We really are one people, afterall...

[UPDATE: So apparently my eyes so glazed over that I totally missed the entire point of the Op-Ed. It pretty much advocates the exact opposite of what I thought it was saying.
The argument is that race IS real, and not a social construct.

I'll leave up my old text up to verify that in fact I AM an idiot.]
- E

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[I picture "It's a Small World Afterall" accompanying that title]


There are times where I have to literally force myself to read something because I think that having the knowledge is worth the punishment of having to do the research.

This op-ed in the NY Times is kinda like that. My eyes started to glaze over towards the end.

BUT, this short piece is actually very interesting. It talks about how "race" is a social construct and not a genetic trait.

In the event that you are too lazy to read it (What? Was it my initial glowing account?), here's a worthy excerpt:

"The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an "indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge."

Don't say I never did anything for you...