race the word is loaded with me but what does it actually mean is race a social construct or scientific fact why does it inspire such uneasiness fear and even violence for better or worse race is one of the most powerful ideas of our age but does it even exist Latinos they're shiftless lazy stupid PO lakhs half-breeds you just can't trust them these are racial stereotypes why we've all heard them even if it was a joke or a whisper Irish they'll drink illegal shiny Indian whites erasing their stupid but who among us has never believed some kernel of a stereotype who has never made an assumption about an individual based on what we call race you almost can't escape it I think we're all vulnerable to developing prejudice most of us like to think of ourselves as not prejudiced or unprejudiced but I like to say we all have biases about some groups because of the limited information we've been exposed to not because we're bad people not because we want that misinformation but because it's like smog in the air you breathe it in because it's the only are available but race is more than just stereotypes it's also less in 1998 the American Anthropological Association declared that the concept of race has absolutely no scientific validity most scientists now agree that race simply doesn't exist in the natural world but it doesn't have to exist in nature to exist in society what would it tell you about this person if you knew his race would you be more fearful more welcoming would it give you any insight into his character it's nearly impossible to live in the modern world and have no preconceptions about a person's race science or no science race has meaning but ask a hundred people what that meaning is and you'll get at least a hundred different answers some absurd system of categorization race is what you are but not who you are I think it has come to mean something peculiar to humans unfortunately race tends to be like pornography I know it when I see it what we lack is a precise scientific definition of race ideally race should be as important as the color coordination of one's costume what race means to me in America is a system of empowerment for some and disenfranchisement for others I really doesn't matter you know it cuz we just all people on the same world scientists tell us race doesn't exist but tell that to anyone who suffered discrimination because of it the idea of race is powerful enough to alter people's lives often in tragic ways one way to understand race is to examine it at its most extreme the violence of racism is all too familiar to the Damer family in Hattiesburg Mississippi Vernon de mer was a successful black man in the segregated south he farmed cotton and ran a small general store next to his house in the 1960s de Mer became active in the civil rights movement and I can remember the small kid standing out to outside of the store after one of the attacks with the Klan had driven by the night before and shot the windows out of the store and that's what happened on a fairly frequent basis I believe the sheriff came out says something to the effect of well if he wasn't in the civil rights struggle you wouldn't be having these problems he got in his car and left when Vernon de mer volunteered his store as a place blacks could register to vote the Ku Klux Klan decided he had gone too far he knew when he was trying to get black people to go round ready to vote that it was a dangerous thing I knew it was Daniel because we slept in shifts we knew somebody needs to be wicked our time in the house especially after dark yes we knew it was danger confronting the reality of race took great courage in the mid 60's but in January of 1966 the day MERS worst fear came true and they yelled to Bernhard get up my baby pick at us this time the car horn was blowing I could see the eaves of the house burning Schatz was coming in and he was yelling to me to get the children out while I try to hold him up remember waking me up I didn't know what was going on once she did get me up I knew that the house was on fire I didn't know why the house was on fire I was a ten year old little happy little girl I played with dolls and had tea parties that my daddy came to she was on the bottom deck and her coat was hanging up on the top I wish to get the coat put on her because it was oh let mine if I was coming so fast I didn't even get the color up in the post they torched the house and the grouse store was gasoline bombs simultaneously and they came fully on with high-powered guns and started shooting into the house and the reason why they were shooting was to keep the family trapped in the house because they also set the doors of fire so the family could not escape and the intent was to burn the entire family but what the Klansmen didn't count on was that Vernon de mer was prepared to defend his family at any cost he shot back at the attackers buying time for an escape she was screaming to the top of the boys but we don't get burnt up in this house we're not gonna get out I'll hit the window so hard with my shoulder that I left bottom side shoot a window out and I fell out with the bottom sash the next thing Brennan was handing Biddy out to doing that to me she was crying you can see she had been burned on her arms and her forehead up there miraculously the family managed to flee the burning house but both Betty and her father were injured once they reached the hospital le de mer believed the worst was over they put him in a hospital room together above them in the same room and tomorrow they brought round we're cheering now and the black nurse gave me a blanket so I could put around my feet and around me to get