Alli Gardner
Anthropology 105
February 9, 2018
All in The Same
Over the course of thousands of years there has been an issue with race. If you
were to look up the definition for “race” it would say, “a competition between runners,
horses, vehicles, boats, etc., to see which is the fastest in covering a set course.” Now I
know that’s not actually what race is, but can’t we compare the two in a way? Aren’t we
all competing and trying to do our best in this life? I feel that it is a constant battle of who
is better than who, who is worthier of holding a title or having the nicest things. Were we
created to be divided or were we created to be the same? It has been scientifically
proven that all our ancestors originated from the center of Africa, and as the population
began to grow people migrated out. Some ancestors moved away to a colder habitat,
some stayed in the warm, and some just moved because they felt like it. Today people
have difficulty believing in this theory, and its only because humans look physically
different, as people travel the world they will notice that we are all not the same height,
we vary in our builds, our facial features, and our skin colors.
Science has approached the study of human biological diversity in two ways,
one, racial classification, and two, explaining biological diversity. The definition for race
in the slides from class states that race is a “a group of people with the same physical
characteristics”. The old racial system was based on three categories which were,
Caucasoids (whites), Mongoloids (Asians), and Negroids (blacks). This classification
system is not scientifically valid, because we learned in class that there are SO many
differences between these three categories of races. An example that has stuck with me
for quite some time is the differences in height and weight between Chinese people, I
have always thought that there is no possible way for a Chinese person to get fat. They
are usually petite and have no fat on their bodies. However, Yao Ming, NBA basketball
star proves me very wrong. With his height being 7’6!
The problems with racial classification is that early scientists focused on
phenotypical (physical) variation, not genotypical (genetic) variation. This concept to this
day is still not understood by the modern-day population, this is not okay because given
the science and what I stated earlier, we all originated from Africa! Our DNA has been
