The American Anthropological Association (AAA) states that “human populations are not…biologically distinct groups”. This stood out to me because the category someone puts themselves in can be vastly different than how someone else categorizes them. Humans are all so very similar yet we make assumptions about others based solely on the smallest visible difference. I also found it interesting that there is more diversity within a race than between races. Because these divisions between races are so arbitrary, throughout history we have seen the line be drawn in different places to benefit different people at different times. I think if more people were aware and believed the science behind our similarities, we might be able to move towards a society where racial profiling and discrimination was far less common. It was also mentioned that “how people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society”. If you treat someone a certain way then they’ll perform in a particular way and assumptions will be made about them and again they’ll be treated differently. It’s a big circle and it’s all based on appearance. 

The American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) states that in the past it was believed that “immutable visible traits can predict the measure of all other traits”. I’m not sure that it has ever made any actual sense to believe that based on a physical trait other characteristics can be determined. A few blog posts from last week touched on this and how people would be grouped based on physical characteristics and their likelihood as a group to commit crimes. This is the whole idea of racial profiling! I agree with the AAPA statement that all people have a common descendent. Having a science background this makes a lot of sense to me. People adapt to their environments. Like the first lecture mentioned, having lighter skin in areas with less UV is beneficial and is important in bone growth. Therefore, people who live in areas with more exposure to the sun would have darker skin to protect from UV. 

I think explaining the non-existence of biological race can be a little tricky. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of it until reading about how anthropologists rely on race when identifying remains. I think that using ancestry would be more beneficial, less controversial, and have less harmful implications. My attempt at explaining the non-existence of biological race would be something like what follows. Although race has real-life implications, it doesn’t have a biological basis. Race was socially constructed by looking at skin colors and assuming that based on a particular color that person/population would act in a certain way and their life has a different value than someone with a different skin color. This means that genetics cause people to have different skin tones but as a society, we have assigned meaning to different races and people have been treated differently throughout history because of these assigned meanings.