Race? This Is a Question

¶ … race?" This is a question that Jefferson Fish poses in his essay "Mixed Blood." He examines the concept of race, the evolution of human beings to have spawned different physical characteristics, and the social environment which has manipulated those characteristics to create fantasies about race and racial hierarchies. Overall, the argument is well written, being blended both with personal experience and academia -- after all, we all experience issues of race first hand.

Here, the author brings up the age old controversy surrounding the nature of race and racial differences between groups. He explains the model for seeing race as a biological difference; yet he refutes this concept using his own personal experiences alongside strong empirical evidence from academia and modern psychological discourse. Fish's primary argument is that "race is a social classification, not a biological one" (Fish 1). He believes that racial attributes are distributed based on social concepts and not innate biology. This comes up out of a review of what other psychologists are suggesting about the nature of race and any biological link to particular behaviors and consequences. In this sense, Fish can discredit the concept that biological racial factor impact characteristics like IQ, but rather strongly influence more social concepts that may be later misunderstood as biological behavior markers. Fish clearly believes that "race is a myth. And our racial classification scheme is loaded with pure fantasy" (Fish 1). The main idea here is centered on the fact that different societies have different notions of race. Variations of racial hierarchies can be seen by examining American notions of race with other nations, like those in South America which do sometimes differ dramatically. Working on this foundation, Fish shows that race is more of a social concept than a biological one, because its conceptions vary with region and cultures.

The background Fish provides helps strengthen his argument and blends really nicely with the rest of the essay's structure. He mentions all of humanity's beginning in Africa, playing off the idea that the only reason there are physical differences between human beings is because of the environmental conditions we evolved in were different based on proximity. That does not make us different races, but just variations of the same species. Fish then turns to go further into a discussion of evolution and how that was the major catalyst for any differences. People have different color skin because adaptation led them to adjust to their physical surroundings so that they could better survive. Yet, biologically, underneath these adaptations, we are still the same creature. The specific evidence and discussion of a number of different "racial" features in relation to the environment that helped evolve them provides a sense of depth and strength to the author's claim. He is speaking from a very educated perspective; one where the evidence is allowed to speak for itself.