wrong cuz we left out with nothing but it's just what we were sleeping in we didn't have time to get shoes coat or anything and next that inion running damn I thought he was getting better but I guess you see what you want it's a vivid illustration of the damage caused by racism but the story doesn't end in 1966 a Klan leader was arrested for ordering the arson and murder but one after another for all white juries deadlocked justice was denied for 32 years at last in 1998 Sam Bowers was found guilty of first-degree murder by a jury of whites blacks and Asians what happened to our family is an example of how race can be used in the worst way first of all my father is murdered then secondly when we go into the judicial system it is slanted because of race to favor someone else initially there is no level playing field so race has a lot of connotations to it some are very good some are very bad one group of people attacks another a man is killed and a murderer goes free for three decades all because of race what makes people behave this way unfortunately we use the differences because we don't know any better really we use the differences between ourselves as as in hopes that by doing so our particular and the individual lives will be better and in that case their race is a big bashing 2x4 and so we flip each other with race not knowing that as we flip each other we're beating our own selves to death with race stories of racial violence are not unusual in this country or the world what can explain such brutality and injustice is racism part of our nature surely humans have always had a sense of us and then an awareness of differences among people one of the things that has made us so successful on the planet is that we're good at classifying things and looking at similarities and differences and in the the small groups of people that existed in our hunting and gathering past that if people look different there was a high probability that these were people who were not related and people who were not relatives were more likely to be dangerous than people who were relatives and therefore that would have been an early innocence defense survival mechanism the urge to classify is evident in our earliest written chronicles the ancient Greek historian Herodotus noted differences among people's around the classical world he described Persians Egyptians Gauls Ethiopians countless different tribes and cultures it is very human to ask the question is this a kind of that or kind of something else humans do that about everything that's one of the cultural universals is that people classify not only do they classify colors or kinfolk they classify one another but how you treat people on the basis of that classification is very different is a very different question the human urge to classify seems innocent enough so how did we get from there to racial hatred classifying people by race it turns out is a surprisingly recent phenomenon when the age of science dawned in the 18th century it inspired a frenzy of naming and ranking nature every variety of plant or animal suddenly received a precise label and a spot in the hierarchy around this time a new notion about people crept into popular and scientific thinking that all the myriad humans in the world could be lumped together into just three or four types of people and the concept of distinct human races was born the first scientist to categorize human beings by race was a Swedish biologist named carolus linnaeus in 1775 he described five human races Linnaeus wasn't the first to think this up but he was the first to make it officially scientific and in the history of science Linnaeus's work was so obviously right about the rest of biology that this carried enormous impact into the study of human differences - Linnaeus race in humans meant the same thing it meant in animals a subspecies a major division within a species across which individuals could still breed for example the indian elephant and the african elephant are usually considered to be subspecies of the elephant but from the very start scientists squabbled about what should be considered a subspecies in both animals and people whenever professional students of the human species have tried to sit down and figure out what the proper number of categories of humans is they always come up with a number that reflects both the age the time and what particular characteristics they're looking at the idea that the human species could be sorted not by culture or language or even geography but by a few arbitrary physical features was a slippery concept from the start it's no coincidence that the idea grew up alongside European colonialism in the Age of Exploration and colonialism and exploitation and slavery there were good political reasons for seeing all Africans as homogeneous to treat an incredibly diverse group of people in similar fashions overestimate their similarities underestimate their differences and that's basically the way the idea of race developed while European nations were plundering Africa for the slave trade Europe scientists were advancing theories that conveniently justified slavery today most anthropologists agree that Linnaeus was simply wrong the human species cannot reasonably be divided into a few basic groups as far as we can tell there is no small number of groups into which the human species can be collapsed in nature what we find rather is that there's a simple pattern at least to a first approximation people are similar to those nearby and are different from those far away and that neither tells us that there are five kinds of people nor tells us they're at twenty nor tells us there are