Humanity as a whole has very different ideas when it comes to race.
Definitions of race depend on where you’re from and what culture or belief system you believe to be true.
Yet there is a more logical way to figure out if black and white are really all that different.
Thursday, the Notre Dame Club of Ann Arbor and Eastern Michigan University hosted a discussion in the 2009 Hesburgh lecture series.
The series receives its name from Ted Hesburgh who gave 35 year to Notre Dame as a professor and its 15th president.
This year’s lecture was titled “What Race is… and What it is Not,” and was led by Notre Dame Professor of Anthropology and Undergrad Research Agustin Fuentes.
One of the first things Fuentes stated in his lecture was that “race in the United States is important. And if you do not agree with that, I think you are wrong!”
The audience learned that while social conflicts in the U.S. have often focused on race, other countries, too, have faced similar inequalities.
Examples Fuentes gave ranged from the class systems in England and other countries to the religious wars that can tear nations apart.
He made sure to mention there are no black or white genes, explaining that there is no possible way to tell who a person is by their blood or where a person comes from based on skin color.
He went on to explain that, “humans have 100 percent of the same genes but each gene has a different form.”
“Almost every gene can be traced back to Africa because we all came from there.”
Like snowflakes, no two people are alike, even if they are related. Even in the same family, two people will not have the same immune system because we are all different, even though we share the same general make-up.
One of the sections covered in the lecture was why humans all look different. Fuentes revealed this is due to multiple factors, including environment.
In humans there are two main types of pigment, or melanin, which determine skill color, brown and black.
The dispersal of these pigments throughout a person’s body will determine their skin color.
Freckles are really just melanin pigment that has clumped the body.
“Race is not a biological unit, but it is a social reality,” Fuentes said.
The material that was covered in 45 minuets, not counting a question and answer period at the end, usually takes a whole semester to talk about.
Regardless of this, the lecture was not only entertaining and occasionally funny, but it made an impressive impact as well. 203 Porter was packed to capacity, with people sitting on the floor just to hear the lecture.