Major funding for this program provided by the Ford Foundation, a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide. And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding provided by these funders. There is no question that individual human beings are different one from the other. Our eyes confirm this day in and day out. Skin color, body shape, hair form. I shape. For several 100 years. We have used these visual differences to classify people into four or five groups. We call races. We have a notion of race as being divisions among people that are deep, that are essential, that are somehow biological or even genetic. And that I unchanging that these are clear-cut, distinct categories of people. And the beauty of the race businesses that you can identify people by just looking at them. They don't even have to look at their genes because one manifestation of their genes is there, namely skin color or eye shape or hair shape. And then that's the key to everything. The idea of Race assumes that simple external differences rooted in biology are linked to other more complex internal differences, like athletic ability, musical aptitude, intelligence. This belief is based on the idea that race is biologically real. Olive our genetic value telling us that that's not the case. We can't find any genetic markers that are in everybody of a particular race and in nobody of some other race. We can't find any genetic markers that define race. And actually what we're going to generate are billions of copies of a little section of your, of your genetic code. And we're going to, these students are gathering for a DNA workshop led by Cold Spring Harbor Labs teacher Scott bronze. Since about 30 micrometers, Phillip Marcus, gorgeous to these tiny Jackie, Noah, Hannah, Jameel, and their fellow students are about to explore the biology of human variation. But there's another type of DNA. They really know what that type of DNAs. Now, when controlling anything good, they will compare their skin colors. Colors. They will type their blood. And they will swab cells from inside their mouths to extract a small portion of their own DNA. Once the sample is ready, they will compare some of their genetic similarities and differences. Very visual. The students begin the workshop with the same assumptions most of us have. As you begin to look at the data you might want to keep in your mind who you think you might be most similar to and who you think you might be most different to? I think I'm probably the most similarities with that Mr. Branson or with Carol because you were white males? Both Carol and I and both Scott Bronson and I think I have the most differences with Carol and the most similarities with gorgeous. She's African-American and African American. I mean, like black. I think maybe me and Natalia are most alike. She's law NMAC in Latin America. And I figured that there'd be tons into France and especially people who looked so different person to read, to understand why the idea of race as a biological Neff, requires a major paradigm shift, an absolute paradigm shift, a shift in perspective. Infamy, it's like seeing what it must have been like to understand that the world isn't flat. And perhaps I can invite you to a mountain top and you can look out the window and at the horizon and see, oh, what I felt was flat. I can see a curve. And now that the world is much more complicated. In fact, that race is not based on biology, but race is rather an idea that we ascribe to biology. The idea of race as biology is ferociously persistent on America's playing fields. Gorgeous. Harper and her teammates are competing at the Adidas Nationals. I loved so much. I don't want to check that the people are try and where they want to be the best data. Put it in our work. This is at the top event for elite high school track and field styles. While racial differences are not necessarily discussed openly, they are often part of the careful calculation of competitive edge. I've heard some rumors I've heard or dislike. Blacks have an extra muscle in LA, but I don't think anything's true as a white girl can't be me. And if you do my own thing, she can be me, but I'll sleep on it. I don't wanna get too controversial here since I really don't know exactly. But I'd say that there's maybe a little bit not uses and excuses why they be me sometimes, but Maybe considering when you, when you look at the Olympics, you know who tends to dominate a 100, the 200 and, and quarter for the most part. I just have to say the way it all falls out tends to point to what your race is. What I'm really saying that different populations, whether it's West African descendant blacks and that's what African Americans trace their ancestry to West Africa or East Africans, or whites or Asians. They all have different body types and different physiological structures that allow them to have advantages in one sport or another. There as a genetic basis for these kinds of differences. A culture environment training athletes can dramatically change the limits of what they can be. That I would like to say to John, there's no scientific definition at holes up about race. Race has changed as definition in this country to the benefit of those who wanted to define it differently. And there is no scientific place to start from. So you have no basis for your work. We can see differences among populations. But can populations