As I was reading the statements put out by both the AAA and the AAPA, I though back to my American Jewish History class and my class on Nazism. The AAA and the AAPA basically say that class has been used as a “worldview” and has been used politically and sociologically for prejudice and to justify wars and general racism. It has been used to justify slavery and genocide, most notably the Holocaust, or Shoah.

It is a really harsh and painful topic, but I think it is worth thinking about when we learn, biologically, what “race” is. In the lectures, we learned about isolated communities, gene flow, and allele variability. Race, as it exists biologically, isn’t really race at all. Skin tone has been used to define race, but it was really just an adaptable trait developed by humans closer to the equator.

In context of the Holocaust, European Jewish people were viciously stereotyped to have specific physical traits, such as dark hair and large noses. They were placed as other, and not thought of as German or Dutch or Polish or whatever their nationalities may have been. In those days, race was often drawn on national or ethnic lines. People from Western Europe, who were thought of as closer or related to Germanic peoples were not treated as harshly, while Eastern Europeans and Slavic people were thought of as lower (though not as low as the Jewish population), and oppressed.

This is all to say that the idea of race has been completely and totally influenced by xenophobia and racism and colonialism. Even today, when most people understand eugenics and Nazi ideas on race to be nonsense, I still hear people talk about Jewish people as if they’re a different race. Judaism is both a religion and a distinct culture, but Jewish people come from every area of the world and have every skin tone. I don’t think we consciously think about that very much.

To a larger point, while discussing race, I do think it’s important to understand the cultural significance of it. I think to people (like me) who don’t always think about biology in terms of race, it can be hard to talk about how race doesn’t exist, when for so many people their race has been a source of discrimination. So in having a conversation with someone I would make sure to suss out the idea that there is no race biologically as in no one is higher than the other, but in practicality, race and culture and sociology and politics exist and are important to people’s identity. For me, I am white, but I don’t want to be told that being Polish is no different from being German, because I grew up around Polish culture specifically. Even though that’s a nationality it feels culturally significant and different than other white cultures. I can’t imagine how that feeling of identity is felt by people who’s culture and skin tone has always been attacked and exists outside my privilege.