What is Race?

            What is “race”? Before I started taking this course, I thought that “race” is the result of differences among people, differences such as color, language, and culture. However, after I started taking this course, I realized something different, something that changed how I think about race. I realized that there was nothing as “race”, because human was once all Africans, “racism” was not the result of people’s differences, and slavery was not because of racism.

When I was in middle school, my science teacher taught us about evolution, and my history teacher taught us the origin of human. Both of my science and history teachers used evidences to prove to us that human was originated from Africa and then spread out into different continents, and that evolution was still occurring while the homo sapiens migrated. Human who lived in different continents had changed their physical features depending on their level of evolution. My science teacher brought in models of skulls from monkeys, apes, various homo sapiens, and humans of different eras, pointed out the similarities among them, and organized them by their chronological orders. We, as students, could easily see that there were changes taking place while time traveled on, and that, was called evolution. 

In addition, I used to believe that “slavery” was the result of racism. After I took the course and did a presentation on the article “Africans, Slavery, and Race”, I realized that slavery was not something I thought how it happened. According to the article, “the Spanish, did not develop significant slave societies in its colonies. “    Columbus had tried to made the native Americans work for him, but he did not succeed. The British, however, imported indentured servants from Britain to work the land because these people are used to the European way of farming. The Portuguese imported slaves from Africa to work their land.  Slaves were captured not because of their race, but because they lacked the technology to fight against the Europeans. In addition, in European’s eyes, Africans were in a lower class than Europeans: they did not dress the same way as Europeans did, eat the same way Europeans did, look the same way Europeans did, and was able to fight against the Europeans. It was after the Bacon’s rebellion that “racism” got connected with “slavery”. Prior to Bacon’s Rebellion, “slavery” had nothing to do with “racism”; slaves were slaves because they were unable to fight against the Europeans, and that “racism” came into existence because the European upper class was afraid that slaves and lower class Europeans could work together and threaten their social status, so they reduced the class of blacks to make the lower class unwilling to work with and discriminate against the blacks.

By understanding that we were all once Africans and the origin of “race”, I realized that we cannot claim to be different from each other just because our surroundings changed our physical features. We, as humans, all have five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, a pair of eyes, a pair of ears, a nose, a mouth, and similar body parts. Our internal organs are identical. The only differences are that of skin colors. But that does not mean anything. Race is nothing to me, because we are all the same- we are all human beings.