This website focuses on pain. Pain is the topic here. I started it to document my back pain resulting from a combination of very serious problems including broken vertebrae, cracked discs, etc. And, I discussed my rehab from spinal fusion surgery.
My back is feeling solidly okay these days, and I want to discuss another type of pain: the psychological pain of racism. This is also something that I’ve experienced.
And, let’s face it…on the most basic, colloquial level we can say that racism is stupid. Hating somebody based upon their skin color is just…stupid.
Evolution of skin color
So, from a long-term historical perspective, skin color is related to natural selection. That means that different skin colors have different advantages in varying climates. And, the primary advantage—from an evolutionary perspective—is reproductive success. This gets a little complicated to explain, so let’s just leave it at that for a moment and return in a bit.
What creates different skin colors?
So, the quickest explanation would be to provide this formula for skin tone:
TYR gene–>tyrosinase enzyme–>tyrosine amino acid—>dopaquinone—>melanocytes cells—>melanin pigment.
That seems like a weird formula to explain how we’ve come to perceive people as Black, white, Hispanic, et. al.
But, that’s how it works on a biological level. We’ve constructed race to mean all sorts of things. It exists in the imagination to be bundled with all types of qualities and value judgments. But, what we think of as “race” results from this sequence on a biological level.
Here’s the longer explanation from Medline Plus: