In the AAA and AAPA statements, I wouldn’t say that anything was truly surprising to me just because this topic is covered extensively in cultural anthropology classes, so I kind of came into this with some previous background knowledge. However I will say that I did enjoy reading them and it was interesting to read the statements, particularly the AAPA one, and get a more biological perspective on race. I also thought their last point, #11, which said that behavior isn’t based on race, a person’s behavior is shaped by social and physical environments. I liked this part because often times you hear people say that people with x skin color acts y way when really the way someone behaves is all based on where they live and / or where they grew up. Your skin color, as people would say is your “race,” doesn’t define your actions. Just because I look a certain way doesn’t mean I’ll act a certain way. This circles back to the third lecture which mentions biological determinism, an attempt to explain how biology, specifically physical traits, somehow relates to behavior.
If I were to explain that race is a non-biological concept, I’d probably begin by saying that race is a cultural construct, that race only exists in our minds and not in our DNA. I think at this point it would then be a good idea to tie in the Sauer piece about forensic anthropology and identifying race. Sauer makes a point of telling us that while features of skulls can connect someone to their ancestors, this is still not an indication of a race, and even furthers this point by mentioning that race is only studied in a “broad sense” (109) within the forensic field and that races are just cultural categories. I’d also want to tie in what I talked about above with biological determinism. Again, there’s tons of examples of people saying that because someone has a certain skin color they are more likely to do x. I think this would be a worthwhile subject to bring up, especially today in 2019 America when racially profiling people and targeting them because they automatically assume that they are a “bad person” is a reoccuring theme in the news. In reality this holds no ground, we are who we are because of where we are. I think it’d also be worth mentioning why and how race is / became a large focus in society, like how the AAA statement mentions the “Great Chain of Being” which creates a hierarchy of sorts that sparked the idea that Europeans are at the top of everything and everything else is successively lower than them. Reading this back, I definitely think I would approach all of these topics more lightly (I think I get a little too worked up over this sometimes),especially if I’m helping someone understand this and if I was speaking to them, but I for sure would want to be able to hit all of them in some way or another.