Race

0:00major funding for this program provided by the ford foundation a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide and the corporation for public broadcasting additional funding provided by these funders

0:56there is no question that individual human beings are different one from the other our eyes confirm this day in and day out skin color body shape hair form eye shape for several hundred years we have used

1:17these visual differences to classify people into four or five groups we call races we have a notion of race as being divisions among people that are deep that are essential that are somehow biological or even genetic and that are unchanging that these are

1:38clear-cut distinct categories of people and the beauty of the race business is that you can identify people by just looking at them you don't even have to look at their genes because one manifestation of their genes is there namely skin color or eye shape or hair shape and then that's the key to everything

1:59the idea of race assumes that simple external differences rooted in biology are linked to other more complex internal differences like athletic ability musical aptitude intelligence

2:21this belief is based on the idea that race is biologically real all of our genetics now is telling us that that's not the case we can't find any genetic markers that are in everybody of a particular race and in nobody of some other race we can't find any genetic markers that

2:43define race and actually what we're going to generate are billions of copies of a little section of your of your genetic code these students are gathering for a dna workshop led by cole spring harbor labs teacher scott bronson and pipe headed up 30 microliters marcus

3:10and their fellow students are about to explore the biology of human variation there's another type of dna does anybody know what that type of dna is yeah mitochondrial mitochondrial dna very good they will compare their skin colors they're like not human colors they will type their blood

3:32and they will swab cells from inside their mouths to extract a small portion of their own dna once the sample is ready they will compare some of their genetic similarities and differences we're going to look at a very tiny section of this ring the students begin the workshop with the

3:53same assumptions most of us have as you begin to look at the data you might want to keep in your mind who you think you might be most similar to and who you think you might be most different to i think i probably have the most similarities with uh mr bronson or with carol because we were white males both

4:12carol and i and both scott bronson and i i think i'd have the most differences with kiro and the most similarities with gorgeous she's african-american i'm afraid american i mean like black i think maybe me and natalya are most alike she's latin american and i'm latin american i figured that there would be

4:32tons of differences especially with people who looked so different too to understand why the idea of race is a biological myth requires a major paradigm shift an absolute paradigm shift a shift in perspective and for me it's like seeing you know

4:54what it must have been like to understand that the world isn't flat and perhaps i can invite you to a mountaintop and you can look out the window and at the horizon and see oh what i thought was flat i can see a curve in now that the world is much more complicated in fact that race is not based on

5:16biology but race is rather an idea that we ascribe to biology the idea of race as biology is ferociously persistent on america's playing fields gorgeous harper and her teammates are

5:38competing at the adidas nationals i love to run track i've been running tracks since i was eight years old the people i train with they all want to be the best and you got to put in the hard work this is the top event for elite high

5:58school track and field stars and while racial differences are not necessarily discussed openly they are often part of the careful calculation of competitive edge well i've heard some rumors i've heard are just like black seven extra

6:19muscle in their leg but i don't think anything's true i assume that a white girl can't beat me in the 200. in my mind i don't think she can beat me but i won't i won't sleep on her i don't want to get too controversial here since i really don't know exactly but

6:39i'd say that there's maybe a little bit that not to use as an excuse is why they beat me sometimes but maybe considering when you when you look at the olympics you know who who tends to dominate the 100 the 200 and a quarter for the most part i just have to say the way it all falls

6:56out tends to point to what your race is i'm really saying that different populations whether it's west african descended blacks and that's what african americans trace their ancestry to west africa or east africans or whites or asians they all have different body types and different physiological

7:18structures that allow them to have advantages in one sport or another there are as a genetic basis for these kinds of differences through culture environment training athletes can't dramatically change the limits of what they can be i would like to say to john there is no scientific definition that holds up about race

7:38race has changed its definition in this country to the benefit of those who wanted to define it differently and there is no scientific place to start from so you have no basis for your work we can see differences among populations but can populations be bundled into what

