What is race?
What do we really know about race?
Race is a short word with a long history in the United States of America. Think of the history of America and the idea of races, just mix-up and ever-changing. It's like a painting, race was created. It's a powerful idea that was invented by society. Race is an enduring concept that has molded by American nation's economy, laws and social institution. It is a complex notion that has shaped each of human destinies.
Many of the idea about associate with race originated during the European era of exploration. Europeans like Christoper Columbus traveled overseas and encountered, Â and the colonize or conqruered peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americans. Who looked, talked, and acted much differently from them.
Naturalist and scientists then classified these differences into system that became the foundation for the nation of race as we know today. In the American colonies the first laborers were European indentured servants. When African laborers were forcibli brought to Virginia beginning in 1619, statues was defined by wealth and religion, not by physical characteristics such as skin color. Bu this would change.
Over time, physical difference mettered and with the development of the transatlantic slave trade, land owners began replacing their temporary European laborers with enslaved African who were held in permanent bondage. Soon a new social structure emerged based primarily skin color with those english ancestry at the top, and African slaves and American Indians at the bottom.
By 1776 when "all men are created equal" was written into Declaration of Indipendence by slave-holder named Thomas Jefferson, a democratic nation was born with a major contradiction about race at its core. As American new nation asserted its indipendence from European tyrany, blacks and American Indians were viewed as less than human and not deserving of the same liberities as white.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the nation of race continued to shape life in the United States. The rise of "race science" supported the common belief that people who were not white were biologically inferior.
The removal of Native Americans from their lands, legealize segregation and the interment of Japanese Americans during World Was II are legacies of where this thinking led.
Today, science tells us that all human share a common ancestry. And while there are differences among us, we are also very much alike. Changing demographics in the United States and across the globe are resulting in new patterns marriage, housing, education, employment, and new thinking about race.
Despite these advances, the legacy of race continues to affect us in a variety of ways. Deeply-held asumptions about race and enduring stereotypes make us think that gaps in wealth, health, housing, education, employment, or physical ability in sport are natural. We fail to see the previleges that some have been granted and others denied because of skin color.
