Part 6: Judgement + Part 7: "May Be of Any Race"

Hello to all of you!

Now the end has come, the end of Race that is. It was an an enjoyable read at most times, and really got my brain churning to think about different aspects of this, and how the topic of race has been an influence in my life. The thing is, I’ve largely ignored it.

In all my life I don’t beleive I’ve ever witnessed a legitamate example of racism. This has led me into the mindset that it really isn’t much of a problem, and that it only exists in select locations where few people would ever be victims of it. Obviously, as I have become more educated I know this is far from reality.

Still, I think it’s a good thing I have not seen it, because it does represent that in this day we are an the slope of improvement. I guess the real hope for us, then, would be to improve in the quickest and most effective way possible. Improve to a point where racism is thought of the same way as medeival torture; nobody spends considerable time thinking about it but we look down on the past for having it.

Throughout the book, I kept wondering how we could get to that point. I want the generation of my children to be the one that is not racist at all. That’s right- not at all. It might be a big jump, but big jumps can come from simple changes. I thought about whether or not we should continue teaching the history of Race in school. Doesn’t it just let children know that those ideas exist, and therefore allow racism to flourish? I suppose I will dedicate the rest of this post to speak my mind about it.

I was really unsure of this idea and whether or not I wanted to put it in my blog post until in only a few pages from the end I came across an idea that was similar: “Dr. Morning suggests that one step would be to stop even using the term “race.” ” I call it similar because my proposed idea would involve the discontinuation of the term race. Now I don’t feel likee I’m being absurd. However, I do acknoldedge that there are some very arguable reasons not to do this.

For one, there is the arguement that the history of race, slavery, and discrimination, is a very important one. I would never be the one to argue that we should forget history. Perhaps I need to alter my argument...

We should stop teaching children about this kind of history at an early age- That is my arguement.

I came to realize that although I am learning about race at the moment, it is not impacting my level of bias. It’s really the earlier ages that the teaching is harmful, because the formation of opinions is underway in young minds, and those children could end up with a lifelong opinion we don’t want them to have.

To better illustrate my point, I’ll share a personal experience, one of the day I learnt any of this existed.

I was in 2nd grade when Barack Obama was elected, and my teacher was eager to tell my class how big a deal a black president was. In order to do so, she told us a bit about the civil rights movement and MLK's "I have a dream" speech. Before that day I had never been introduced to the idea of racism. I remember raising my hand and asking, "So if I had lived back then I would've hated black people?" Yeahhhhh........


The purpose of this story was to show that it's more difficult to comprehend these ideas at young ages, and I feel that if people aren't introduced to the subject until later on, they will have a better grasp on it.


I can relate this to the picture I chose to analyze in class depicting the black children moving into a white neighborhood and receiving judgmental looks from the white children. I think the only reason the kids were racist is because they were introduced to the idea of racism at an early age.

Anyway... that's all I have to say. Thanks for reading!

2nd Half of Part 5: The Age of Racism

Hello again my friends,

I am growing to love the way Marc Aronson leads up to his arguments. It’s always the same sort of thing; he begins every chapter exactly the way a non-fiction book would be written. Then, towards the end of the read, he clarifies the connection and I feel a sudden jolt of enlightenment. For the sake of using simple terms, it’s a surprise when the clarification comes.

Now.... I suppose an example would be helpful. Since I’m reflecting on chapters 13, 14, and 15 in this blog post, I’ll pull examples from them.

Chapter 13: Survival of the Fittest
          As a portion of you might have guessed by the title, this chapter began with a rundown on who Charles Darwin was, and what he dedicated his time to doing. Aronson tells of how his ideas were highly controverial, mentioning that Darwin delayed revealing his discoveries for 20 years because he was afriad of the reactions people would have (pg. 175).
          Next, Aronson explains the impacts Darwin’s ideas had when he did reveal them. He particularly goes into depth on how people such as Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin) took Darwin’s ideas and used them for strange implications. Galton took Dalton’s ideas and applied them to people, rather that what Dalton had intended: application to the natural world (pg. 177).
          Now that the concept of traits being passed from parents to children was scientifically established, Dalton wanted to beleive society could improve if the people with worse traits were kept from having children and conequentally die off.

My jolt of enlightenment happened was when on page 84, Aronson connects Galton’s idea of genetically inferior people with the prejudice against jews. Now I understood why Aronson brought up “survival of the fittest” at all. Ot was becuase, ultimately Dalton’s work increases the severity of racism in the world by providing a supposedly scientific background, rather than just the opinions of racist people.



I’m going to leave it at just the one example from chapter 13 so as to avoid boring you all. Plus, I feel like I went overboard explaining that one. Just be aware that the pattern of arguent formation exists in every chapter somehow.

The one other thing I’d like to share today is how I feel this can connect to what I said in my previous post about people feeling the need to be superior. I think that in Galton’s case, it is really the same idea: he wants to be superior. The scale is just larger, because he is trying to make his race superior, not just himself.

