http://www.sodahead.com/living/what-race-are-you/question-1919271/?link=ibaf&q=&esrc=s
Race is a classification system that has affected many people simply because of their skin color or country of decent. “Invisible Australians” states that early twentieth century Australia identified itself as a white man’s country and enacted discriminatory laws and policies against the non-European people that lived there. These people were basically denied their place as Australians.
“The Real Faces of White Australia” shows faces of men of non-European decent, people who lived in Australia but faced discrimination because of their skin color. A link is provided below and if you click on one of the portraits, you will find a record stating that that individual was forced to leave Australia for a certain number of years (most said three) and if they returned before that time finished, they would face consequences. Could you imagine being forced to leave the country you call home just because of the way you look or your decent? Even in recent years, people here face forms of discrimination based on race.
I intern at a psychiatrist’s office and one of the young ladies that works there is mixed Black and Guatemalan so as a child, she hated answering what gender she was when it came to school forms because of one time when she marked herself as Hispanic, resulting in the school placing her in a class for children who spoke English as a second language. She ended up having to take a test to prove that she could speak English fluently. Her school functioned with the notion that race defined whether she spoke English fluently or not.
People of mixed decent are not as uncommon as they were ten years ago making it seem like the notion of race is outdated, and for the most part, it is except for when it comes to a person’s health. Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Gene, Race, and Disease says that “The human population is not homogeneous in terms of risk of disease. Indeed, it is probably the case that every human being has a uniquely defined risk, based on his/her inherited (genetic) constitution…” In this sense, it is important to categorize people based on their decent because of health risks that may have been passed down by an allele. Categorization does have its negatives because of the social impacts that it can have on a group of individuals, but it does have its use and purpose for protecting them as well.
Work Cited
http://invisibleaustralians.org/
http://invisibleaustralians.org/faces/
http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/gb-2002-3-7-comment2007.pdfThat