African American Essay Example for Free

African American EssayJames Baldwin once said, I am what time, circumstance, history, have make of me, certainly, but I am also so much much than that. So are we every last(predicate). When the subject of race comes up, I feel like that acknowledgment is very meaningful. According to class lecture, race is an arbitrary favorable miscellanea of clearly bounded categories based on skin blazon which corresponds to no biologic reality. To be able to understand race today, a person should have a background on the history of race. According to the American Anthropological Association, by the 1600s, English colonists had established a system of indentured servitude that included both Europeans and Africans. But by the time of Bacons Rebellion the status of Africans began to change. Servants who once had an hazard for freedom following servitude were relegated to a life of permanent slavery in the colonies. Thomas Jefferson was influential in the idea of race with a biological a nd social hierarchy.He stated that, blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of remains and mind. Not only did people begin to base their opinions on Thomas Jeffersons statement, but when Carolus Linnaeus developed a biological classification system and the German scientist Johann Blumenbach introduced a race-based classification of humans, the concept of race expanded and whites saw themselves as superior.I feel that even though race is so deeply introduce into our lives, and it also appears to be the natural order of liaisons, it is non a useful way to blither astir(predicate) human variation. unclothe color alone does not provide any reliable information close at persons race, civilization, or susceptibility to disease. Ryan A. Brown and George J. Armelagos in the review, Apportionment of racial Diversity, makes a good point by saying, A single trait such as skin color will result in a classification system that is easily determined.Add another trait and classification becomes a more difficult task, and there usually are groups that cannot be classified. For too longsighted people have been basing human variation on a persons race. Many people are guilty of simply looking at an individual and grouping them by their skin color. The sorting proceeding on the PBS website confirms this. When I completed the exercise, the results said that I only had grouped 3 individuals in the right group. I was using appearance and appearance only to classify the individuals. Appearance doesnt always tell a person about someones ancestry of self-identity.Its hard to make any accurate predictions based on appearance alone. According to the Me, My Race, and I reading on the PBS website, I realized that whites and nonwhites had very different things to say. A Caucasian individual stated, race does not affect his life so he doesnt dwell on it. It is quite different for n onwhites. An African American male stated that he feels as if people automatically perceive him as a robber. An Asian said she was expected to be good at math and sciences, just because of the way she looked.According to the Why Genes Dont Count (for Racial Differences in Health) phrase, Human variation is non-concordant. Traits tend to vary independently of other traits. Race classifications vary, therefore, by the traits used in the classification. For example, a classification based on the sickle cell trait might include equatorial Africans, Greeks, and Turks. Sickle cell is not a black disease. According to AAA, Contrary to popular perception, the gene variant that causes sickle cell disease evolved as a result of its surprising upside malaria resistance.The gene variant for sickle cell disease is related to malaria, not skin color. There is no possibility for consistency. Because skin color correlates with only a few other phenotype traits such as hair and nerve centre co lor, it is true that race is only skin deep. Another reason why I would say race is not a useful way to talk about human variation is the reason that human variation is continuous. Alan H. Goodman, PhD says there is no clear place to designate where one race begins and another ends. Skin color, for example, slowly changes from place to place. Whether than using race to talk about human variation, I think there is a better way to talk about groups of humans. I think the better way to talk about groups of humans is based on grow. In lecture we learned how a persons ethnic group is the emphasis of cultural construction over genes. Ethnicity is a multifactorial concept including, but not limited to cultural constructs, genetic background, ecologic specialization, and self-specialization. According to the article Culture, Not Race, Explains Human Diversity, races are imagined by the public and do not actually exist.If you think about it, ethnicity/ finis is such a better way to talk a bout groups of people rather than grouping according to skin color. Skin color is based simply on appearance, whereas ethnicity/culture brings multiple concepts into play. Mark Nathan Cohen says, The anthropological concept of culture can be explained best by an analogy with language. Just as language is more than vocabulary, culture is more than, say art and music. Culture structures our behavior, thoughts, perceptions, values, goals, morals, and cognitive processes. Mr.Cohen makes a good point by stressing that people should stray from their egocentric ways and look more carefully at what other people are doing and try to understand their behavior in context before judgment. A persons culture shapes many things once thought determined by biology, including sexuality, aggression, perception, and susceptibility to disease. This exercise of exploring on the websites and reading all the external readings, did reinforce our classroom discussions. One thing that stood out to me was th e fact that we talked about a girl from Lau Lagoon, Solomon Islands who had dark skin but was born with blond hair.This example also came up in our outside reading as an example. This emphasized that skin color does not come with a certain set of hair colors. Another way this exercise strengthen our classroom discussion was that the websites and reading both reinforced the concept that race has no genetic basis. Not one characteristic, trait or gene distinguishes all members of one so-called race from all members of another so-called society. I feel that that was the overall major concept that was learned in both this exercise and classroom lecture.As I was on the PBS website, I came across one of the background reading entitled Where Race Lives. I found this article very elicit because I read that in 1993, 86% of suburban whites still lived in places with a black population of less than 1%. This was interesting to me because in 1994 my family moved to what was considered a whit e suburb. Even though I was only 1 years of age, at the time, my mom told me that we were 1 of the 2 African Americans families living in the neighborhood at the time. We were the only African American family on our street at the time.Today our street has more African American families on it than white families. It is sad to say but as more African American families moved on our street, more white families moved away. on the whole in all, Genes and environments work together to make each person unique. Why just look at a persons skin color and make judgments, when there is more to a person than their skin color. Characteristics such as skin color, height and susceptibility to disease are determined by complex combinations of genetic traits, environmental factors and cultural experience.