Race

Last week in Sociology we talked about race. I learned that different cultures think of race in so many different ways. Here in America we think of race as usually white, black, asian, or latino. In Brazil they have 134 terms to describe "skin color" such as, ebony, deep bluish, off-white, greenish, yellowish, reddish, honey toned, cinnamon, tawny, cashew, chocolate brown, tint of coffee, milky, etc. They is no way to group human into distinct racial groups. It is all in social construction. In class Sal talked about how when he went to Japan he asked the people there what the different races were, and they said "Japanese people, and foreign people" so you are either Japanese or you're not, and that's all. Seeing how each culture describes their races shows that we create race ourselves, placing people into certain groups based on skin color. He also talked about how some Japanese people identify themselves by earwax! You either have dry/flaky earwax, or wet greasy earwax, depending on where your ancestors came from. So many people create race themselves, that there are no rules on race.