Earlier this semester I was reminded of something that I believe most of us of already knew: race is a social construction. More specifically, it is a socio-political construction. There is no such race as Black or White or anything in between. Even then, we disagree. What one culture considers white or black differs from our own interpretation. Even within our own history, the people we now consider White were not before. Whiteness has never been solely about skin color, but about the ways in which society has divided itself as either those with power and privileges and those without. We've always tried to draw boundaries within each other to show how we're different rather than embrace each other's differences and celebrate how alike that we all are.

Here's a quote from Harper's Weekly in 1851. Sound familiar?

" [They are] distinctly marked- the small and somewhat upturned nose, the black tint of the skin…[They] are ignorant, and as a consequence thereof, are idle, thriftless, poor, intemperate, and barbarian…Of course, they will violate our laws, these wild bison leaping over the fences which easily restrain the civilized domestic cattle, will commit great crimes of violence, even capital offences, which certainly have increased as of late.” –Harper’s Weekly Magazine (1851)

This was said about the Irish. Not what you thought, right?

My professor asked my classmates and me this question, "is the idea of race in and of itself racist?" This was meant to be rhetorical, but after some thought, I thought I should answer it after all.

Is it racist? We've established that race is a social construction. According to our biology, two people of the same "race" are more different than two people of unlike races are different to each other. For example, as a "Black" woman, I am probably more biologically similar to my "White" friends than I am to my "Black" peers on campus. This can be tested using Mitochondrial DNA. We only receive this DNA from our mothers and can use it to accurately see how closely related we are to one another. Mitochondrial DNA is often used in the discussion of race because every cell contains a multitude of copies while they only contain one or two for nuclear DNA. Using Mitochondrial DNA and comparing the sequences between different people, you're more likely to find a more accurate representation of their similarities and differences compared to using nuclear DNA.

So, is it racist that race is even a thing?

All in all, I think it is. While this can be disputed, I think that the idea that people who simply have a different skin color, different facial features or different culturally influenced behaviors must be of a total other classification of people, is, for lack of a better word, racist. You can argue and say that humans naturally put things in categories; it’s easier for us this way. We give things labels and place them in different categories to better help us navigate through life. However, the United States' race history is quite different to those around the world. At one point, we actually believed that two people were so different that may have been a different species. To make matters worst, we tried everything we could to prove it. We were so obsessed with this idea that it reached across continents. Imagine my horror that the Nazis' Eugenics science was inspired by United States scientists. The same "science" that they used to justify the killing of more than 11 million innocent lives, the most targeted being Jews.

I recommend watching Race: the Power of an Illusion through PBS. It’s very eye-opening and interesting. If you're a student at the University of South Florida, it's free to stream on our Library website as well. It's a more in-depth analysis of the ways in which we've created race in this country and the ways it's changed throughout time.

Race is nothing more than what we've made it to be. No matter how many times earlier scientists have tried to prove it to be, it is not rooted in biology. Nonetheless, while it may not be something of reality, it has, does and always will have real consequences. We've seen this way too much in our history and we still see this now.

So, why does this matter? Why should we care that race is just a social construction? With this knowledge, we can better look at the world and see it in reality rather than this thing we’ve constructed with our shared assumptions.We can learn to ignore the disparaging comments of politicians and those of our peers and be better able to think rationally. In the same way, we will be able to recognize the real consequences of such a construction. Even though race is not rooted in Biology, it is very much rooted in our culture and way of living.