What is race? By standard definition it is a system used to classify people into groups. If you’re asking me, race can be a pinnacle point in defining who we become as individuals. How is it that a man’s classification by the public defines who he can become? This arises from a long history of social segregation that shows the “truths we hold to be self evident”, weren’t always so obvious, or should I say black and white. In less than 300 years our great nation has come quite a long way, enduring a civil war, a great depression, two world wars, racial segregation of blacks and whites, and a slew of other great conflicts. In those years, white Americans came to the realization that black men and women were no longer to be viewed as property, but as people. It is safe to say that race has developed into a social phenomenon unlike any other. Race in our society has come to be known as something rooted in biology, however many studies seem to contradict this. During the age of enlightenment the Europeans began using the word race as a biological concept to note their scientific ideas about racial variation in human beings. A common misconception when referring to race and biology is that skin color is directly related to a person’s biological race, however, skin color has nothing to do with genetics, instead it is more directly related to clinal variation. In humans, skin color varies naturally with the amount of sun that shines in a specific region of the world. A more intense level of UV radiation from the sun can be incredibly harmful to human beings, so naturally the human body will produce more melanin, creating a brown pigment in the skin. In other words, difference in skin color is created through natural selection and has no genetic significance in terms of classifying individuals into different groups. Skin color is easy too see, but doesn’t quite determine a person’s genetic race. Early studies of human diversity show that most genetic diversity was found between individuals rather than betwee