be bundled into what we call races? How many races would there be? Five, 55. Who decides? And how different would they really be from one another? The measured amount of genetic variation in the human population is extremely small. And added something that people need to wrap themselves around. That genetically we really aren't very different. In fact, genetically, we are among the most similar at all species. Only one out of every 1000 nucleotides that make up our genetic code is different. One individual, um, another. These look like penguins have twice the amount of genetic difference. One from the other than humans. And these fruit flies, ten times more difference. Any to fruit flies maybe as different genetically from each other as a human is from a chimpanzee. So the central question for us is of the small amount of variation between us. What if he is mapped along what we think of as racial lines? Because we live in a racialized society. This is not an academic question. We have a long history of searching for racial differences and attributing performance and behavior to them. For 200 years, scientists poked and prodded, measured, and mapped the human body, searching for a biological basis to race. Some measured facial angle to illustrate the proximity of races to the primitive. Others calibrated skull size to identify those with superior or inferior intelligence. Measures of eye shape, hair form, even brain color, where scrutinized in the hunt for the fundamental sources of racial difference. We just take African-Americans as an example. There's not a single body part that hasn't been subjected to this kind of analysis. You'll find articles in the medical literature about the ***** air and the ***** knows, and the ***** leg and the ***** heart and the *****, I am the ***** foot. And it, every single body part. And they're constantly looking for some organ that might be self, fundamentally different, size and character. You can say this is something specific to the ***** versus whites and other groups. Scientists are part of their social contexts. Their ideas about what races are not simply scientific ones, are not simply driven by the data that they are working with. That is also informed by the societies in which they live. At the turn of the 20th century in American society was riding a wave of confidence as an emerging industrial power. And the face of its power and prosperity was white. African-americans lived under the yoke of Jim Crow segregation. Most surviving Native Americans had been banished to reservations. And new immigrants crowded into urban ghettos. Disease was rampant. Death rates soared, infant mortality was high. To many. This reflected a preordained natural order. Those that lot wanted to confirm what they saw, which is to say that the proper place of say, the ***** are in other regions of the country, the Native American or the Chinese, the bottom of the social and political hierarchy. And if you can say that they are fundamentally biologically different than they should be, than it's natural for them to be at the bottom of our social hierarchy. The biology becomes an excuse for social differences. Social differences become naturalized in biology. It's not that our institutions cause differences in infant mortality. If that there really are biological differences between the races. For Prudential Life Insurance statistician Frederick Hoffman, does differences could lead to only one. For African Americans in vital capacity, he wrote, the tendency of the ***** race has been downward. This tendency must lead to a still greater mortality and in the end, caused the extinction of the race. Huffman's Race Traits and tendencies of the American ***** was published in 1896. The same year the Supreme Court legalized segregation. It was one of the most influential publications of its day. What's interesting is that it resonated in the minds of so many other social observers of the time, the extinction thesis. It fit into their notions of how races become ascendant in the world. They looked at other groups of people at the various stages beneath them. Approaching that completely civilized state. Hoffman presented as statistical data as unimpeachable science. He compared rates of death and disease between African-Americans and whites, am not surprisingly found enormous disparities. But analysis was flawed. He ignored the insidious effects of poverty and social neglect on health. In contrast to today's belief in black physical superiority, Hoffman concluded that African-Americans were innately infer. As such, attempts to improve their housing, health, and education would be futile. Their extinction was inevitable. Encoded in their blood. By the 19 twenties, a single drop of blood reflecting African ancestry could identify any individual and inferior in every way. In the not so distant past, many of these students would have been considered contaminants. Were they to have bred into these superior white race? 28 states passed laws forbidding intermarriage to safeguard white racial purity. Racial purification was one aim of the eugenics movement. The science and genetics rested on simple Mendelian genetics. One gene eat from father and mother, it was believed gave rise to any trait, physical, behavioral, even moral. Some of these things were things like the ability to play chess, routing AS congenital feeble mindedness, virtually