Terribly sorry, everyone, that I'm running so late on the blog today. It has been a bear of a busy, busy, busy day.

Well, good news and bad news from a weekend of men's NCAA tournament basketball. Gonzaga, who I had predicted as a Final Four contender, was knocked out in the second round. However, contrary to my other bracket predictions, both Louisville and Washington made it to the Sweet Sixteen... where they play one another on Thursday at 7:10 pm (right during Maundy Thursday service, no less). If anyone has Husky paraphanalia they want to send me to hold my own against all these Cardinal fans, feel free to pass it on by Thursday :). Unfortunately, the only team I was really interested in in the women's tournament, Louisville, was knocked out in the first round yesterday. Bummer.

I spent lunch watching the first part of a documentary called Race: The Power of an Illusion. This particular piece of the documentary focused on race as a biological myth. Now, you might be asking, "How can race be a biological myth when there are certain physical characteristics that belong to certain groupings of people?" Well, from a genetic standpoint, those truly are nothing more than skin deep. Did you know that there is ten times more difference in genetic makeup between two fruit flies than between myself and a person from Kenya? And that 85% of all genetic variations are between people who come from the same locality (and are considered the same race)? You hear racial stereotypes all the time-- things about African-Americans being better athletes or Asians being better at math and science. What the video points out, though, is that from a biological standpoint traits such as athleticism, intelligence, and musical ability stem from a complex interaction between several genes (not just one) and various environmental factors. They're certainly not genetically common to any one group of people.

As for the visible physical characteristics that we mark as "racial," those have more to do with the geographic location of your ancestors than anything else. Skin tone deals largely with your ancestors' distance from the equator. Even sickle cell amenia, which is characterized as a disease afflicting those with African ancestry, actually has a higher rate of occurance in any population whose ancestors lived in malaria-infested regions-- including the Mediterranean and the Middle East, but not including the southernmost parts of Africa.

If this is true, and there really is no deeper biological basis for race, then what else is race but a very, very powerful social construct? Maybe Paul was more right than he even knew in saying that "we are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). Even he, too, points to the roots of race as a social concept-- he talks about the elimination of the dichotomy of "slave and free," a category which underlies later motivations to determine biological racial markers (i.e., if we're enslaving or mistreating other humans, we have to prove that they're inferior to us in order to justify it).

It was a fascinating film, one I would definitely recommend to anyone for some sort of open forum about issues of race and power. I'll let you know when I see the other parts of the documentary. Have a great rest of your Monday!

"For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit." --1 Corinthians 12:13

Kelsey