film response 3

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102

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Anthropology

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Oct 30, 2023

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Film Response 3 Roxanna was essentially as white as anyone, but the 1/16 of her that was black won the vote over the other 15 parts and classified her as a Negro. She was a slave and so marketable. Her child was 31 parts white, a slave, and—by a fiction of law and custom— he was also a black person. Because it is easy to distinguish between a Nubian and a Norwegian, why not categorize people according to race? In "The Difference Between Us," the speaker examines this issue and shows how recent scientific advancements have disproved our common-sense belief that the world's inhabitants may be divided into distinct groups. It starts by following a dozen students as they sequence and compare their own DNA, including black athletes and Asian string players. The students and the audience are shocked by the results when they learn that their closest genetic matches are just as likely to be with individuals from other "races" as with themselves. The curriculum spends a lot of time figuring out why. It looks at several scientific findings that show why people cannot be separated into races and shows that there are no qualities, attributes, or even a single gene that set "race" of people apart from another. Among all animals, humans are among the most similar. That's because contemporary humans—every single one of us—evolved in Africa and just recently started migrating elsewhere. Populations collided as humans spread throughout the world, mixing mates and genes in the process. Simply put, populations have not been isolated for long enough for distinct races or sub-species to develop. We may observe how visual traits alter gradually and consistently between groups as we "walk" from the equator to the North. There are no restrictions. We also discover that most features, including blood type, skin colour, and hair texture, are controlled by different genes, and are therefore inherited separately from one another. One attribute alone does not prove the existence of others. Really, skin colour only goes so far. Numerous variations in our physical features, including as various skin tones, seem to have recently evolved after we left Africa. But the characteristics we value most— intelligence, musical skill, and athletic prowess—are widespread and old. Geneticists have determined that any local group, including Poles, Hmong, and Fulani, has 85% of all genetic variants. Racial profiling is as wrong genetically as it is on the New Jersey Turnpike, it turns out. Certain gene types, such as those that control skin colour and those linked to certain disorders like Tay Sachs and sickle cell, are undoubtedly more common in some populations than in others. But do these indicate "race"? We find that the malaria resistance afforded by the sickle cell mutation led to its selection. People with this condition are found among those whose ancestors originated in regions of the world

where malaria was prevalent, such as central and west Africa, Arabia, Turkey, Greece, and Sicily, India, but not southern Africa. However, we have a long tradition of looking for inborn "racial" distinctions to account for variations in group outcomes, whether it be sickness, SAT performance, or athletic ability. In contrast to today's myth of inborn black supremacy in athletics, many white people believed one hundred years ago that high African American disease and mortality rates were not due to poverty, subpar sanitation, or Jim Crow, but rather because black people were innately ill and would eventually become extinct. Frederick Hoffman, a prominent statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company, compared the death and disease rates of white and black people in 1896 and concluded that there was a "heritable race trait" in Negroes; he disregarded the effects of poverty, subpar sanitation, and overcrowding on health and mortality. Even today, it's common to explain group performance discrepancies by innate "racial" characteristics. Many of the stereotypes we have about race are debunked in "The Difference Between Us," including the notion that black athletes have "natural" advantages and that Asian musicians are more talented.

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