fifty kinds of people the concept of race came from faulty science but does that mean race doesn't exist over time people have latched on to the idea of race and given it meaning science has abandoned the idea but society hasn't since the categories of race were essentially made up they're a mishmash of nationality ethnicity and physical characteristics so it's no surprise that no one has ever come up with a reasonable list of racial groups take the census over two centuries the US Census has tried out more than 30 different racial categories changing the choices in every single survey the problem of the census is really a fascinating one when this began we were in an intellectual state where we believed that our cultural categories were scientific ones and we now know that they were folk categories and because people were whether they wanted to be or not were forced to align themselves in these categories that they took on a social reality and the social reality of race is often chilling because along with the notion of race came the idea that certain ones were superior and more deserving of life and racism's ugly history began out of ignorance people harp upon the differences and conclude that because your people originally came from one place and someone else's from another place and I'm I'm from another place we are differently made it's really sad and it all it does is puts under the spotlight the blithering ignorance when people are afraid they respond without ration the so-called science of race has been used to further all manner of political evils but that didn't make it any easier to nail down the rules of the game even the Nazis had a tough time with it relying on arbitrary measurements to discern whether someone was Aryan or non-aryan Nazis claimed that large facial features meant you were less evolved more animal-like the size of your ears or nose might determine whether you lived or died the South African apartheid regime resorted to a much more complicated classification system dividing people into white Asian black and several categories of colored and each group was accorded very different rights in the US and throughout the world racism has survived into the modern age leaving a bloody trail in its wake in this country racial violence may be less common than it once was but it's not gone extremist groups still exist keeping alive the ideas they represent many refuse to accept that race has lost its endorsement by science this idea that there's no such thing as race a very recent phenomenon it is born of the political correct movement which has sought to twist history for the purposes of social change Matt Hale holds the position of pontificates Maximus in a white supremacist organization called the World Church of the Creator race is the most fundamental issue facing the world today as far as we are concerned of the world Church the courrier race is the primary determinant of human traits we of the white race must take steps to protect our white race if we are to have civilization and progress on this planet as most people would like to have white people need to band together as one to fight for the interests of their people the Church of the Creator claims 7,000 members worldwide they believe that America is headed for a race war we would like the non-white races to simply leave this country and a lot of them will once white people are banding together are making it obvious that they are going to fight for their future many non-whites will leave hopefully all of them will but I think there will be some bloodshed it is inevitable to some extent the question is just how much really according to hate watch an organization that tracks hate groups on the Internet the Church of the Creator is one of hundreds of similar organizations many have websites for recruiting members some aimed specifically at children but you don't have to be a white supremacist to cling to old ideas about race a lot of people still believe race is a reasonable way of sorting out our species Americans believe that there are these three races Caucasians [ __ ] and negroid or you know whites blacks and Asians they but they believe that these are three distinct biological groups and we know that's not true but many of us were taught that there were three races and looking around it may seem true well the problem with races is largely an optical illusion what I see with my own eyes isn't what's actually out there it looks like there may be three kinds of people discretely different out there but the fact is that's not really what's out there in nature what's out there in nature is one human race but the idea that distinct races exist is difficult to debunk for a very simple reason people look different the human form is miraculous in its variety but does different add up to race think of it this way what if we say that a race is a group of people with a common ancestry who look alike and maybe have certain genetic traits in common sounds simple enough but then what if we take a random group of red-headed people and leave them on an island for a long time as the generations tick by they would look more and more alike soon they would find themselves with certain hereditary diseases traits and gene combinations in common all the things we generally think of as making up a race but the fact is the island of the redheads is not a race it's simply an isolated gene pool and the truth is any isolated population redheaded or not will start to look a lot alike given enough time simply because they are related and that group will look different from other groups but just how different are we the fledgling science of genetics