Facts on Racial Discrimination

There are a number of things about racial discrimination to see. These can change the way how people treat others and should encourage people to feel more comfortable around those who are different. It is estimated that there is five times as much genetic variation within different races than what is between them. This comes from how the melanin in one’s skin can change in a number of ways. This is a pigment that is used in one’s skin to influence one’s color. It come in red and dark brown, or pheomelanin and eumelanin, forms. Each pigment is determined by different genes that can be inherited from one’s parents. Each gene comes from many alleles that involve changes in skin tone. Also, the melanin can be used to control how much ultraviolet radiation from the sun can impact the skin. Also, the term pygmy is often used to define black people who are in groups where the average height of an adult male is less than five feet. This is something that was especially the case of Ota Benga, a pygmy who was taken in 1904 from the Belgian Congo and displayed as a so-called “savage” at the St. Louis World’s Fair. He was even put into the Bronx Zoo. However, a number of protests and legal threats forced the zoo to free him. An important concern about racial discrimination comes from how linguistic diversity is so commonplace in Africa. When technology was developed Europeans worked with many ideas from all over the world including rudders from China and numbers and trigonometry from India and Egypt. However, in Africa the continent had about ten percent of the world’s population and a third of all of its languages. This diversity has impacted the ability of all people to understand one another. In 1774 an antislavery society was created in America by Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin. John Jay formed a similar group in New York. However, discrimination is still being used in some places. For example, in Sudan all people are expected to practice Islam despite how most people in the southern part of the country are black Christians and animists. The government has forced them into “peace camps” to get them to convert and has forced people who refuse to starve to death. More than a million people have died because of this since 2000.