Race Relations in the United States - Essay Example

Race Relations in the United States The work of Joseph Graves essentially explains how the piece known as the Emperor’s New Clothes and other works like it originated during a time period in the United States where Science was defining the physical aspect of humanity more so than superficial aspects such as skin color had done so in the past. The breakthroughs in science which the human genome project had made served more than just to explain more clearly the assembly line of human existence and procreation.

It also provided unquestionable evidence that though human beings may vary slightly due to various alleles and expression mechanisms of those alleles, human beings were virtually all genetically the same with just the tiniest of differences from person to person and so on. For example, we know that by definition a species is essentially composed of organisms with the same number and pairs of chromosomes. This is also true for human beings. We are all within one species though gene expression and allele acquisition from parents, may differ slightly throughout populations.

The old saying “knowledge is power” is incredibly useful in this explanation as we are living in a time where there is little room for the arguments of the past which served to segregate human beings based on the color of their skin. Due to recent scientific breakthroughs of the past twenty years, we now know skin color is little more than a variation of the amount of melanin (skin pigmentation) which an individual happens to produce or express. Science has given us the power of knowledge which reminds us that quantitative and non subjective data is indisputable and will permanently outlast any argument which ignorantly tries to suggest that human beings are not created or evolved equally.

Race relations of the present in the United States are certainly not perfect but are progressively evolving with time. The genome project as well as other evolutions of contemporary knowledge has essentially laid the foundation for a society which is more inclined to frown upon those who hold strongly to racist ideology and belief systems, rather than to frown on varying cultures or ethnicities. We are living in a sociological and political climate which embraces knowledge, education and information.

Because of this, the marginal portion of society which chooses to adhere to fascist, racist and uninformed beliefs is becoming less and less tolerable. We are less than a month away from the beginning of a new political administration which will most likely be headed by America’s very first African American president. Certainly, part of this new horizon of renewed and informed race relations is attributed to modern writers such as Graves, but the sum of the current sociological climate is the result of indisputable knowledge and understanding.

What this means ultimately is that the search for scientific truth and data, the conclusion of the finding of that data and the reinforcement of such findings through modern literature can all be coupled in order to explain the condition of U.S race relations of today. Fortunately, the opening of Pandora’s box, the mapping of the human genome, is an irreversible discovery ensuring that as a race we will only move forward in the pursuit of knowledge and with that knowledge we will recognize the reality that there is really only one race, and that is the human race.

Works CitedGraves, Joseph L., “The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological theories of Race at the Millennium.” New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 2005.