Pilar Ossorio is a leading scholar and microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin, who studies the ethical limitations and impacts of genetic research. In it, she describes how races are a socially constructed idea with physically and socially real impacts. Although race is artificially created in that it has no tangible basis in biology, I believe that everyone is impacted by their race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ossorio talks about how we vary genetically from each other by only .1%. This reminds me of the moment in the film where students were guessing which peers’ genes they would be the most similar to, and all of them thought they would share the most similarities with those who look the same as them but they found out that was not the case at all. This illustrates how we can hold presumptions that race indeed does have a biological basis which, in turn, legitimizes racism. For example, slavery in America was accepted because Americans genuinely thought that African Americans were subhuman, in that African Americans were inferior biologically. This in turn justified their horrendous treatment of the slaves. Because if African Americans were biologically equal to white landowners, they have no excuse for their behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Furthermore, Ossorio discusses that race is not simply defined by one’s skin color but also one’s attitude, speech, etc. She talks about how the definition of being black and white can differ between geographical locations. That is undeniable support for the fact that race is socially constructed, because if the idea of race varies based on where it is found, because true facts remain immutable. Ossorio also notes that, although race is not biologically real, scientists should not completely dismiss race as a factor that may impact our social and biological health. This reminds me of a documentary that I watched called “When the Bough Breaks”. It discusses how the infant mortality rates of African American women in high socioeconomic classes is higher than that of white women in low socioeconomic classes. The conclusion that was drawn for this peculiar phenomenon is that African American women undergo constant stress like “a thousand little cuts” everyday due to the discrimination they have to face and react to due to their races. Therefore, I think it’s critical that there are scholars who intersect biology and humanities subjects like anthropology so that we can shed light on topics like this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pilar Ossorio is a leading scholar and microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin, who studies the ethical limitations and impacts of genetic research. In it, she describes how races are a socially constructed idea with physically and socially real impacts. Although race is artificially created in that it has no tangible basis in biology, I … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11681,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11681"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":803,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions\/803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/pulversciencescholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}