Extra Credit - Race The Power Of Illusion

Race is one of those topics that we choose not to speak about, but we all like to think that some how we are experts. The film “Race The Power Of Illusion” is a three-part segment that really questions the thing we call “Race” and how our assumptions is absolutely wrong. The series help clear away the biological underbrush and shows the underlying social, economic, and political conditions that define our society.  

           

             Episode 1 – “The difference Between Us” examines recent scientific discoveries have topple the notion’s of biological race. The film follows a dozen diverse students “Black, White, Asian, and Hispanic” who sequence and compare their own DNA.  They discover, suprisely  that their closet genetic matches are as likely to be with people from other “Races” (Shocking) as their own. Throughout episode 1 the students felt that because they were from different races; they would differ from one another unless they were of the same race. The video clearly states in so many words that it why it doesn’t make scientific or genetic sense to sort people into biological races.

            Episode II – “The Story We Tell” uncovers the roots of the race concept, including the 19^th- century science that legitimated it and the hold it has gained over our minds. It’s an eye-opening tale of how America’s need to defend slavery in the face of radical new belief in freedom and equality led to a full-blown ideology of white supremacy.  Noting the experience of Cherokee Indians, America war against Mexico and annexation of the Philippines, to me the film shows how definitions of race excluded from humanity not only Black people, but anyone who stood in the way of American Dream.

            Episode III – “The house we live in” focuses not only on individual behaviors and attitudes but on how our institutions shape and create race, giving different groups vastly unequal “life chances” really who define race? In the 20^th century, the courts were called upon to determine who was white, employing contradictory logic to maintain the color line. After World War II, government sanctions and subsidies helped create segregated suburbs where Jews, Italians, and other not-so-white Europeans ethnics were able to reap the full advantage of whiteness. This episode revealed some of the ordinary social institutions that quietly channel wealth and opportunity so that the dominants culture could benefit from a racist system .

            I must admit this video bought on emotions that have been long forgotten. I feel like I’m split between two worlds from my parent’s ancestry. I realize the government creates policies for social control but it still leaves me saying “Aren’t we all human” from the Americans concocted story that “there’s” something different about “those “people” to rationalize the devastation’s that they have cause and the effects that it still have..  I have to acknowledge race is a modern idea it has no genetic basis there isn’t a human subspecies; skin color is really only skin deep, most variation is within, not between, “races” slavery predates race. Race and freedom were born together furthermore race some how justified social inequalities as natural and colorblindness will not and cannot end racism.

“To get beyond racism we msut first take account of race. There is no other way.”

                                                            Supreme court justice Henry Blackmun