can shed some new light on the question recent findings show us that the genes of every single human being are more than 99% identical genetically we are far more similar than most species for example our closest animal relatives chimpanzees have three or four times the amount of genetic variation seen in people in humans there's just not enough variation to qualify any group as a subspecies we don't recognize the existence of subspecies in the human species and the reason for that is that it doesn't seem to be there empirically if you actually study what humans look like in the aboriginal world you don't find a few major divisions of people we are all Homo sapiens sapiens one species with no subgroups this is not unique in the animal kingdom many species are without subspecies this doesn't mean that they all look alike the domestic cat comes in every color of the rainbow all of them exactly the same species and the same is true for humans scientists now believe that human differences are merely superficial we look different for three basic reasons some features change because of purely random genetic mutations sometimes new genes are introduced through conquest or trade other differences are believed to be evolutionary adaptations to the environment for example light colored skin may have developed because it can absorb more vitamin D in regions with fewer hours of Sun dark skin seems to protect against skin cancer in sunny tropical climates curly hair may occur more often in warmer climates because it allows heat to escape conversely straight hair seems to help conserve warmth in colder regions but if human differences are only skin deep how do we explain why race is so important in the modern world when people are treated differently because of insignificant differences race acquires meaning the idea of race is deeply embedded in our cultures and our psyches we share a street-level understanding of what the word means if you stop people and ask them what race they are they do know what you're talking about so Mexican I usually say a [ __ ] plus I'm from China and its own ass whatever race I am to telling my Portuguese I'm gonna be ashamed of kind of obvious so I could confuse they confuse me for a Filipino a lot I guess white European American if anyone uses that term I'm actually half chinese and half Vietnamese but my typical response would be Chinese that's cuz I identify with that that part of my my heritage more socially and politically race has become an important concept we use it to mean everything from skin color to ancestry to culture some experts are even trying to figure out if we respond physically to the idea of race is the idea of race so entrenched that it can speed up your heart rate to make sure our equipment is working properly I'm just gonna need to take your pulse this researcher is measuring the stress that a person experiences when confronted and touched by a stranger of the same or another race Scot Verena and David rollick are the Purdue University psychologists who designed and ran the study I'm very interested in issues associated with the adjustment of people of racial different racial and ethnic groups and we both had an interest in how those kinds of factors play out in everyday social situations more than a hundred African American and white undergraduates participated in the experiment electrodes were attached to each subject in order to detect stress next a technician came into the room hello gentlemen name is Troy I'm helping Andrew this person was always the same gender as the subject but not always the same race the study found quantifiable differences in how people respond to strangers of a different race the most notable finding concerned reactions to African American men while black males showed a slight increase in stress when meeting a black stranger white males had a more exaggerated response when a white male was the subject and they encountered a black male heart rate went up when the person walked in the room but it went up even more than for other combinations and then when they were touched by that person heart rate continued going up and so overall heart rate for white males encountering a black male went up over ten beats a minute ten heart beats a minute is quite a big change and especially considering the fact that the person was sitting reclined in a nice lounge chair and was generally in a relaxed position one thing that produced study shows is that race means something very real to most people race is significant its salient people notice it there's been a lot of talk in recent decades about color blindness regardless of the merits of that it's simply not true people notice it not only do people notice race but they attach ideas to it ideas about how people behave the stupid you just can't trust them where do these ideas come from and why are they so persistent categorizing an individual based on group attributes it simplifies the world it makes complexity much easier to deal with because it really reduces complexity into formulas now we all do it police do it when they profile suspicious characters most stereotypes probably have little seeds of truth buried in them but the seeds grow into tangled weeds of hatred because they're allowed to spread out of control stereotyping is an especially insidious form of prejudice it operates subtly through innuendo and caricature many people equate Asians with foreign well there are two things one they equate race with culture and two they equate Asian with not American so if you're Asian you can't possibly be American and so many asian-americans talk about how people compliment them that they're able