21:39 May 27 2016
Times Read: 1,852
COLOR/RACE/ETHNICITY
Melanin: The pigment that gives human skin, hair, and eyes their color. Dark-skinned people have more melanin in their skin than light-skinned people have.
UNDERSTANDING OF MELANIN:
Racial classification according to skin color became more complex when anthropologists added other, less obvious characteristics, in their attempt to achieve a scientific classification of races. It was later found that skin color depended essentially from the amount of melanin, and could vary widely in the same community. Thus, it could not provide a satisfying way to classify ethnic groups, much less "races." Following World War II and the discredit of such racial classifications, more and more biologists and anthropologists began to question the concept itself of "race." Thus, The Race Question statement by the UNESCO, in the 1950s, proposed to substitute the term "ethnic groups" to the concept of "race," arguing that human communities were defined as much by cultural traits (language, religion, etc.) as by biological characteristics (skin color being only one of them, along with blood types, which did not recover previous racial classifications, etc.). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_terminology_for_race
Some Societies and Cultures have programmed into their people that the darker one is, the less attractive one is.
It's sad to have met so many attractive females who still struggle with the effect of that type of programming.
It's also sad to see how the issue of the color of one's skin continues to be the source of jokes, teasing, and narcissism even among nuclear family members.
It starts at a young age. I mean I had a 4 year old comparing my brown skin to her brown skin and arguing with me that I’m black. I told her that I’m human and that my skin color was brown. I told her to look at the black ink of my tattoos and compare it to my skin tone. I asked her which was brown and which was black? She said, but she's brown and she was told that I'm black. Wow!
At a young age the difference between Color, Race, and Ethnicity isn't explained well. Not by society nor by some parents.
DIFFERENCES:
- Color is the natural appearance of the skin, especially of the face; complexion, based on the amount of melanin in one's skin.
* NOTE #1: The color of one's skin IS NOT one's race!
- Race is associated with biology. First and foremost a human is of course part of of the human species/human race. However, there are small genetic variations across the globe that engender diverse physical appearances, such as variations in skin color in which the amount of melanin in one's skin has resulted in human categorizing other humans based on this as well as other physical features.
- Ethnicity is associated with culture. Ethnicity is the term for the culture of people in a given geographic region, including their language, heritage, religion and customs. To be a member of an ethnic group is to conform to some or all of those practices.
* NOTE #2: DNA - DeoxyriboNucleic Acid, a self-replicating material present in nearly all living organisms as the main constituent of chromosomes. It is the carrier of genetic information. The fundamental and distinctive characteristics or qualities of someone or something, especially when regarded as unchangeable.
1) Race is the inheritance of your DNA.
2) Culture is the social/religious milieu you grow up in.
3) Ethnicity is the branch of the race that your DNA occupies.
4) Creed is what you believe, or even codes of honor that you expect and/or live by.
5) Skin color is the color of your skin.
6) Nationality is the name of the land you are raised on insofar as it is called and recognized by the modern nation-state community. https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-differences-between-race-culture-ethnicity-creed-skin-color-and-nationality
INTERESTING READING:
Many human societies classify people into racial categories. These categories often have very real effects politically, socially, and economically. Even if race is culturally real, that does not mean that these societal racial categories are biologically meaningful. For example, individuals who classify themselves as “white” in Brazil are often considered “black” in the U.S.A., and many other countries use similar or identical racial terms in highly inconsistent fashions (Fish, 2002). This inconsistency is only reinforced when examined genetically. For example, Lao et al. (2010) assessed the geographical ancestry of self-declared “whites” and “blacks” in the United States by the use of a panel of geographically informative genetic markers. It is well known that the frequencies of alleles vary over geographical space in humans. Although the differences in allele frequencies are generally very modest for any one gene, it is possible with modern DNA technology to infer the geographical ancestry of individuals by scoring large numbers of genes. Using such geographically informative markers, self-identified “whites” from the United States are primarily of European ancestry, whereas U.S. “blacks” are primarily of African ancestry, with little overlap in the amount of African ancestry between self-classified U.S. “whites” and “blacks”. In contrast, Santos et al. (2009) did a similar genetic assessment of Brazilians who self-identified themselves as “whites”, “browns”, and “blacks” and found extensive overlap in the amount of African ancestry among all these “races”. Indeed, many Brazilian “whites” have more African ancestry than some U.S. “blacks”. Obviously, the culturally defined racial categories of “white” and “black” do not have the same genetic meanings in the United States and Brazil. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/
We are all the same ‘Race’. If one wished to categorizes another, use their ‘Ethnicity’ or ‘Nationality’. Using ‘Skin Color’ is ignorant especially when most of us learn the color wheel at a very young age.
COMMENTS
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LadyZombie
06:54 May 31 2016
Sweet :)