8:00we call races how many races would there be 5 55 who decides and how different would they really be from one another the

8:21measured amount of genetic variation in the human population is extremely small and that's something that that people need to wrap themselves around that genetically we really aren't very different in fact genetically we are among the most similar of all species

8:42only one out of every thousand nucleotides that make up our genetic code is different one individual from another these look like penguins have twice the amount of genetic difference one from the other than humans

9:03and these fruit flies ten times more difference any two fruit flies may be as different genetically from each other as a human is from a chimpanzee

9:24so the central question for us is of the small amount of variation between us what if any is mapped along what we think of as racial lines

9:44because we live in a racialized society this is not an academic question we have a long history of searching for racial differences and attributing performance and behavior to them

10:08for 200 years scientists poked and prodded measured and mapped the human body searching for a biological basis to race some measured facial angle to illustrate the proximity of races to the primitive

10:33others calibrated skull size to identify those with superior or inferior intelligence measures of eye shape hair form even brain color where scrutinized in

10:55the hunt for the fundamental sources of racial difference if we just take african-americans as an example there's not a single body part that hasn't been subjected to this kind of analysis you'll find articles in the medical literature about the negro ear and the

11:16negro nose and the negro leg and the negro heart and the negro eye and the negro foot and it's every single body part and they're constantly looking for some organ that might be so fundamentally different in size and character that you can say this is something specific to the negro versus white and other groups

11:40scientists are part of their social context their ideas about what race is are not simply scientific ones are not simply driven by the data that they are working with that is also informed by the societies in which they live at the turn of the 20th century american

12:03society was riding a wave of confidence as an emerging industrial power and the face of its power and prosperity was white african americans lived under the yoke of jim crow segregation most surviving native americans had been

12:24banished to reservations and new immigrants crowded into urban ghettos disease was rampant death rates soared infant mortality was high to many this reflected a preordained natural order

12:45those that looked wanted to confirm what they saw which is to say that the proper place of say the negro or in other regions of the country the native american or the chinese we're at the bottom of the the social and political hierarchy and if you can say that they are fundamentally biologically different than they should be then it's natural

13:06for them to be at the bottom of our social hierarchy the biology becomes an excuse for social differences the social differences become naturalized in biology it's not that our institutions cause differences in infant mortality it's that there really are biological

13:28differences between the races for prudential life insurance statistician frederick hoffman those differences could lead to only one fate for african americans in vital capacity he wrote the tendency of the negro race has been downward

13:49this tendency must lead to a still greater mortality and in the end cause the extinction of the race hoffman's race traits and tendencies of the american negro was published in 1896 the same year the supreme court legalized segregation

14:11it was one of the most influential publications of its day what's interesting is that it resonated in the minds of so many other social observers of the time the extinction thesis it fit into their notions of how races become ascendant in the world

14:31they looked at other groups of people in various stages beneath them as approaching the completely civilized stage hoffman presented his statistical data as unimpeachable science he compared rates of death and disease between african americans and whites

14:51and not surprisingly found enormous disparities but his data analysis was flawed he ignored the insidious effects of poverty and social neglect on health in contrast to today's belief in black physical superiority hoffman concluded

15:12that african americans were innately infirm as such attempts to improve their housing health and education would be futile their extinction was inevitable encoded in their blood by the 1920s a single drop of blood

15:34reflecting african ancestry could identify any individual as black and inferior in every way in the not so distant past many of these students would have been considered contaminants were they to have bred into the superior white race

15:5528 states passed laws forbidding intermarriage to safeguard white racial purity racial purification was one aim of the eugenics movement the science of eugenics rested on simple mendelian genetics

16:15one gene each from father and mother it was believed gave rise to any trait physical behavioral even moral some of these things were things like the ability to play chess rowdiness congenital feeble-mindedness

16:35uh virtually any cultural or behavioral trait you could imagine now the mistake that they were making was assuming that complex behaviors could be reduced to simple mendelian genes nonetheless eugenicists use the science of the day to advance a social agenda

