Race, Schmace

Race Not Reflected in Genes, Study Finds:

“There is wide agreement among anthropologists and human geneticists that, from a biological standpoint, human races do not exist,” Sergio Pena and colleagues at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerias in Brazil and the University of Porto in Portugal wrote in their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Yet races do exist as social constructs,” they said.

I remember learning in my Japanese anthropology class about how scientifically, race is nonexistent. Here’s the same idea again.

It’s funny–the United States is regarded by all sorts of countries (including Asian ones) as a country with race problems–and yet racism thrives here. It’s just very hush-hush. I remember reading something a Chinese person said, as quoted in the China Lonely Planet: “There is no racism in China because there are no black people in China.”

If you ask a Chinese student, probably over 90% will tell you that there is no racism in China. Yet if you force them to answer the question, there is definitely a sort of “heirarchy of acceptability” for marriage: Chinese first, then Korean, Japanese, Caucasian, African. Why? “No reason,” they say. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Chinese people say they don’t like black people even when though most of them have never even met one.

Japan has serious problems as well. Many Japanese people seem uncomfortable acknowledging that a lot of their genes are shared with the Ainu minority people and the Koreans. Scientists work hard to disprove these theories to maintain ridiculous concepts of “racial purity.”

Asians tend to keep their mouths shut when they have something disagreeable to say, and they don’t go burning crosses or anything like that. But make no mistake about it, no matter what they tell you. Racism is well established here.