any cultural or behavioral trait you can imagine. Now, the mistake that they were making was assuming that complex behaviors could be reduced to simple Mendelian genes. Nonetheless, you Use the science of the day to advance a social agenda, widely accepted in white America. To breed the best and the brightest, always white, and breed out societies worst and weakest of all colors. There's a lot of concern about race mixing. You don't why a superior race, a race with great qualities of intellect and achievement, a musical genius, and these kinds of things to mix with arrays on a lower stage of civilization that has fewer of these characteristics because that again, would bring down the level of those characteristics and what you want to have for your civilization. What you did not want for your civilization was found in the Blue Hills of Virginia. Mangrove Virginians, mixed race, on classifiable and worse, able to pass for white, circumvent segregation laws and breed into the white race. They recall the wind tribe for their white, Indian and ***** ancestry. A combination of the worst racial traits, badly put together. People said Charles Davenport, leader of the American Eugenics movement. To keep America's Mongols at bay, eugenicists proposed a series of restrictive measures unthinkable today. Yet they were adopted within and outside of America. Taken to their extreme, they fueled one of the century's greatest Horace. The Nazi propaganda machine pointed out that their eugenic policies were entirely consistent and in fact, derived from ideas of American race scientists. At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Hitler's area and race was to have confirmed its place at the top of nature's hierarchy. But the star of the gains would shatter those expectations. Semi-final, blinding speed of Jesse Owens. As a child. Jesse Owens had been chronically ill, destined it seemed to fulfill Huffman's extinction thesis until a teacher intervened. When he first asked me to go out for the track team and a fifth grade, Owens wrote in his autobiography, it wasn't because he saw any potential champion in me. It was because he saw a potential corks. How could a society steeped in the science of racial inferiority reconcile itself to Owens four gold medals by conceding innate athletic superiority to African Americans. While denying them so-called civilised capacities. In the words of American team coach Dean Cromwell, the ***** athlete Excel because he was closer to the primitive. It was not so long ago that is ability to sprint and jump was a life and death matter to him in the jungle. Competition with Graham. Very glad to come out on top of where Gary, a flurry of debate between racial scientists and those contesting the assumptions greeted and women's accomplishments. With the rise of the great ***** athletes in the 19 thirties, it became this question that there must be a reason that they're great and that, that reason must reside in biology rather than and in culture or history or circumstance. And Jesse Owens was picked apart. When the African American anthropologists and physician Montague Cobb is trying to explain why Jesse Owens was such an outstanding track star. He does so by talking about his body, he talks about feet, he talks about his legs, his calves, this chest capacity. And he comes to the conclusion of course, that you can't say that ******* have some special characteristics that make them more fit as runners. Among the few who challenge racial science, Cobb wrote, There is not one single physical feature, including skin color, which all our ***** champions have in common, which would identify them as *****. But what marker would identify them as ***** in the first place? Jackie, asian, Noah, as white, gorgeous as Black. Think about race and its universality. Whereas your measurement device, there is no way to measure race. We sometimes do it by skin color. Other people may do it by hair texture. Other people may have the dividing lines different in terms of skin color. What is black and the United States? Not what's black in Brazil or what's black and South Africa? My favorite trivia question based rows which Italian American player for the Brooklyn Dodgers, once it 40 home runs in a season, no one ever gets it right. Because the answer is right campaigner, who is as Italian, it seems Black in Italian father and a black mother. He's always classified as black. You see, American racial classification is totally cultural, whose Tiger Woods is colon towel colon valences, Irish, and Z is African. Being Black has been defined as just looking dark enough that anyone can see you are. When I was a child, one of the things my father bought me was a set of Time-Life books on science and a book on evolution, had in it skin color scheme that went from one to 36. And I would spend hours putting my arm against the scale in the book, the picture in the book, trying to figure out what number my color was. And I couldn't quite find myself on the scale. You can be in either 19 hundreds would be. This actually. Matters are tenure. I'd say that John and Noah 60 multiplied by parents. And Jack and I both fit under the Asian classification. But I guess the thing that surprised me was with the skin color test, what should you technically call entire loop? I would never know ice cream as she called them all white. Or should you call them 11 to 15? Ways? Would I