16:58widely accepted in white america to breed the best and the brightest always white and breed out society's worst and weakest of all colors there's a lot of concern about race mixing you don't want a superior race a race with great

17:19qualities of intellect and achievement a musical genius and these kinds of things to mix with a race on a lower stage of civilization that has fewer of these characteristics because that again would bring down the level of those characteristics and what you want to have for your civilization

17:39what you did not want for your civilization was found in the blue hills of virginia mongrel virginians mixed race unclassifiable and worse able to pass for white circumvent segregation laws and breed into the white race

18:01they were called the wind tribe for their white indian and negro ancestry a combination of the worst racial traits a badly put together people said charles davenport leader of the american eugenics movement to keep america's mongrels at bay

18:23eugenesis proposed a series of restrictive measures unthinkable today yet they were adopted within and outside of america taken to their extreme they fueled one of the century's greatest horrors the nazi propaganda machine pointed out that their eugenic policies were

18:45entirely consistent and in fact derived from ideas of american race scientists at the 1936 olympics in berlin hitler's aryan race was to have confirmed its place at the top of nature's hierarchy

19:11but the star of the games would shatter those expectations and the games here in the semi-final heat of the 100-meter dash movie tones camera catches the blinding speed of jesse owens cracking the world record in the incredible time of 10 to 10 seconds as a child jesse owens had been chronically ill

19:32destined it seemed to fulfill hoffman's extinction thesis until a teacher intervened when he first asked me to go out for the track team in fifth grade owens wrote in his autobiography it wasn't because he saw any potential champion in me it was because he saw a potential corpse

19:58challenges how could a society steeped in the science of racial inferiority reconcile itself to owen's four gold medals by conceding innate athletic superiority to african americans while denying them so-called civilized

20:19capacities in the words of american team coach dean cromwell the negro athlete excelled because he was closer to the primitive it was not so long ago that his ability to sprint and jump was a life and death matter to him in the jungle

20:40of a champion the competition was grand and we're very glad to come out on top thank you very much a flurry of debate between racial scientists and those contesting their assumptions greeted owen's accomplishments

21:02with the rise of the great negro athletes in the 1930s it became this question that there must be a reason that they're great and that that reason must reside in biology rather than in culture or history or circumstance and jesse owens was picked apart

21:26when the african-american anthropologist and physician montague cobb is trying to explain why jesse owens was such an outstanding track star he does so by talking about his body he talks about his feet he talks about his legs his calves his chest capacity and he comes to the conclusion of course that

21:48you know you can't say that negroes have some special characteristics that make them more fit as runners among the few who challenge racial science cobb wrote there is not one single physical feature including skin color which all our negro champions have in common which would

22:09identify them as negro but what marker would identify them as negro in the first place jackie is asian noah as white

22:31gorgeous as black think about race and its universality where is your measurement device there is no way to measure race we sometimes do it by skin color

22:52other people may do it by hair texture other people may have the dividing lines different in terms of skin color what is black in the united states is not what's black in brazil or what's black in south africa can't be a tone for previous failures at

23:12the plate with that one my favorite trivia question in baseball is which italian-american player for the brooklyn dodgers once hit 40 home runs in a season no one ever gets it right because the answer is roy campanella who is as italian as he was black he had an italian father and a black mother he's always classified as black you see

23:30american racial classification is totally cultural whose tiger woods it was colin powell colin powell's as irish as he is african being black it's been defined as just looking dark enough that anyone can see you are when i was a child one of the things my father bought me was a set of time life

23:51books on science and a book on evolution had in it a skin color scale that went from 1 to 36 and i would spend hours putting my arm against the scale in the book the picture in the book trying to figure out what number my color was

24:12and i couldn't quite find myself on the scale you can be either 19 or 20. who would be this color i wonder if it matters how tan you are not 14. not right

