynamic. Examples of variables used to organize the folk taxonomy include skin color, body physique, hair color, and texture, and other choices (Haviland et al, 2017). Our assumptions of race change as time goes by. Folk taxonomies, unlike scientific taxonomies, profess to be disembedded from social relations hence, being objective and universal. Race is culturally constructed for culture makes the artificial look natural. Races are created through the social, economic, and political processes which reconstruct populations into races and create racial connotations.
Scientists define the concept of race as biological where there is discrete diversity within species. Nevertheless, the idea of race does not apply to the present-day human populations as they are described as being genetically ‘open’. An example is the frequency of blood group O being high in one population than the other but besides present in both (Haviland et al, 2017). Scientists discovered that people from the same geographical region tend to have the same skin pigmentation. The people living within the tropics possess darker skin tones, but as we proceed further, the skin gets lighter. Hence a majority of people dwelling in Australia and sub-Saharan Africa tend to be darker than those in northern America, Europe, and northern Asia. Melanin blocks out ultraviolet light found in equatorial regions of the earth where sunlight is intense, making people inhabiting these areas have dark skins as an adaptation. As we move towards the tropics, the sunlight gets less intense and the skin color gets lighter. In northern latitudes, people need every bit of light they can get during wintertime for Vitamin D hence their lighter skin is well adapted. Hence, it would be difficult for people living in the northern hemispheres to survive in the equatorial regions since they would develop sunburns (California Newsreel, 2019).
The students had premeditated thinking that people from the same ‘race’ or those with the same physical appearances share a lesser mitochondrial DNA variation than those who are divergent from them physically. That’s why the ones with darker complexion chose to compare with their ...