I recently read a story about a High School student in an accelerated program who tried to justify the relative absence of minorities via a science project.
Science Project
As misguided as this type of study is, I'm not ready to vilify a young person who seems, well misguided.
One interesting aspect of science today is that we can actually track people's DNA and ancestry. I recently did this and while the results indicated a lot of what I already know about my ancestry, there were a few areas that I didn't expect.
We tend to forget that the human race has experienced any number of migrations and invasions which we know about as well as who knows how many that predate recorded history.
Its pretty clear that the world was populated as Homo Sapiens spread out of Africa to eventual replace or intermingle with prior Neanderthals who had preceded them. We also see an expansion out of central Asia that led to the populating of the American continents.
By every definition in science, including the one concerning having viable offspring we are a single race sharing a range of characteristics no matter our external appearance.
The idea that we have subsets with significantly different basic abilities is clearly not supported by any science. Of course, we have cultural differences and if a person from a Western culture was forced to live in a "more primitive" society, they may very well come across as an idiot because of what they don't know.
On a lesser scale it's also clear that much closer to home we can be uninformed about certain slang and behavior in different niches of our culture.
A recent episode of the TV show Blackish covered how everyone in the Black community is familiar with "The Talk". Of course they need to explain the unique situation of being black in America to their young, its a matter of life and death, unfortunately.
Instead of studying differences it would be better to make "The Talk" unnecessary in the future.
Maybe someday.
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