Later in the section, I read about Adolf Hitler’s actions. This was essentially the same concept. Overall, I can clearly see that Aronson intended that the big takeaway of Part 5 is that any development in history that eatablished a difference between groups caused those groups to separate even further, in some instances going to extreme levels.

If I could request anything of you as you read my blog, I would ask that you choose never to hate people. It just seems to me that that is the reason wars and other large social conflicts erupt: because on the basic level, too many individuals decide to have hatred for one another.

Okay that’s a wrap!

-Simon S. Page

Part Four: Race: The Beautiful Skull + 1st Half of Part 5: The Age of Racism

I have a personal takeaway from this segment of the book...

Through reading about how Indians, Irish immigrants, freed slaves, and Chinese immigrants were treated by white Americans it just seems like people are doing without thinking. As I see it, everyone wants to be the top dog, and superior to the people around them. There are two ways to go about that: either self improvement or making the other people worse. The second of the two is in my opinion easier to accomplish, which is probably why it has so often been the first choice throughout history. Obviously, it's also the wrong choice. By downgrading the people around you, you are forgetting that the important thing is to succeed as a species, and develop together.

Perhaps that sounded a bit deep, but it's what I see as the cause of the problems brought up in this book time and time again. From what I see in my own environment and time period, it seems like a similar thing occurs. There are people who are not focused on self improvement yet still focused on becoming superior. Those are the people who impose a disturbance on the flow of society.

I don't mean to dominate this post with this topic, but I'll conclude on it by referencing a part of the text that I feel is getting at the same idea. "There is no real justice, or fairness. Everybody thinks he is right and his enemy is wrong. In life, winners win and losers lose. There is nothing to count on except being professional." (pg. 165). The word professional stuck out to me, and I read it to mean; always choosing the first option (self improvement) whenever you get the urge to be superior.

I could go on and on, but there are other things to talk about... in fact I'm going to make a barrier between this and what I intended to be the focus of the post.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Page 127!!! That's where our friend Marc Aronson is covering the topic of whether racial differences are real. But on page 127 in particular, he makes a shift from looking at historical evidence (Johann Blumenbach's theory of race) to modern evidence.

The modern evidence he brings up is a drug called BiDil, which according to Aronson, was the first approved drug meant to be taken by a specific race (African Americans). It is meant to cure hypertension. Either the drug only works well on African Americans or hypertension is a disease African Americans tend to get more. So in any case, it is a recognition of a genetic difference between races.

I decided to do a bit of research on the drug. It seems to me that the controversy of the drug and others like it is very real, even from just the title of the articles about it. The company that makes the drug is called NitroMed, and they claim to be "a group attempting to eliminate disparities in cardiovascular disease for African-Americans." (Race-Based Medicine)

I see where the controversy is coming from, but I don't see why it's such a big deal to some people. I get that acknowledgement of race has become a thing that is looked down on, but NitroMed clearly has good intentions.

The article concludes by saying that the future of racial medicine is an uncertain one, but that it is expected to be a short lived thing (Race-Based Medicine). I sincerely hope this is true, because it's not something that I would enjoy seeing again and again on the news in the coming years. There are far more important issues to talk about.

I guess the whole thing with it is that racism has come to be thought of as seeing differences between races. I'm no expert on the topic, but I think it's clear to everyone that races have some physical differences. I think racism should be exclusively when those differences are not based on anything scientific, especially when they make the race in question out to be worse than another

 I felt like the logic in this post flowed very well, but I'd like to hear an outside opinion on that!

Thanks for stopping by!

“Race-Based Medicine: A Recipe for Controversy.” ScientificAmerican.com, Scientific American, www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-based-medicine-a-recipe-for-controversy/. Accessed 31 March 2018.

And Something Else...

I was going about my day today when something hit me!

Let me rewind a tad bit... I noticed that preceding each chapter of Race was a modern scenario, either specific or hypothetical (although realistic). The scenarios connected some reoccurring modern issue with a problem that was developing way back in the day. And in general, Aronson described the modern one first, but only after reading the chapter do you see the connection. I didn't realize how that was a rhetorical strategy until after I made my previous post.

But now that I have it all figured out I can't help but share...

These scenarios evoked emotion! It's so obvious I feel extra stupid that I didn't see it before.

Thinking on why Aronson included those, I think he felt that more variety of the three appeals was needed (because his writing is largely logos based). Although he describes some truly awful things that happened long ago, they don't do much to evoke emotion because they were so long ago they don't matter- at all. But we do tend to care much more about people who are presently alive, which explains why they got some pathos appeals into his book.

One more thing.. in case I haven't mentioned it yet, Aronson's ethos comes from how much research he obviously did to write this book. That research makes him more knowledgeable, and thus more highly trusted.

Actually I think I did mention that in my first post, but for those of you who didn't read that, it's here too!!!

Until next time!

