Sunday, November 13, 2011

The Geometer of Race (Gould)

This article is about subjectivity of dividing humans into races.
The main opinion of the author Gould was that scholars should be aware of the unconscious bias and stereotyping of creating a race.
In other words, he says that people can never be objective when they think about race, and they have to realize this fate. 

In this article, he is referring to the story of Johann F. Blumenbach
who was the German anatomist and naturalist (9-1, L20-21).
Blumenbach was not a racist but he created the hierarchical form of race
based on the beauty of appearances, and it encouraged racism in his future ages.
The author expresses that the criteria of race were created by someone's own subjective view and biases even though he/she thought that those were objective and logical.
I agree with this Gould's opinion because I have learned that
the human's perception is always experiential and subjective from Fisher's article.
In addition, not only the individual opinion but also the generational view can be affected
by various social and historical factors, so humans can never decide the perfect criteria of race.

Gould's thesis which claims the subjectivity of race is reasonable. I also think that Humans (especially scholars) should not forget their incompleteness. If people assume that they can always decide or create something perfectly, there would be a big problem like the way Blumenbach's theory occurred discrimination. Also, Blumenbach's story was interesting as one historical nonfiction.  
However, I think that the author should refer some more scholars or another story about racial history to support his opinion. This article was somewhat like a bibliography of Blumenbach.
Also, I wonder why this article has no works cited list at the end.

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