24:34i'd say that john and noah both white by appearance and jackie and i both fit under the asian classification but i guess the thing that surprised me was with the skin color test you know what should you technically call the entire group i would never know that all her skin colors are so similar exactly like

24:57should you call them all white or should you call them 11 to 15 you know wow maybe lighter than those i'm white would i trade my skin color um i probably wouldn't trade my skin color

25:18it's something that i've taken for granted it's also a privilege i guess i think 13 is closer 13 is closer wow they're like all 13. i know there's no profit in denying it that um that there is a certain advantage to being white

25:39we all have the same 35 000 or so genes but over time mutations cause variations in our dna today some genes like those for skin color come in different forms in a few genes that control the colors

25:59of melanin in our skin different alleles different mutations occurred that were positively selected so that many of us with very light skin lost the capacity to make dark melanin dark melanin blocks out some ultraviolet light and is found where sunlight is intense lighter melanin is found where sunlight

26:20is less intense scientists debate why this is one hypothesis is that it happened because sunlight is essential to have adequate vitamin d in northern latitudes with very little light during the winter one needed every bit of light that one could capture

26:40in order to be able to have adequate active vitamin d and children in particular would need to have would need to be able to absorb into their skin enough light to have vitamin d present to keep them healthy

27:02the best way to understand the genetic differences that we find in human populations is that populations differ by distance and it's a continuous change from one group to another and one way we can look at this is use example of skin color if we were to only look at people in the

27:23tropics and people in norway we'd come to the conclusion that there's a group of people who have light skin that's a group of people who have dark skin but if we were to walk from the tropics to norway what we would see is a continuous change in skin tone

27:53and at no point along that trip would we be able to say oh this is the place in which we go from the dark race to the light race human biological variation is so complex

28:14there are so many aspects of human variation so there are many many ways to begin to explain them variation in some traits like eye shape hair texture whether or not your tongue curls involves very few genes

28:35and even those genes haven't all been identified variation in traits we regard as socially important is much more complicated differences in how our brains work how we make art how gracefully we move

28:58genes may contribute to variation in these traits but to the extent they do there would be a cascade of genes at work interacting with each other and the environment in relationships so intricate and complex that science has hardly begun to decipher them

29:20people are always talking about genes for things the genes for athletic ability the genes for making money the genes for intelligence you have to be very careful even when there are genes that influence those things to talk about it as genes for them it's not so clear what makes us different is both those

29:41genetic differences that we have between us and also the interaction of that genome with the environment and the environment is a very very complicated thing so when i say i sort of mean the environment writ large everything from the environment in the womb to the environment in your school

30:02now in the urban environment of the 1930s jewish teams dominated american basketball what castleman shoots from outside sons of immigrants theirs were the hoop dreams of the day

30:24and they rush it up the floor and the spas win and it was said that the reason that they were so good at basketball was because the the artful dodger characteristic of the jewish culture made them good at this sport there are strong cultural aspects of what sports individuals choose to play

30:44it has to do with the interaction of individual genetic background of opportunity and training history shows us that as opportunities change in society different groups get drawn into sporting arenas

31:04by 1992 america's olympic dream team was almost completely african-american ten years later twenty percent of nba starters would be foreign born the top nba draft pick chinese

31:25we can't come to any fast hard rule about how genetic ancestry is going to influence the ability of an individual to perform an athletic event so i don't think we're ever going to be able to isolate a gene for athletic performance

31:47or a gene for any complex trait if genes contribute to marcus's musical talent there would be dozens interacting with environment training and practice

32:08those genes would be inherited independently of the genes for eye shape skin color and hair form which mark has inherited through his korean and jamaican ancestors for race to be more than skin deep one has to have concordance in other

32:28words skin color needs to reflect things that are deeper in the body under the skin but most of human variation is non-concordant skin color or eye color or hair color is not correlated with height away and they're definitely not correlated

32:49with more complex traits like intelligence or athletic performance who is the person you said was going to be most similar jimmy all right yeah what's his number he's 34. the tools of

