Who am I? What are you? I'll be completely honest; this course was a bit tiring for me. Even though I appreciated the content and knew it was important and also why it was important, it always took me longer than I expected to have a solid grasp of the material. However, I have learned quite a bit about race and its study, and I will use Wiesen's "Herodotus and the Modern Debate on Race and Slavery," Lucius Outlaw's "Toward a Critical Theory of Race," and Letter from Emperor Claudius to the Alexandrians to demonstrate what I learned. Simply put, I learned that race can be viewed from a scientific and religious perspective, but mannerisms and appearance end up dominating how a person is racially classified. So what exactly is race? Outlaw describes it as, “…a vehicle for the notions employed in the organizations of these worlds in our encounters with people who are significantly different from us especially in terms of physical characteristics (skin color and other anatomical features), but also, often combined with these, when they are different with respect to language, behavior, ideas and other "cultural" issues. (Outlaw, 384) Outlaw is saying that race is a vehicle, and by that I mean a subject that we use to perform or justify certain actions, for how we interpret and organize people with significant differences from each other. However, the most important of these classifications is that of appearance. It is so important, in fact, that it tends to override arguments made on behalf of others. For example, when Wiesen examines the Histories of Herodotus, he observes: "But for modern readers, the physical evidence of Herdotus' national parentage, the blackness of the Colchians, was so striking as to throw h... into the middle of the paper.. ....ll and will be forced to question their identity. The play shows that no amount of ignorance or arrogance can save a person from this centuries and centuries because they can be interpreted in different ways. In each version, the show centers on the same kernel of truth about identity and belonging and forces the audience to question their own privilege – and perhaps their own ignorance – about. how war and culture can affect one's identity, the entire audience is left to ponder the same question that has baffled humans for as long as they have existed: who am I?4 pt)Compare how race was presented in classical-era literature with today's literature. What is the cause of these differences/similarities? What does this say about society in general??