treat my skin color? I probably wouldn't trade my skin color. It's something that I've taken for granted, but it's also a privilege, I guess. I think they're closer. There's no profit in denying it. That, um, that there is a certain advantage to being white. I mean, we all have the same 35 thousand or so genes. But over time, mutations cause variations in our DNA. Today, some genes like those for skin color, come in different forms. In a few genes that control the colors of melanin in our skin. Different alleles, different mutations occurred that were positively selected. So that many of us were very white skin, lost the capacity to make dark melanin. Dark melanin blocks out some ultraviolet light and is found where sunlight is intense. Lighter melanin is found where sunlight is less intense. Scientists debate why this is. One hypothesis is that it happened because sunlight is essential to have adequate vitamin D in northern latitudes with very little right during the winter, one needed every bit of ICT that one could capture in order to be able to have adequate active vitamin D. And children in particular would need to have would need to be able to absorb into their skin enough light to have vitamin D present to keep them healthy. The best way to understand the genetic differences that we find in human populations is that populations differ by distance. And it's a continuous change. From one group to another. And one way we can look at this is use example of skin color. If we were to only look at people in the tropics and people in Norway, we'd come to the conclusion that there's a group of people who have like skin, that's group of people who have dark skin. But if we were to walk from the tropics to normally, what we would see is a continuous change in skin tone. At a node point along that trip, would we be able to say, oh, this is the place in which we go from the dark race to the light rays. Human biological variation is so complex. There are so many aspects of human variation. So there are many, many ways to begin to explain the variation in some traits. Like I shape, hair texture. Whether or not your tongue kernels. Very few genes. And even those genes haven't all been identified. Variation in traits we regard as socially important is much more complicated. Differences and how our brains work. How we make art. How gracefully removed genes may contribute to variation in these traits. But to the extent they do, there would be a cascade of genes and work interacting with each other and the environment in relationships so intricate and complex that science has hardly begun to decipher them. People are always talking about and genes for things. The genes for athletic ability, the genes for making money that genes for intelligence. You have to be very careful, even when there are genes that influence those, to talk about those genes for them, it's not so clear. What makes us different is both those genetic differences that we have between us and also the interaction of that genome with the environment. And the environment is a very, very complicated thing. So when I said, I mean the environment writ large everything from the environment in the womb to the environment in your school. Quite a plan. In the urban environment of the 130s, Jewish teams dominated American basketball. Outside. Sons of immigrants. There's where the Hoop Dreams of the day. They ratcheted up the bone. When it was said that the reason that they were so good at basketball was because the artful Dodger characteristic of the Jewish culture made them good at this sport. There are strong cultural aspects of what sports individuals choose to play. It has to do with the interaction. Of individual genetic background of opportunity and training. History shows us that as opportunities change in society, different groups get drawn into sporting arenas. By 990s to America's Olympic dream team has almost completely African America. Ten years later, 20% of NBA star trans would be foreign born. Atop NBA draft pick. Chinese. We can't come to any fast, hard rule about how genetic ancestry is going to influence the ability of an individual to perform an athletic event. So I don't think we're ever going to be able to isolate a gene for athletic performance or a gene for any complex trained. If genes contribute to Marcus has musical talent, there would be dozens interacting with environment, training and practice. Those genes would be inherited independently of the genes for eye Shane, skin color and hair form. Which markers inheriting through his Karim and Jamaican ancestors. For race to be more than skin deep, one has to have concordance. In other words, skin color needs to reflect things at a deeper and the body under the skin. But most of human variation is non-concurrent. Skin color or eye color or hair color is not correlated with height, go away. And they're definitely not correlated with more complex traits like intelligence or athletic performance. Who is the person who said there's going to be more summer term area is 34. The tools of modern genetics allow the students to explore the idea of race and come coordinates. From the beginning. They believe they would be most similar genetically to those whose racial ancestry they believe they shared. She says Gandhi was different nowhere. They have now sequence to small loop of their mitochondrial DNA. If we want a very fine scale for assessing