33:10modern genetics allow the students to explore the idea of race and concordance from the beginning they believed they would be most similar genetically to those whose racial ancestry they believed they shared who'd you say was going to be most different no but he's not they have now sequenced a small loop of

33:31their mitochondrial dna if we want a very fine scale for assessing how similar we are to each other person by person we can do that by sequencing that small bit of mitochondrial dna

33:52mtdna is a second set of dna found in the cell's mitochondria it does not code for any traits and is inherited only from our mother now what will it tell us it will tell us a whole lot about one of our ancestors our mother's mother's mother's mother's mother wow

34:13it seems like everyone has blood the student's empty dna appears as the letters a c t and g representing the four nucleotides that define our dna the students are sampling a small sequence about 350 letters long they find that most of it is identical

34:33one to the other what is not is highlighted in yellow a lot of differences with everybody because i'm different i'm really different jameel thought he'd have the fewest mt dna differences with gorgeous

34:53i was more like kiro than i was than gorgeous she used has like 12 differences and like carol is like oh white his background yeah he's like from russia and like we seem completely different but it's less differences but i mean it's hard to tell because we don't

35:13john thought he'd have the fewest differences with kirill and with noah in fact john discovered that he had the same number of differences with carol as he had with jackie only three

35:37if human variation were to map along racial lines people in one so-called race would be more similar to each other than to those in another so-called race that's not what the students found in their mt dna what about other genetic differences and you're different the problem for

35:58evolutionists and population geneticists was always to try to actually characterize how much genetic variation there was between individuals and groups and i spent a lot of time worrying about that like other people in my profession in the 1960s richard lewington decided to find out just how much genetic variation fell within and how much

36:20between the groups we regard as races a new technology enabled him to do pioneering work and that method which is called gel electrophoresis a very fancy name um we were able to use on any organism at all if you could grind it up you could do it that included people and you have to grind the whole person but you could

36:41take a little bit of tissue or blood over the years a lot of data were gathered by anthropologists and geneticists looking at blood group genes and protein genes and other kinds of genes from all over the world i mean anthropologists just went around taking blood out of everybody i i must say if i were a south american

37:02indian i wouldn't let them take my blood but but they did and so i thought well we've got enough of these data let's see what it tells us about the differences between human groups lewinton's findings were a milestone in the study of race and biology if you put it all together and we've now got that for proteins for blood groups

37:25and now with dna sequencing we have it for dna sequence differences it always comes out the same 85 of all the variation among human beings is between any two individuals within any local population between individuals within sweden or within the chinese or the kukuyu or the

37:48icelanders to put it another way of the small amount of variation in our jeans there is apt to be as much difference between gorgeous and her teammate christine as there is between gorgeous and her opponent kaelin any two individuals within any so-called

38:11race may be as different from each other as they are from any individual in another so-called race are the people who we call black more like each other than they are like people who we call white genetically speaking the answer is no there's as much or more

38:31diversity and genetic difference within any racial group as there is between people of different racial groups still we know that some genes are found with greater frequency in some populations and geography is the better way to explain that more than race or anything

38:53else there can be accumulations of genes in one place in the globe and not another like the gene forms regulating skin color and for some genetic diseases like sickle cell disease

39:15long assumed to be a racial trait sickle cell disease is a debilitating disorder caused by a gene form that alters the shape of red blood cells it's one of the misconceptions that sickle cell disease is an african-american or an african disease sickle cell trait is not uncommon in

39:39people from the in people from the mediterranean region in fact in some parts of greece up to 30 percent of people in the population may carry sickle cell trait sickle cell trait persists in certain populations around the world because of the relative resistance it confers to malaria so people who've got sickle cell

40:01trait are less likely to develop malaria and when they do develop it they are less likely to develop severe complications and to die from it where malaria was common the sickling gene was selected in arabia south asia central and western but not southern africa

40:23and in the mediterranean basin the home of jackie washburn's ancestors thought to have originated only a few thousand years ago sickle cell is not a racial trait it's the result of having ancestors who lived in malarial regions

