This unit was interesting due to the questioning it forced readers to consider.
It would be very easy for individuals to believe the notion of race is real, and several people do.
This unit forces individuals to realize or at-least consider that race is made up.
I remember when I my sociology professor discussed the fact that there are more variations within one “race” than there are when a “race” is compared to another “race”. I had heard the ideas that go with races so much that I had not ever questioned the idea of race, but just accepted what I was being told.
I think that not only myself, but others as well, are guilty of doing what I just mentioned. We go along with what we continue to be told and never question what we assume to be real.
The PBS website, The Power of Illusion: What is Race?, was an intriguing website and offered helpful tools in aiding with causing one to question the notion of race.
The website made the claim “The concept of race helped explain why some people could be denied the rights and freedoms that others take for granted.” This too me suggest that race was a completely made up concept that supported the ignorant mindset of the times, but for some reason this concept was able to hold on and is still around decades later.
I wonder if the idea of race being made up will ever be understood to be false amongst all of society in America…I highly doubt it, not because I am a realist or pessimist, but because what we know as race coincides with what we see immediately when we look at someone. Black, white, red or whatever color is one of the first, if not the first, thing anyone sees when looking at any person. If our eyes tell us that someone is a certain color, it’s easy to judge them base on what we already assume to be true of the others with the same skin tone.
America would somehow have to become blind to the color differences that exist in this country in order to move pass the notion of race.