how similar we are to each other person by person. We can do that by sequencing that small bit of mitochondrial DNA. Mt DNA is a second set of DNA found in the cells mitochondria. It does not code for any trait, is inherited only from her mother. Now, what will it tell us? It will tell us a whole lot about one of our ancestors, our mother's, mother's, mother's, mother's mother. Oh, wow. Like everyone, the students MT DNA appears as the letters a, C, T, and G, representing the four nucleotides that define our DNA. Has students are sampling a small sequence, about 350 letters long. They find that most of it is identical, one to the other. What is not is highlighted in yellow. They're really there for Jameel thought he'd have the fewest MT DNA differences with gorgeous. But I was more like cure than I was, than gorgeous. And she's has 12 differences. And Mike Carroll is like, oh, they seem completely their differences. And it's hard to tell because we don't. John thought he'd have the fewest differences with Caroline and with noaa. In fact, John discovered that he had the same number of differences with Karel as he had with Jackie. The three goes, well. If human variation where to map along racial lines or people in one so-called race would be more similar to each other than to those in another so-called race. That's not what the students found and they're empty DNA differences. But what about other genetic differences are different? The problem for evolutionists and population geneticist was always to try to actually characterize how much genetic variation there was between individuals and groups. And I spent a lot of time worrying about that. Unlike other people in my profession. In the 160s, Richard Lewontin decided to find out just how much genetic variation found within and how much between the groups we regard as races. And new technology enabled him to do pioneering work. And that method which is called Gel Electrophoresis or very fancy name that we were able to use on any organism at all. If you could grind it up, you could do it. That included people and you have to grind the whole person, but you could take a little bit of tissue or blood. Over the years, a lot of data were gathered by anthropologists and geneticists looking at blood group genes and proteins, genes and other kinds of genes from all over the world. I mean, anthropologists just wander around taking blood out of everybody. I must say if I were a South American Indian, I wouldn't let them take my blood, but, but they did. And so I thought, well, we've got enough of these data. Let's see what it tells us about the differences between human groups. Learn tons findings where a milestone in the study of race and biology. If you put it all together. And we've now got that for proteins for blood groups. And now with DNA sequencing, we have it for DNA sequence differences. It always comes out the same. 85% of all the variation among human beings is between any two individuals within any local population, between individuals within Sweden or within the Chinese or the cuckoo, you are the Icelanders. To put it another way of the small amount of variation in our genes, there is apt to be as much difference between colleges and her teammate Christiane, between gorgeous and her opponent k1, n2 individuals within any Some countries, maybe as different from each other as they are from any individual in another so-called race. Or the people who we call black, more like each other than they are like people who we call white genetically speaking? The answer is no. There's as much or more diversity and genetic difference within any racial group as there is between people of different racial groups. Still we know that some genes are found with greater frequency. Some populations. Air geography is the better way to explain that more than race or anything else. There can be accumulations of genes in one place and the growth in another. Like the gene foreigners regulating skin color. And for some genetic diseases like sickle cell disease, alarm assumed to be a racial trait. Sickle cell disease is a debilitating disorder caused by a gene form that alters the shape of red blood cells. It's one of the misconceptions that sickle cell disease is an African-American or an African disease. Sickle cell trait is not uncommon in people from the, people from the Mediterranean region. In fact, in some parts of Greece, up to 30% of people in the population may carry sickle cell trait. Sickle cell trait persists in certain populations around the world because of the relative resistance it confers to malaria. So people who've got sickle cell trait are less likely to develop malaria. And when they do develop it, they are less likely to develop severe complications and die from it. Where malaria was common, the signaling gene was selected in Arabia, South Asia, Central and Western, but not southern Africa. And in the Mediterranean Basin, the home of Jackie wash burns, ancestors, thought to have originated only a few thousand years ago. Sickle cell is not a racial trait. It's the result of having ancestors who lived in malarial regions. Race does not account for patterns of genetic variation. Our recency as a species. And the way we have moved and mated throughout our history. Does our human lineage originated in Africa? About 2 million years ago, small groups of early hominids, not modern humans, began a first