Name: The myth of race | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2021-02-25T19:10:24.000Z
Duration: 7 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Adverbs of manner

What is race has changed dramatically through time.

There is no official scientific definition of race.

The teacher said, "No, no, Tess is something else."

And everybody's eyes are on me, and I'm a really shy person.

A lot of people imagine that there is some biological tangibility to race,

but just because something is a social construct,

that doesn't mean it doesn't have meaning in peoples' lives

like money, or the nation state, or democracy,

or all these other things that define how we live,

the type of schooling you have access to,

I mean, it's a powerful marker for all of these things

that we care about when we're trying to run a society.

Race has never been something that I don't have to think about.

When you look at the history and origins of this idea,

you start to see it for what it really is,

People imagine that people have always thought about skin colour

in this racialised way, and we really haven't.

That idea is no more than a few hundred years old.

It's not really until the age of colonialism, in the 17th Century,

each continent has its own individual kind of people.

It arose at a very specific moment in history.

In the 17th Century, you're taking long trips by ship,

and you're struck by how different people look

So this is the first edition of Systema Naturae,

And for man, Linnaeus distinguishes four varieties,

these varieties correspond to the four continents.

Where it really changes is in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae.

This is the foundation of scientific racism.

The European, "white, sanguine, and muscular"

The Asian, "sallow, melancholic and stiff"

The African, "black, phlegmatic and lazy"

So these stereotypes have endured through the ages.

If you're going to take a group of people,

and you're going to decide that they're not people anymore,

And that's how these categories have always been used.

that change depending on their usefulness

We are one of the most homogeneous species on the planet.

Humans have far less genetic variation than chimpanzees do.

And yet, those chimpanzees look the same to me.

there is no gene that exists in all the members of one race

There is no black gene, there is no white gene.

Human groups overlap completely in their genetic variation.

In the same way that you're related to your family,

you can get a kind of fuzzy genetic similarity.

But when you get to the continental level,

which is really where we're talking about race,

and so statistically weak, as to be almost meaningless.

We have this envy of fields where things are hyper-simplistic.

We want to be able to look at a genome and say

that people are these kind of concrete immutable things,

Genetics doesn't work that way, it's the product of many genes

interacting with each other and their environments.

To fully answer the question about what a living thing is

it's going to be about much more than genes.

If I were to go out on to the street today

and find someone of Indian heritage like myself,

and randomly then pick someone who is not of Indian heritage,

for my genome to have more in common with that person

who isn't of Indian heritage than that person who is.

racism is real and we are not in a post-racial society.

Race keeps making itself and power keeps making race.

Even though we know that race isn't biological,

we've been living with this idea of it being real

for so long that it means that people who do have a shared racial identity

The biology of race is not a useful concept.

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The myth of race | BBC Ideas

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concept

character

spectrum