40:48race does not account for patterns of genetic variation our recency is a species and the way we have moved and mated throughout our history does

41:09our human lineage originated in africa about two million years ago small groups of early hominids not modern humans began a first migration out of africa to the far reaches of the globe breeding isolated lineages

41:36it was long thought and is still believed by some that those first lineages led to genetically distinct races that are with us today it turns out that's not true i think there's almost genetic proof now i wouldn't say the issue is totally resolved that those

41:56lineages just died out that neanderthals in europe died that homo erectus in asia died that there was a second migration of our modern species homo sapiens and that all modern humans are products of the second migration which is probably less than a hundred thousand years old by the best current evidence

42:20some of those movements may follow major migrations as agricultural people came into europe as people cross the bearing straight and came into the americas but other movements are much more subtle they're smaller groups of individuals that moved or their genes moved from

42:41place to place in time to time we've had maybe a hundred thousand years of having genes move out and mix and reassort in countless different ways a hundred thousand years may seem like a long time but in evolutionary terms it is a blink of the eye

43:03human populations have not been isolated from each other long enough to evolve into separate subspecies just hasn't been time for the development of much genetic variation except that which regulates some very superficial features like skin color and hair form for once

43:24the old cliche is true under the skin we really are effectively the same and we get fooled because some of the visual differences are quite noticeable the superficial traits we use to construct race are recent variations

43:44by the time they arose important and complicated traits like speech abstract thinking even physical prowess had already evolved as geneticists we now have the opportunity to investigate

44:04using proper genomic analysis complex human traits athletic ability musical ability intelligence all these wonderful traits that we wish we understood better and for which we'd very much like to know if there are genes that are involved how they interact how they play out

44:24those traits are old we spent most of our history as a species together in africa in small populations before anyone left there's far more of us now than those small original populations that founded our species each of us carries with us some very

44:46recent variation and some common shared variation that goes way back in human history variations among us in those old traits developed independent of and non-concordant with variations in the recent superficial traits we think of as

45:07racial human variation does not map onto what we call race no matter how we might measure it so now it's going to this gigantic database of dna you're going to blast this database with your dna sequence and it's going to pull up anything that's significantly similar

45:28and now the final exercise of the dna workshop offered the students further evidence of the genetic variation within groups they compared their mitochondrial dna sequences with an international database so the first choice for you is urban mitochondrial dna there's one

45:49two three gorgeous sequence was most similar to that of a european individual in nigeria and that's what you were saying that's the closest person you match up now does that necessarily mean you're urban no no it just means that there's somebody in this part whoever in this part of the world has a very similar dna sequence to you okay and remember if we

46:11look at other people within this urban group i expect to see other forms of mitochondrial dna so let's close and they did her match was dramatically different from another europeans whose dna sequence was very different from still other urbans because modern humans first evolved in africa there is even greater genetic

46:33diversity in africa than elsewhere so if there were a catastrophe which destroyed the rest of the world's population most of the genetic variability in the world would still be present in sub-saharan africa

46:57genetic data can subvert racial assumptions about our ancestry and so i'm going to compare your dna sequence to somebody from a study that was done on the population in the balkans look and see how many differences we see one two two differences jackie's data search matched her with a sequence from an individual in the

47:19balkans so you're expecting something maybe more japanese yes definitely more japanese instead of balkan that's interesting at all if i actually know my maternal lineage like i know where it should end up doing a surge like this should double check it right what's your preconceived notion my preconceived notion is um we know back through my great great

47:40great grandmother and she had lived in eastern europe her whole life in the australian empire okay in a little town in ukraine okay as far as i understand but remember this little town near ukraine may have many different mitochondrial dna sequences within it so let's go back and we'll look at yours

48:00and isolate from the balkans not a major shock there let's see how similar you are to that person and we had always guessed that my great grandmother had been this nice little farm girl who had spent her whole life in the ukraine and so i was pretty sure that i should be a pretty exact match to one of those

