ED262 mylineONLINE: Ethnicity, Race & Racism

Some people like to distant themselves form a certain ethnic background, when we are all one. Europeans came from one area same with latinos, blacks and natives we all are similar. Africans have a major influence to  who Europeans are and also who most of the americans did descend from so theres a possible connection somewhere.

This article was very intriguing, especially because there have been so many migrations and movements of people in the U.S.  When you think about it, people were already here, and then Europeans came, and then they brought over Africans.  But, since then, people from all over the world have continuously moved here and spread throughout the country. In this map, you can see each region, and it's almost just how you would imagine it to be.  The south has more people who think that have some amount of African ancestry, and with the amount of slavery that had occurred, that makes sense.  However, the line between the percentage of African decent you have that makes you to be considered white, and then one percent more and you are African-American, is a bit bizarre to me.  In reality, in today's society, we are just as focussed on who is what race as they were a hundred years ago, whereas it actually should not matter anymore.  But, we don't live in a perfect world, and people need to be willing to work to get to that point.

I found this article particularly interesting because my father recently had a DNA test done. As a Portuguese immigrant, he was surprised to find how varied of a background he comes from, with significant parts of his DNA tracing its origins to Southern Europe (outside the Iberian Peninsula, which only constituted 50% of his markers), the British Isles, Northern Africa, and West Africa. What I think everyone should take away from this article is that the human species is a beautiful mosaic of intermingling cultures and nationalities, especially here in the United States. We are all a part of each other, despite a past filled with hate (the article discusses a Pocahontas Law in Virginia that honestly had me chuckling at the hypocrisy of the legislators who drafted it) and issues of race that continue to plague us a society to this day. Race is entirely a social construct, and issues of white and black become meaningless when you look at data such as that complied in this article. A very interesting read.