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"A Family Tree in Every Gene By Armand Marie Leroi Published on: Jun 07, 2006 Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body." This Article is a fairly sensible, nuanced, defense of the race concept based on recent genetic analyses of hundreds of genetic variables at a time.   

This is a short list of good points to be made about Genetics and the concept of race.  I find that it is often difficult for students to wrap their heads around genetic variation and race.  I will try my best to explain it in the coming week.

WE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES ARE A MIXED BREED. WE HAVE COME from all parts of the world; all races of men compose our biological aggregate. We have created an official ideology to fit this condition which declares than men of all races and all cultures are equally precious in the eyes of God and are, therefore, equal,-and here we pause for a long afterthought-"At least, they should be equal, in the thoughts and actions of men." In the second thought we see the ever-present basic conflict that permeates our way of life: a deep faith in the principles of equality which we proudly proclaim, and a fundamental, unofficial, unacknowledged, and almost guilty belief that certain Americans are the "real" ones and superior, while all others are second-class citizens and inferior. Our communities' social systems reflect this conflict when attempting to organize the lives of men who hold these opposing beliefs. Commonsense observation of these communities, buttressed by the more exact findings of social science, demonstrates that despite our equalitarian credo two types of separate and subordinate groups have emerged in the United States. All dark-skinned races with Mongoloid or Negroid ancestry are placed by our social system in subordinate groups, and all deviant cultural groups, speaking different languages, professing different faiths, and exhibiting exotic manners and customs are set apart and classed as inferior.

This cite is mentioned in Kottak's text...it has a lot of good information about Race.

To understand the genetic basis of human genetics and the limitations of race concepts describing that variation...I encourage you to read some of the essays attached to this page.  If you find something of interest, highlight it and share it to our class page.

This page, while it has some problems, highlights the history of scientific racism and how these ideas have been used by politicians and the public to justify genocide, ethnocide, slavery, segregation, etc.  It also should give some idea of how these deeply entrenched attitudes linger in our society and continue to have some effect on continuing inequalities.

Slave society was stratified into three castes: a small number of Whites, a smaller number of "free people of color" (generally mulattoes), and a huge Black slave population. White-minority rule led to the development of a "white bias": European phenotypic and cultural traits were more highly valued than their African or Creole counterparts. With Emancipation, the castes were transformed into classes, but the White bias persisted, resulting in a "color-class pyramid": a White upper class, a "Brown" middle class, and a Black lower-class majority. The addition of Chinese, East Indian, and Lebanese immigrants, who did not have a clear place in the color-class pyramid, made stratification more complex. Color and ethnicity still influence social interactions, but the White bias and the color-class pyramid have become less evident since the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, Jamaica is still highly stratified by wealth; it has a very small, prosperous upper class, a small middle class, and a huge, impoverished lower class. In the mid-1960s Jamaica had the highest rate of income inequality in the world.

The quote, "we're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages" really caught my attention right away because it can be debated. Are we really better off now than the people and animals before us? Although we do have more means of being able to obtain necessary things we need to survive, these advances have also caused many problems within our society today, mostly, in my opinion, due to technology, which is then related to agriculture.