The myth of race, debunked in 3 minutes

Published on Jan 13, 2015
You may know exactly what race you are, but how would you prove it if somebody disagreed with you? Jenée Desmond Harris explains.

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You may think you know exactly what race you are,

but how would you prove it
if someone disagreed with you?

The fact is, even though race drives
a lot of social and political outcomes,

race isn't real.

One of the first people to attempt
to categorize humans according to race

was a German scientist around 1776.

He came up with 5 different groups

according to physical appearance
and geographic origin of their ancestors.

American's of European descent eagerly bought into
this type of thinking around the same time.

Some historians have said the idea
that there are different races

helped them resolve the contradiction between
a natural right to freedom and the fact of slavery.

If whites were their own distinct category,

then they could feel a lot better
about denying freedom to people

who they labeled black
and decided were fundamentally different.

But as political priorities change,

definitions of race in America
adjust right along with them.

For example, if you were of Mexican birth
or ancestry in the United States in 1929,

you were considered white.

Then, the 1930 census changed that
to non-white to limit immigration.

Later, when the US needed to increase
its labor force during World War II,

these people were switched back to white.

And what it took to be "black" once varied
so wildly throughout the country,

from 1/4, to 1/16, to the infamous
"One drop" of African ancestry,

that people could actually change races
just by crossing state lines.

Then, suddenly in 2000, the government decided
that Americans could be more than one race

and added a multi-racial category to the census.

This has left many Americans scratching their heads
when it comes to selecting who they are.

As many as 6.2% of census respondents selected
"Some other race" in the 2010 survey.

The idea that someone might look one way,
and identify another way,

or that they might be really hard to place
in a racial category, is not new.

This is why there was a public debate about

whether MSNBC's Karen Finney
could say she was black,

or how we can't even agree on the racial label
assigned to the President of the United States.

Of course many people feel their racial identity
is very clear and very permanent,

but the fact that some people have changed theirs,
and that no one can really argue with them,

shows how shaky the very idea of race is.

This is all because there isn't a race chromosome
in our DNA that people can point to.

It simply doesn't exist.

When the medical community
links race to health outcomes,

it's really just using race
as a substitute for other factors,

such as where your ancestors came from,

or the experiences of people who may have
been put in the same racial group as you.

Dorothy Roberts explains that sickle-cell anemia
is a prime example of this.

The disease is linked to areas
with high rates of malaria,

which includes some parts of
Europe and Asia in addition to Africa.

It's not actually about race at all.

This of course does not mean that the concept
of race isn't hugely important in our lives.

The racial categories to which we're assigned
can determine real life experiences,

they can drive political outcomes, and they can
even make the difference between life and death.

But understanding that
racial categories are made up

can give us an important perspective
on where racism came from in the first place.