to speak English or ask them when they came here where they're really from there seems to be a view of Latinos as being on the one hand noble savages or Concord noble savages on the one hand on the other hand these kinds of undocumented illegal Avengers when I tell people that I'm black who are not black they they respond um negatively they say but you're not really black you know you're only part black and you don't even look at and they really don't want me to identify as black they find it really makes them uncomfortable and I think that's a lot of racism going on there and a lot of distaste for blackness curiously there are a few stereotypes that are applied to every group almost every racial or ethnic group that I've come across that's had collision with another one in a society has regarded itself as more devoted to family values than the other group and the other group may have exactly the symmetrical image I think many blacks have an image of whites I've been told as being colder less human less warm less humanly intuitive perhaps even less regarding of family if stereotypes are so deeply embedded in our culture and unconscious Minds what can we do about it is there any escape from bias I think that we need to talk about race and that we can never attack racism or address race problems unless we talk about unless we notice think about and talk about race and thinking and talking about a notice raise doesn't mean race hatred or racism it's a big thing you know being a Latino American outside be a race you know like my ex-wife is actually half Italian half annoying notice on race and getting our assumptions out on the table is the special realm of certain people comedy can be a very powerful tool for examining ideas about race myself I'm originally from Iran thank you I feel the warmth thank you very much single person applaud it okay be that kind of a crowd like to start off by doing something in the name of Allah and I was wanted to be a newscaster you don't I mean like so I could act really white and wash me up until I get to my name then I could have that 90 no core transformation you know that cultural thing that we always seem to have those were the events today outside the Los Angeles quarterly OJ Simpson trial found beyond death my name is my TMP just one of hey guys we got all the money so I just did this is really cool I just fired my manager which is like amazing to do in show business but you know like this is why I had to fire him he actually said to me he said you know what Margaret I think the Asian thing puts people off and he thought he was giving me constructive criticism like you know maybe you can take a workshop somewhere maybe you can be a little more Latino that would be a good idea if you could just be black maybe we could get you a sitcom on UPN maybe I think that comedians are allowed to talk about race because they're tempering it with humor and and there are they are sort of giving their message in a funny way and I think that um people are just more apt to listen and I think everybody should talk about it but you know people talk to you a lot more if you have a dog because I was walking the dog and this homeless guy jumped out and he goes that dog gonna wind up in a pot of rice and he probably wouldn't have said that if I was by myself my goals in bringing up race in my humor is to bring light shine a light onto experiences that have been particularly painful for me and odd and you know I I get upset about things and then I'll write jokes about them and that alleviates my pain for the moment and then also in lines people to the fact that you know maybe we shouldn't do things like that because that's really awful and I really am so in love with him that I had consented to go meet his family in Sarasota Florida which I was like really worried about going to Sarasota before I went because I was like are there going to be any other Asian people there he's like no I was like well could you just take me to the dry cleaner then because I can't be around all white people that much I think that whenever you talk about race you are entering a treacherous area because everybody has a really defined idea of what race means to them so in a sense you are challenging people's ideas about who they are and I think that people that think that what I do is I would never I've been called racist but I would never perceive myself as that I think that that's good I think you can call me racist all you want because at least we're talking about it you know at least we're discussing it thank you very much everyone reason race makes good material for comedy is that just mentioning it breaks a taboo heart is race is a very difficult subject for many people to talk about the what is what is racism right what is racism how does it operate we've been looking at it's a hard topic to talk about people actively avoid it the truth is people also want to talk about it and when you give them the opportunity to do so they just run with it because it's such an important topic and it impacts so many dimensions of our lives and yet there is so much silence about it these are the provocative statements that you all generated last week psychologist Beverly Tatum is the Dean of Mount Holyoke College for almost a decade she's been teaching a course on the psychology of racism every student in the class must prepare a plan for dismantling racism in her own life there are lots of ways I think at the grassroots level for people to think about you know what can I do to make a difference and that's really what I encourage the readers of my book and the students in my class to think about what is my sphere of