Sorting people by color, race and culture
Our eyes tell us that people look different colors but do our eyes lie to us placing humans into invented color, race and culture categories to suite our needs.
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Ubuntu African philosophy "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" means that a person is a person through other people
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What is race?
Race has no genetic basis. Race is considered by
many to be a made up characteristic in order to objectify people who have the same
physical characteristics or phenotype such as eye shape, hair texture or skin
color. Race is not biological.
What is ethnicity?
An ethnic group is a category of people who
belonging to or deriving from the cultural, religious, or linguistic traditions
of a people or country. People who identify with each other based on
similarities, such as common ancestral, language, social, and cultural
experiences. Therefore, ethnic group is a subjective category based on personal
feelings, tastes, or opinions of others.
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| Sorting people |
What is culture?
Culture is the learned pattern of human
knowledge, belief, and behavior transmitting knowledge to future generations
and these shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices distinguish the person.
Culture is a category based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or
opinions.
What is color?
Color shapes our perceptions of the world around
us. Color is visual, the pigmentation of the skin. Color is a strong sensory sensation
that shapes our everyday life. Colors give the sensation of feeling cheerful, depressed,
cautious or friendly.
To see color, you
have to have light. When light shines, on an object some colors bounce off the
object and others are absorbed by it. Our eyes only see the colors that are
bounced off or reflected.
The sun’s rays
contain all the colors of the rainbow mixed together. All light rays contain
color. Light is made of electromagnetic waves. These waves spread out from any
light source, such as the sun.
DNA African Study
Populations are genetically diverse, and because there is a complex relationship between ancestry, genetic makeup, and phenotype. In 1987, three scientists announced in the journal Nature that they had found a common ancestor to us all, African Eve was a woman who lived in Africa 150,000 years ago.
The theory is all people alive today can trace
some of their genetic heritage through their mothers back to this one woman. Dr.
Tishkoff , a professor of Genetics and Biology at the University of
Pennsylvania studying genetic material variations, human evolution, and disease
risk in global populations and her team studied 121 African populations, four
African American populations, and 60 non-African populations.
The Khoisan people of Southern Africa was
previously thought to possess the oldest DNA lineages, but those of the Sandawe
tribe of central Tanzania are older. This suggests southern Khoisan originated
in East Africa, according to Dr Tishkoff. Modern humans originated in Africa
around 200,000 years ago and then spread across the rest of the globe within
the past 100,000 years.
Did
you know?
Genotype vs phenotype
Genotype cannot be seen by the naked eye, it is the genetic makeup of an organism. Visible
traits are known as phenotypes. A phenotype is an individual's observable
traits, such as height, shoe size, eye color, and face shape.
