City College News

Have you ever wondered what you would look like as a member of another race?

Through the week of February 8-12, Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC) most recently played host to the Human Race Machine, located in the T-building skyway area.

The Human Race Machine is designed to show a person as another race. It works by capturing a facial image of the person and then morphing it to show them as any one of several different ethnicities: White, Hispanic, African, Asian, Indian, or Middle Eastern.

MCTC Dean Cheryl Saunders first encountered the multimedia device at her alma mater, the University of North Dakota, about five years ago. Last year, as part of her Black History Month proposal to the Student Life Budget Committee (SLBC), she made a reservation request to Wolfman Productions, the distributor of the Human Race Machine. When asked why specifically she chose to reserve it for Black History Month, she explained, "I think, during Black History Month, we have more of a tendency to focus on race and what it has done to this country and to its people. Because of racism we've cheated ourselves."

It is a known fact that any two people have a 99.7 percent similarity in their DNA. There is virtually no gene for race, and thus it is a purely social construction. This was the key concept kept in mind by artist Nancy Burson when she created the Human Race Machine in 2000. Since then, over 150,000 individuals around the world have used her unique invention, which in 2006 was featured on Oprah.

Also built into the Human Race Machine is a face aging simulation, a program used widely by the FBI and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to facilitate recovery of kidnap victims, the Couples Machine, allowing men and women to view an image of their prospective offspring, and a facial anomaly simulation.

A powerful diversity tool used throughout many institutions of higher learning, the Human Race Machine is a creative attempt at enhancing intercultural communication and understanding. It is well known that MCTC is the most ethnically diverse college in the state of Minnesota. Dean Saunders has expressed her hope for increased interactions within our multicultural school community. "We have more in common than we realize."

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