Thinking about Race and Radiolab

    I have been thinking a lot about the episode that Radiolab did about race. Some of the ideas that they put forward have just stuck in my head and other things made so little sense that I’ve been turning them over in my mind since I heard them. I still find it hard to believe that people at some point didn’t think race had anything to do with biology. How did they think our skin knew to be whatever color it was? Did they think we looked at our parents when we were born and changed colors like an octopus? Mostly I’ve been thinking about what race has to do with your identity. How much of who you are is decided by what color you are and how much is decided by other people’s reaction to that. Do we act a certain way because we are one color or do we act that way because we KNOW that we are that color?
    Growing up in Hawaii, I feel like I have a different perspective on race from a lot of people who were interviewed on the show. My high school was predominately made up of local kids, local being kids who grew up in Hawaii and were generally Filipino, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Tongan, Samoan, Hawaiian. It didn’t much matter what race you were as long as you weren’t a white kid from out of state, like I was. Mostly what mattered was the culture. If you acted like a local kid, you were a local kid and you didn’t get harassed. But if you didn’t they called you “haole” which literally means stranger in Hawaiian but was generally a derogatory term for white people that was usually used in conjunction with “stupid.” For the most part, the only times I was ever called a haole was when I was being an idiot, so I always associated it more with actions than with my color. As a result, it’s weird for me to think of things as being a result of race. I just automatically think of race as being an extra thing, a descriptor rather than something that determines anything.
    One thing that I’ve been thinking of is the story of the man who found out that he wasn’t black. I don’t understand why he was so mad to find out that he wasn’t black. If he had known his entire life that he wasn’t, would that have changed anything? He says himself that where he was growing up, you were either black or you were white. Not being black still did not make him white so he would have recieved the same treatment growing up and still been seen as black. The only difference would be that he would be fighting against being labelled as black the whole time. I feel like his incorrect belief that he was a black man maybe saved him from a lifetime of struggling with his identity. Having an incorrect image of himself may have been a better than an accurate one. I can understand though how this discovery could shake his foundations. When you think you know who you are and learn that something he knew his whole life, something so obvious as the color of your skin isn’t true. Now his wife’s reaction was even more bizarre. She said “what do you mean? You’re a black man? I defied my mother to marry you. You’ve got to be black!” Weird.
    My favorite story was Malcolm Gladwell’s tale of his running and that personal choice to be fast. That moment when an athlete turns to themself and asks “how much do I care?” He saw that as the true difference between a great athlete and a hobbyist. I really liked that idea that maybe race came into play to a certain extent but that it didn’t define the whole story, that it was that individual choice to keep running, to keep moving, to push through that pain and come out the other side.
    This episode of radio lab left me with the same feeling I had before, that maybe race has something to do in predetermining our lives but that for the most part, it’s our choices that define us. Our diet plays a larger role in determining our blood pressure than our skin color does. Our ability to push through mental blocks is more vital to becoming a good athlete than whether or not we were Jamaican or British.