Part Two: The Road to Race: The Christian Era + Part Three: Inventing Race: New Worlds, New Peoples

Hello Everyone!

I have now read 111 pages of Race. The arguments that began in the early part of the book are solidifying now. That is to be expected since I am near halfway through.

Marc Aronson seems to be keeping his writing consistent in terms of format and methods he uses to persuade me. I shall elaborate on that...

The main argument that was solidified was, in his own words "The argument that dark-skinned people of African heritage are inferior was a global creation." (pg. 97). Just to give a bit of a rundown on how Aronson accomplished that, he started with two ideas: slavery and people who were different being regarded as inferior.

Both ideas were developed with similar usage of rhetoric. With slavery, he showed that it was never originally meant to be done with solely Africans. He summarized this with the statement, "slavery flourished in Europe and Africa long before the idea of race was invented. But the slave trade that began in the 1400s took place on a massive scale, and that was different." (pg. 98). The other idea, that people who were different were regarded as inferior, he explained came from people seeing other religions as inferior. He brought these ideas together towards the end explaining that the idea of Race came about when religions characterized foreign people who had different physical characteristics as people meant to be slaves. The plentifulness of African slaves led to the modern misbelief that blacks were always the inferior and enslaved.

But I'm not going to go too much into a review of the reading I've done. But for those of you who haven't/aren't reading Race, I thought it best that I include the gist of what Aronson talked about.

The real topic of conversation I'd like to get into with this post is the rhetorical methods used by Aronson to get his point across. He did it with a vast amount of historical information. This included tellings of movements put in place by prominent leaders, beliefs that impacted decisions and with them history, and (one that I found very effective) included images of artifacts that gave a clearer view of these movements and beliefs.

One such example of an image of an artifact can be found on page 72. It shows pictures of "monstrous men" as people during the middle ages believed they looked. including the image certainly helped me to understand these beliefs and how extreme they were better than descriptions of them could have. And it helped to explain why Europeans looked down on them so much.

The inclusion of images was used very frequently in parts 2 and 3. I'm going to assume that's because Aronson saw that he had an effective way to use it to get his argument made.

Alright, that's where I'll stop for now. Overall I'm taking away that Marc Aronson is a great writer. (Which explains why his rhetorical strategies work so well on me)

Introduction + Part One: Before Race: The Ancient World

After reading the Introductory Section + Part 1 of "Race", I have only good things to say

Marc Aronson (the author) is hard to disagree with. I am finding that his writing is presented in such a way that it makes logical sense and the parts where he did research he did thorough and well. At no points did he make any hasty assumption- one without evidence/reasoning to back it up that is. To put it in short, I found his arguments very convincing and likewise effective on me.

It started right from the beginning. The opening pages of the book describe one of Aronson's personal experiences where he himself made a definite racial judgement. This would seemingly be a bold move to start the book in such a way, largely due to the fact that from the cover we can't tell what the author's position is. All we know going into the opening pages, is the topic. These early pages of the book are especially important for an author who's forming an argument, because whether their writing has a lasting impact on the reader is largely determined by the reader's level of trust for the author, of which the foundation comes from the early pages.

Building more on where I was going with that... I can certainly say that Aronson gained my trust. Following the rundown of his personal experience, he admits his wrongdoing. "I am prejudiced (pg. 1)" he says. Yet in a near instantaneous turnaround he says "It happens to all of us, all the time (pg. 2)" Speaking for myself, I came to realize how true it was. But rather than becoming annoyed by the fact, I was accepting of it. I believe this to be due to the way Aronson implied that it's only what would be expected of me (and everyone for that matter).

It was unclear precisely where his argument was headed from there at first, but having now read up through part 1, Aronson went on to explain much of the earliest origins of both race and slavery.

Speaking of race and slavery... I was definitely influenced when on page 23 he said "Slavery did come to be linked with race, but that was a very recent development. That insight is the key to this whole book, for it allows you to look at slavery and race by themselves, and then trace out their connections" It felt to me as if Aronson was putting forth a completely new concept. I also believe that's what he intended to do. On page 22 he wrote, "we [Americans] assume that slavery is necessarily built on racism." and proceeds to label this as "completely misleading." My mention of that is to show that Aronson sees the American assumption, and therefore aimed to both correct it and build the reader's trust in him for presenting such a fundamental yet very true idea.

Truth.... by truth I mean his claims are only true in my eyes because of the evidence he provides for their support. And since I was only just talking about his claim that slavery and race took separate paths in history, allow me to say what evidence for that struck me as convincing.

It was primarily the background he gave for the social class system in the Roman Empire and to sum it up short, how "In Rome prejudice was based on status. (pg. 47)" This to me was not something I'd ever realized, which is certainly a large part of how Aronson intends to make his arguments throughout this book- by informing the readers of things they were unlikely to have known previously.

That is my take on part 1. As I started off saying, I have good things to say about this book. As such I am in no way dreading the rest of the read. Moreover, I am excited to see it through.