It's an interesting learning experience, teaching undergraduates about race. Some of them have a really hard time letting go of essentialized thinking about groups, and understanding the quite basic notion that race is a social construction with material consequences, but no biological basis.
The fabulous PBS film Race: The Power of an Illusion helps quite a bit for fueling the discussion, so we showed the third part, The House We Live In, to the sections this time around. Somehow roughly a third of the class still missed the question on the exam asking about the biological basis of race, answering that it's "skin color, hair texture, and nose breadth".
As I continue striving to find a way to communicate these ideas to young people, I get increasingly excited about research that may help to clarify the issues. So the image above caught my eye when I saw it on the U of M homepage today. It's a schematic of human genetic variation, with colors representing different genetic types. If you click on it, you'll get to the article on the research the team has been doing. Pretty amazing, I say.
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