Race: The Diffrences Between Us

The primary thesis of Race: The Power of an Illusion, Part 1, The Differences between Us is that on a genetic level our racial differences are insignificant. As the title suggests racial differences are an illusion as well as a human construct and not a biological fact.

The video details a classroom biology experiment, which has the class analyzing a portion of their DNA. In advance of the findings the students are asked to identify who they thought they would be most like genetically. As expected they picked classmates with a perceived racial classification. The students were surprised to learn that some of its members were genetically closer to some seemingly distant racial students than those they perceived to be of the same race. The video goes into much greater depth about the history of biological classification of races, but the basic summary is that on a genetic level we are all very similar, even more so than other species.

The video smartly contrasted the concept of genetic diversity and society imposed ethnicity. The conclusion was that genetically some seemingly different ethnic groups were really closer than what society would have you think. Also on a genetic level people who are of the same race can be genetically very different. The one real good example was of a black person in the US being genetically completely different from a black person in Brazil or South Africa. The observation strongly reinforced the thesis. The video fell a little short of providing a solid explanation of how exactly race is defined by society, but I expect that we will learn more in the following videos.

I thought the video was very thought provoking. It did a very good job of dispelling the popular myths that certain racial groups are genetically better than other groups. I think that most people have at one point or another made this seemingly logical yet factually inaccurate observation. I thought that the video overstepped its premise by drawing a moral equivalence between American Eugenicists from the turn of the century and the Nazis. I felt that they did not make enough distinction between the theory of racial purity and the Nazi policies of actively pressing racial reverse diversity. Overall I thought this point was minor and the video was a good learning experience.