48:19ethnic groups and i was interesting 100 match so i'm going to compare you with someone in iceland all right we also pulled up a sequence from iceland wow i see no differences yeah again this huh and that one so what does that tell you so are you icelandic or are you baltimore what does

48:40it tell us and we pulled up a third sequence from somewhere in africa and i was also a 100 match well that's 100 match wow that's very significant um and that's weird well what did chung use not that you're closely related to this person made possibly mitochondrially speaking and that we're all very closely related so

49:02that someone shocked me actually that there were so many of these racial groups that shared it i'm just a mutt so to speak i've been crossbred and interbred with lots of different ethnic groups let's see if it gets more interesting than we think i think the way to think about things is that we're all mongrels we've always been mixing every single

49:21one of us is a mongrel today's genetic findings corroborate richard loewington's discoveries of 30 years ago because of our history of moving mating and mixing most human variation especially that of older complex traits can be found within

49:41any population most of it from a common source in africa we have now understood genetic variation in human beings i'm not saying our knowledge is fixed for all time it never is but i think we have

50:01seen just how shallow and superficial the average differences are among human races even though in certain features like skin color and hair form the visual differences are fairly striking they're based on almost nothing in terms of overall genetic variation racist biology simply doesn't work

50:22but what is important is that race is a very salient social and historical concept a social and historical idea we live in racial smog just because race isn't something biological that doesn't mean it's not real there are a lot of things in our society that are real and are not

50:43biological race as we understand it as a social construct has a lot to do with where somebody will live what schools they will go to what jobs they will get whether or not they will have health insurance black white and brown are merely skin colors

51:05but we attach to the meanings and assumptions even laws that create enduring social inequality when i'm walking the streets alone at night coming home from parties and stuff i never get a sideways glance at people asking what i'm doing there if a woman is stumbling with her shopping bags and i stop and say would

51:26you like a hand i never get sort of a glance with two meanings it's always oh nice white boy you can help on my own campus when i walk to classes students often come up to me and ask me if i'm the football coach or the basketball coach and i tell them no i'm a professor in the department of life

51:44sciences it's easy to be white it's very easy to be white it's never been easy for africans or african americans here never it's been a long long time you know since the abolition of slavery you know african american slavery and in this country it doesn't matter it doesn't matter

52:04those ideas are still around no matter how they view themselves the world sees jackie gorgeous and john as separate races the social expectations that await them are in many ways dependent upon that racial assignment

52:29would our expectation about gorgeous be that she is a champion athlete or valedictorian of her class in fact gorgeous is both but since the days of jesse owens

52:50our society has more readily acknowledged and more avidly rewarded one of her talents over the other

53:13if the playing field were level the array of opportunities opened to gorgeous and her teammates would not be limited by assumptions society makes about the nature of the genes they inherited lots of things are inherited they don't have anything to do with genes money is inherited

53:35and money goes a long way in increasing someone's capacity to do well in one area or another off the track the playing field is not level the net worth of the average white american family is eight times that of the average african-american family

54:00race is a concept that was invented to categorize the perceived biological social and cultural differences between human groups and the beauty of that ideology is that it justifies what is the greatest

54:22social agony of american life namely it justifies the inequalities that exist in a society which is said to be based on equality race is a human invention we created it we have used it in ways that have been

54:43in many many respects quite negative and quite harmful and we can think ourselves out of it we made it we can unmake it the racialized society we live in has been under construction for three centuries

55:04how can we unmake race unless we first confront its enormity as a historical and social reality and its emptiness as biology

55:38if race doesn't exist in biology where did the idea come from find out in the next episode of race the power of an illusion to learn more about rethinking race visit pbs online at pbs.org to order the video set of race the power of an illusion call

56:01for 1-877-811-7495 use only major funding for this program provided

56:22by the ford foundation a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide and the corporation for public broadcasting additional funding provided by these funders

56:58you