I’ve stewed on this one for a while. I couldn’t decide whether it made for an interesting post or a snide, judgmental complaint. I think it will ultimately fall somewhere in between.
Last fall, I took an introductory Anthropology course at my large public university [1]of choice. The class fulfilled a general science requirement, so a wide range of students ended up in the course. Near the end of the quarter, as topics had moved through human evolutionary history, we arrived at the topic of race. My instructor, in an attempt to paint race as a meaningless classification, a social construct [2] of sorts, asked students to list all of the different races they could name.
The resulting list proved so mind-blowingly misled that I have wanted to share it with the folks at DI for quite some time. We’ve discussed American ignorance and the failure of our education system frequently on this blog (for a recent post on the subject, see here [3]), and I think this “list of races” serves as another anecdote in the same vein. Each of the following came from a real, honest-to-goodness Anthropology class of around 50 people, all of whom had at least taken basic college biology.
List of Races:
Asian
Italian
African American
Latin
Indian
Spanish
Caucasian
African
Catholic
Arabic
The first thing I notice: Asians and Africans have the misfortune of all being lumped into one race, respectively, regardless of where on each continent they originated. Meanwhile, Europeans received detailed designations such as Italian, Spanish, and so on. The second thing I notice: Native Americans and South Americans have gone totally neglected. The third thing: these students think Catholic and Arabic are races?! And what do they mean by “Latin” and “Indian”? Why “African” and “African American”? Of course, the issues with this list go on and on. The frightening implications go on even longer.
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