influence as an educator you know I have some choices about what I choose to teach and I have chosen to teach about the psychology of racism as one way of exercising my sphere of influence but we all have a different sphere of influence and thinking about what's my spirit influence how can I use it to make a difference in this cycle I think is an important first step it all goes back to racism being a thing for Tatum it's not enough to simply refrain from overt acts of racism I like to talk about racism as being like a moving sidewalk at the airport you know the cycle of racism being like that because you can step on that sidewalk at the airport and get carried along you don't have to exert much effort you don't have to really do anything you can just stand still and you get carried to your destination racism is kind of like that too in the sense that many of us don't call people names we don't engage in acts of racial violence we don't actively discriminate and yet we still are being carried along by that cycle the question is not are you racist or not the question is are you actively anti-racist working to understand and combat racism is often a very personal journey and once in a while the actions of a single human being can exceed all reasonable expectations well of course that people thought I was crazy my friends know I'm crazy so but the they've always known me to be you know a little different Daryl Davis is a professional musician as a performer and a recording artist he's had considerable success in his musical career but it's his hobby that makes him unusual this is a Klan robe and the stickler robe as you can see belonged to an officer in the Klan as designated by the stripes and sleeves Darrell Davis is obsessed with the Ku Klux Klan and the mask now and his preoccupation doesn't end with reading books and collecting paraphernalia Darrell Davis's relationship with the Klan began some years back when Davis met a white man in a bar where he was playing one time this guy came over to me and said hey man you know I'm I never had a black man play like Jerry Lee Lewis and I proceeded to tell him where Julie had had learned that style so um he he was kind of incredulous about it but he wanted to buy me a drink and so I sat on his table and I had a cranberry juice with him he says you know this is first time I ever had a drink of the black man and I thought yes I was kind of odd so I said why and he snickered and his buddies said tell him tell him I said tell me what and he said I'm a member of the Ku Klux Klan and I started laughing guffy yeah this guy's pulling a joke on me it was no joke and from that moment on Davis's fascination with the KKK grew I never set out to to make friends with anybody I've something set out to gather information to try to understand what will fought this way and what had happened was this big long story short I found out who the Klan leader was here in my home state Davis contacted Imperial wizard Roger Kelly of Maryland and arranged to meet him the meeting turned into a surprisingly cordial two and a half hour interview that experience launched Davis on a bizarre Odyssey recounted in his book clandestine relationships he spent several years interviewing dozens of Klansmen and did more than just satisfy his own curiosity the most important thing that I gained from dealing with members of the Klan was that while you are actively learning about somebody else you are passively teaching them about yourself little by little Davis gained the trust of many Klansmen he's almost certainly the only black man who's ever been invited to KKK rallies what's more he goes and hangs out with clan leaders backstage over time Davis is warm and openness led to something no one could have predicted 11 or 12 members of various Klan groups have quit their organizations as a result of getting to know me some have given me their robes and their hoods there are stiff roots of our membership their medallions their you know whatever um I'm not very proud to have those things racism is a cancer you must treat it when you find the symptoms of it otherwise it will spread which is why it's still here in this country so I've chosen to treat it in my own way and I've had some some good results I have robos hanging in my closet people who've changed and who ever influence others to change that's what I've done to improve race relations what have you done how many rooms do you have hanging in your closet it's hard to imagine anything more astonishing than an african-american with a closet full of Klan robes but there's an even more unexpected thing that came of this brave quest friendship Darrell Davis and Imperial wizard Roger Kelly have become so close that in 1997 kelly named davis godfather of his baby daughter yeah people said we'll have you be friends with somebody who's still in the clan well I take away you know that that element of racism you know I don't agree with how they believe and certainly if they commit any acts that I would disapprove of and I find out about it no I wouldn't be their friend but if they want to have those beliefs that's fine and we all have different beliefs like you know you may have friends who agree on abortion yeah friends you don't agree on abortion um but you can still be friends with them regardless of what your belief is Daryl Davis is proof that the real experts on what we call race are not scientists but ordinary people tackle it in everyday life the truth about race will never be found in our blood or DNA but where science leaves off poetry goes to the heart of the matter from human family by Maya Angelou I know the obvious difference is in the human family