Race: The Power of an Illusion

Episode One: “The Difference Between Us”
In this video, it was stated how visual differences are used to categorize or rather classify people into five races. These visual differences include shape and color of eyes, skin color, hair etc. The one problem that comes with this is that race assumes that external differences are attributed to internal differences. It assumes that race is a biological difference. Therefore, biology becomes an excuse for races. But the idea of race is a biological myth because we only ascribe race to biology. The idea of race has been exploited especially by those who have changed its definition in order to benefit from it. Society places a very big role and has greater influence in how people define race and react to issues pertaining to the same. Due to a racialized society, performance is attributed to race where people of certain races are believed to naturally perform better in certain skills than those of other races. According to the video, scientists also have a social context, they do not explicitly work on data they find, but also have information imparted on them by their society. In other words, even as they carry out research, they already have preconceived ideas about what the outcome of their study should be like. Is there a way to measure race and show whether we are truly different at genetic level?
In this video, a study was conducted where the mitochondrial DNA of students of different “races’ was studied to find out if it is true that we are genetically different. This study shows that there are very few differences in our genome. We all have the same genes except for a few differences which are due to mutations. These few variations and environmental effects might account for the few differences that we see amongst us. From this study, it was shown that there is much difference within one race as there is between two different races.
The conclusion is that race is a salient and historical concept that was invented to categorize. But the biggest question is: how can we unmake race since we made it? I believe one of the ways to unmake race is to educate people about such studies as was in this video which show that we are very similar in our genetic make up and that we should not just use our phenotypes to categorize ourselves