Daily Log

Tuesday, October 14

Students took a quiz for fun: the "Race Literacy Quiz" developed by California Newsreel in association with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Using scientific and historical research, the quiz overturns many common assumptions about race and shows that the category as we know it in the United States is a relatively recent concept (with no basis in genetics) developed at the time of the country's founding to justify slavery and explain away the transparent contradiction between slavery and the idea that "all men are created equal." Thomas Jefferson (who explicitly unmasked that very contradiction in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence) is cited as the first prominent American to suggest that European-Americans were "racially" superior to their slaves.