race

In today’s society, racism is a topic that is frequently discussed. We question what race means and what does it mean to be racist. According to one teacher giving a lecture at a high school in Oklahoma, being white means that you are racist. This teacher was giving a lecture at Norman North High School, a lecture with the goal to heal racial divides. Instead the teacher, who was not named in the article published on The Washington Post website, said that being white makes you racist in an article titled “ ‘To be white is to be racist, period,’ a high school teacher told his class”.

We tend to believe that we can classify individuals into certain categories based on their “race”. After taking this anthropology class I realised that we, human, do not know much about “race”. In this essay I will provide reasons on why my view on the concept of “race” started to change. 

Race is a very touchy subject in society today. It used to be that race wasn’t a problem and racism was accepted and encouraged basically everywhere. Nowadays, it is not alright. It is not alright to be racist and it is becoming less and less alright to use race in any situation. I recently read Jared Diamond’s article ``Race Without Color`` and one part I very much liked was when he said that we cannot classify people like we do with animals because it changes how we view that person. He says that when we classify someone as different than us we subconsciously justify discrimination.

In one of the first lectures of my third semester class “ The Myth of Race and the Reality of Racism,” we were told a logical reasoning that there is no such thing as human races, but rather a single race known as the human race. Following this discussion, we were asked to identity which ‘race’ we are.  Without hesitation, I answered, “I am Caucasian,” thinking this was a simple question. Yet seeing from the responses of my classmates, I was deemed wrong.  The individuals sitting next to me truly believed that being Jewish or Irish was a race.