So today, I had another interesting lecture in my Anthropology class. The past couple days we have been discussing the issue of race and what it really means. What I found out though, is that it means nothing at all. There are no lines that separate one “race” from another. It is just a culturally constructed idea to explain arbitrary and conventional symbols. Races are not even seen the same throughout the world. For example, in the U.S. your race is based on your bloodline, where you are descended from. Also, if you have one drop of minority blood, you are considered to be in that minortiy group. In Brazil, however, race is based purely on the color of your skin and your hair type. Barack Obama, being half Kenyan and half white, would be considered “black” in America, but not in Brazil where there are many different classifications to describe the exact color of someone’s skin. 

Your skin color and hair, however, is simply based on what part of the climate that you live in. An example of this would be someone who lives somewhere hot and with little trees on the equator, such as Ghana, and someone who lives in a more shady part of Africa would have very different skin and hair types. Also, the pygmy tribe in Africa is far shorter than the Masai tribe. In fact, Africa has the most genetic diversity in its populations than anywhere else in the world. This is because our mitochondrial DNA shows that we all have originated in Africa about 150,000 years ago from one woman, called the Mitochondrial Eve. There has been more time to diversify.

It has also been shown in our class and through websites we have visited that Europeans and Asians are just subsets of the genetic variations in Africans. As you walk from South Africa to Norway, you can visibly see the gradual change from dark skin to light skin and directly correlate it to climate. In fact, only about .01% of your genetic makeup is represented physically and since we all originated from the same woman a Norwegian and a South African are almost identical in DNA. There is no such thing as “black” genes or “white” genes. 94% of physical variation lies within the so called “racial groups.” This article that we read for class explains this concept very well.

Although I already knew that we were all the same underneath I never really thought of it in this way so I found it quite surprising. I didn’t know that genetically I could be more similar to someone in India than I could to my immediate lineage in Italy or Ireland. I also didn’t know that scientists had actually traced our species back to one woman, who lived relatively recently. Also, if there is no such thing as race, do “minorities” or “majorities” really exist? Why do we refer to ourselves as European, Asian, or anything else if we are really all African or more simply human? Why is there even racism to begin with? This topic really got my brain going and I just had to share it with someone else . I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

Through this skin color map, you can easily see how skin color and climate correlate.