Race The Power Of Illusion, Microbiologist Pilar Ossorio

Jessica Zhu Short Writing Assignment 4/17/17 Race is a hot topic in our world. We all think we know what race is. After all, we are constantly being bombarded with it whether it be from media, politics, or sports. The truth is that race does not revolve around the idea of biological traits or characteristics. It is a modern concept that we as a society have created to divide people into categories. I will argue that race is socially constructed from a biological, political history, and sociological standpoint, and how it may impact other areas of our society. From a biological perspective, race is a social construct that has little bias in genetics. In the PBS documentary, episode 1: Race: The Power of Illusion, Microbiologist Pilar†¦show more content†¦In the PBS documentary, we learned that that race and freedom were developed together. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley points out a problem our founding fathers faced: â€Å"how can we promote liberty, freedom, democracy on the one hand, and a system of slavery and exploitation of peoples who are non-white on the other?† (1:04:43). Our past presidents rationalized this contradiction by declaring that blacks and other races had a natural inferiority to whites. Such reasons were used to justify America’s political goals for power and money that benefit the white society at the expense of others. Omi and Winant claim that â€Å"the introduction of slavery†¦ presupposed a worldview which distinguished [whites] from ‘others’.. . to explain why some should b e ‘free’ and others enslaved, why some had rights to land and property while others did not† (1). The enslavement of Africans led to the ideology of white supremacy which builds up a political system that privileges white people over â€Å"others†. Granting opportunities only to whites widens the social difference along racial lines. This historical attitude toward racial difference has determined the way most of us currently view the world. On a sociological basis, the notion of race is understood as a social construction. As a black student in France, Frantz Fanon writes of how the white man has made him a â€Å"slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of [him] but of [his]