Teen author Stone Erickson says race means nothing

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Teen author Stone Erickson (Photo by Adam Higgins)

For thousands of years we as a society have struggled to find new ways of marginalizing people into the most arbitrary little boxes in order to justify our pretentious preconception that we are somehow better than our peers. We have used our religions, philosophies, and most notably our skin color as mere pretext in our self-entitled crusade against each other. This lack of altruism is in every way possible, disgusting.


First, it must be understood that race as a concept is a social construct. Social constructs are superfluous concepts that we create in order to rationalize the world around us. To be frank, modern scientists have even stated that that there is no commonality among genes in the human genotype that correlates to race, meaning that race isn’t biological as people once believed.


Researchers have even come up with new explanations for why different skin colors exist. Originally, scientists believed that variances in skin color were caused by the evolutionary precedent that more melanin was needed to regulate temperature and prevent skin cancer for populations near the equator and that less melanin was needed for populations near the poles. The problem with this hypothesis is that evolutionary precedents and imperatives only act to allow a species to pass along their genes and most skin cancers fester within a carrier for years before coming lethal — long enough to pass along their genes. Therefore, another theory is needed as the latter one has been disproved.

It turns out that scientists weren’t too far off. More melanin was needed near the equator, but only to help produce vitamin B and folate. UV rays from the sun break down vitamin B, and folate, which is essential for development and reproduction and therefore an evolutionary precedent, determined that dark skin near the equator was the most viable option. Conversely, near the poles where there is not such high concentrations of UV rays high levels of melanin hinder their host as UV rays do help produce vitamin D. As the poles do not have high concentrations of UV rays there is no danger of losing out on vitamin B and lighter skin near the poles helps facilitate vitamin D. This shows that there is no difference between races other than where we developed. We are still 100 percent the same in biology and marginalizing someone based on their skin color is simply a fallacy we’ve indulged in in order to elevate ourselves to higher status at the cost of others.


That’s right. If someone were to analyze the contents of your blood without having any access to a DNA database, they would not be able to determine your race. Still, this article will not stop some of you from judging others. Many of you will still assume Middle Easterners are terrorists and that Whites are serial killers or school shooters or that Blacks are just common criminals. Still. Perhaps this will help a minority of you feel as though there is only a human race and everything else is a social construction or worded less eloquently, a delusion. A lie.

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