ANTH 1000 Lecture 8: Race & Racism Continued
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ANTH 1000 Full Course Notes
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Racial classifications are not relevant when it comes to other characteristics like social, behavioral, intellectual, emotional or cultural factors. We could easily construct racial classifications in any number of different ways, such as: Earwax: wet, dry, yellow, brown, sticky, crumbly. We could segregate students based on if their earwax was dry or wet. We could put random constructed ideas on this, such as people with wet earwax can"t jump and shouldn"t play basketball while all of the people with dry earwax are good jumpers and excel at basketball. This is the same as classifications by skin color. There"s a problem with organizing these differences into a hierarchy. The function of creating racial categories wasn"t to differentiate between one skin color versus another. It was to create a hierarchy which played into political maneuvers, colonialism, taking land and rights for worldwide domination, and slavery in the us.
