Challenge Issue The people of the United States of America took a significant
step toward redressing a history of slavery and racism with the election of Barack Hussein
Obama as their forty-fourth president in 2008. This moment of extraordinary social and
political significance challenges us to look at race and racism both in the past and in the
present. It challenges us to recognize our common origins and to avoid oversimplifica-
tion, discrimination, bigotry, and even bloodshed fueled by superficial differences. It
requires us to recognize that racism feeds on folk beliefs that so-called racial groups are
natural and separate divisions within our species based on visible physical differences.
Biological evidence demonstrates that separate races do not exist. Broadly defined,
geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another in only 7 percent of their genes.
Having exchanged genes throughout evolutionary history, human populations continue to
do so today. Instead of leading to the development of distinctive subspecies (biologically
defined races), this genetic exchange has maintained all of humankind as a single spe-
cies. Although race functions as a social and political category that promotes inequality
in some societies, it is a cultural construct without an objective scientific basis.
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