migration out of Africa. The far reaches of the globe, breeding isolated lineages. It was long thought and is still believed by some that those first lineages led to genetically distinct races that are with us today. It turns out that's not true. I think that is almost genetic proof now I wouldn't say the issue is totally resolved. That those lineages just died out, that Neanderthals in Europe died the dome or act as an Asia died. That there was a second migration of our modern species, homosapiens, and that all modern humans have products of the second migration, which is probably less than a 100 thousand years old by the best current evidence. Some of those movements may follow major migrations. As agricultural people came into Europe, as people across the Bering Strait and came into the Americas. But either movements are much more subtle. Their smaller groups of individuals that moved or their genes moved from place to place and time to time. We've had maybe a 100 thousand years of having genes move out and mix and Bree or saw it in countless different ways. A 100 thousand years may seem like a long time, but in evolutionary terms, it is a blink of the eye. Human populations have not been isolated from each other long enough to evolve into separate subspecies. There just hasn't been time for the development of much genetic variation except that which regulates some very superficial features like skin color and hair from. But once the old cliche is true under the skin, we really are effectively the same and we get fooled because some of the visual differences are quite noticeable. Superficial traits we use to construct race, our recent variations. By the time they arose, important and complicated traits like speech, abstract thinking, even physical prowess had already evolved. As geneticists, we now have the opportunity to investigate using proper genomic analysis, complex human traits, athletic ability, musical ability, intelligence, all these wonderful traits that we wish we understood better. And for which we'd very much like to know if there are genes that are involved, how they interact, how they play out. Those traits are old. We spent most of our history as a species together in Africa, in small populations before anyone left. There's far more of us now than those small original populations that founded our species. Each of us carries with us some very recent variation and some common shared variation that goes way back and human history. Variations among us and those own traits developed independent van non-concurrent with variations in the recent superficial traits we think of as racial. Human variation does not map on to what we call race, no matter how we might measurement. So now it's going to, it's gigantic database of DNA. You're going to blast database with your DNA sequence and it's going to pull up anything that significantly similar. In the final exercise of the DNA Workshop offered to students further evidence of the genetic variation within groups. They compared their mitochondrial DNA sequences with an international database. First choice for you is your mitochondrial DNA. There's one, T3 gorgeous. This sequence was most similar to that of a euro been individual in Nigeria because his birth, and that's what you were saying, that's the closest personally match up. Now, does that necessarily mean your urine? None though. It just means that there's somebody in this part wherein in this part of the world has a very similar DNA sequence to you. Now remember, if we look at other people within European rule, I expect to see other forms of mitochondrial DNA. So let's close. And they did have match was dramatically different from another year abundance whose DNA sequence was very different from still other Europeans. Because modern humans first evolved in Africa. There is even greater genetic diversity in Africa than elsewhere. So if there were a catastrophe which destroyed the rest of the world's population. Most of the genetic variability in the world would still be present in Sub-Saharan Africa. Is, here's somebody from my genetic data can subvert racial assumptions about our ancestry. And so I'm going to compare your DNA sequence. Somebody from a study that was done in population in the Balkan, looking, seeing how many differences from C one to two differences. Jackie's data search matched her with a sequence from an individual in the Balkans, had to. So you're expecting something maybe more Japanese? Definitely my bucket sentence, NR If I actually know my maternal lineage, like I know where it should end up doing a search like this should double-check it, right? What your preconceived notion? My preconceived notion is we now back from my great, great, great grandmother. And she lives in Eastern Europe her whole life and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Okay. In a little town in Ukraine. Okay, as far as I understand, but remember this little town, your Ukraine, may have many different mitochondrial DNA sequences within it. So let's go back and we'll look at yours nicely from the Balkans. Not a major shock there. Let's see how similar you want to that person. And we'd always guessed that my great grandmother, it had been this nice little farm girl who had spent her whole life in the Ukraine. And so I was pretty sure that I should be a pretty exact match to one of those ethnic groups and I was 100% match. So I'm