One thing that confused me and got me thinking in the program “Race: The power of an illusion” was when the guy who said he knew that his great-grandma was from Ukraine, found out he had as many similarities with someone from Iceland and the Balkans as well. This in itself was not very confusing, it actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Everyone has a pair of parents, two pairs of grandparents, four pairs of great-grandparents and so on. It doubles every time. This means that if we go back only a few hundred years, there would be more people in Europe than there have ever lived there, which is obviously not the case. Rather, this means that everyone who now lives in Europe or is of European descent (e.g. “white” people) have a common ancestor just a few generations back (so the people saying things like “I’m related to Charlemagne” aren’t really that cool, because pretty much all Europeans are.)
But all of this doesn’t mean that his great-grandma wasn’t from Ukraine, but the way he reacted seemed like he thought so, or that where his great grandmother was from wasn’t as important anymore, which is what confused me (He said “we always thought that my great-grandmother was this farm girl living in the Ukraine”). I think that our family history is important, fascinating and positive, as long as it’s not being used to put other people or groups down.
I agree. While I am not convinced that race has absolutely nothing to do with genetics (after all, your physical characteristics are based of of your genetics), I think that a tiny amount of DNA has little impact on skin color, and should not affect how we treat each other. It is important to know that other traits play much bigger roles (as proven by the similarities of different people of different races), we should understand that DNA does play a role in skin color, but cannot create segregation between people.
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