going to compare with someone in Iceland. We also pulled up a sequence from Iceland. Ok. Wow, I see no differences. Yeah, again, this home, that one. So what does that tell you? So you Icelandic, Are you what does it tell me? Pull up a third sequence eight from somewhere in Africa and I was also a 100% match. Well that's a 100% match. Wow, that's very significant. And it's weird. Well, what did Germany is closely related to this person? Mit, possibly mitochondria Lee speaking were all very closely related. So that's somewhat shocked me actually that there were so many of these racial groups that shared it. I'm just a much so to speak, I've been crossbred and interbred with lots of different ethnic groups. Let's see if it gets more interesting thing, I think the way to think about things is that we're all Mongrel. Rebar has been mixing everything Irwin versus someone. Let's see what else. Today's genetic findings corroborate Richard low intense discoveries of 30 years ago. Because of our history of moving, meeting and mixing most human variation, especially that if an older complex traits can be found within any population. Most of it from a common source. In Africa. We have now understood genetic variation and human beings. I'm not saying our knowledge is fixed for all time and never is, but I think we have seen just how shallow, superficial the average differences are among human raises, even though in certain features like skin color and hair form the visual differences of fairly strikingly based on almost nothing in terms of overall genetic variation. Braces, biology simply doesn't work. But what is important is that race is a very salient social and historical concept. Social and historical idea. We live in racial smog. Just because race isn't something biological. That doesn't mean it's not real. There are lot of things in our society that are real and are not biological. Race as we understand it as a social construct. Has a lot to do with where somebody will live, what schools they will go to, what jobs they will get, whether or not they will have health insurance. Black, white, and brown are merely skin colors. But we attached to the meanings and assumptions, even laws that create enduring social inequality. When I'm walking the streets alone at night, coming out from parties and stuff. I never got a sideways glance at people asking what I'm doing there. If a woman is stumbling with their shopping bags and I stop and say, Would you like a hand? I never get sort of a glance with two meanings. It's always nice. White boy, you can help. On my own campus. When I walk to classes, students often come up to me and asked me if I'm the football coach or the basketball coach. And I tell them No, I am a professor in the Department of life scientists. It's easy to be white. It's very easy to be wait. It's never been easy for Africans are African Americans here. However, it's been a long time since the abolition of slavery. African America, slavery in this country. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Those ideas are still around. No matter how they view themselves. The world sees Jack, gorgeous and John as separate races. The social expectations that await they are in many ways dependent upon that racial assignment. What our expectation about gorges B, that she is a champion athlete or Valedictorian of her class. In fact, gorges is both. But since the days of Jesse Owens, our society has more readily acknowledged and more avidly rewarded one of her talents. Overthink. If the playing field B1 level, the array of opportunities open to gorges on her teammates would not be limited by assumption society makes about the nature of the genes they inherited. Lots of things are inherited. Turning to exchange. Money is inherited. And money goes a long way in increasing someone's capacity to do well in one area or another. Off the track. The playing field is not level. The net worth of the average white American family is eight times that of the average African-American family. Race is a concept that was invented to categorize the perceived biological, social and cultural differences between human groups. And the beauty of that ideology is that justifies what is the greatest social agony of American life. Namely, it justifies the inequalities that exist in the society which is said to be based on equality. Race is a human invention. We created it. We can use it in ways that have been in many, many respects, quite negative and quite harmful. And we can dig ourselves out of it. We made it, we can on making the racialized society we live in, been under construction for three centuries. How can we unmake ways unless we first confront its enormity as a historical and social reality and its emptiness as biology. If race doesn't exist in biology. Where, and the idea comes from, find out in the next episode of race, the power of an allusion. To learn more about rethinking rings, visit PBS Online at PBS.org. Toward the video set of raise to the power of Ana Lucia, call 18778174 95 for educational use. Major funding for this program provided by the Ford Foundation, a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide. And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding provided by these funders.
Race: The Power of an Illusion, Ep. 1: The Difference Between us
From Carol Wong September 06, 2020
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