What I Think About: Race

The concept of race has to be one of the most problematic social constructs that we have in this country.

There's a very good reason for the fact that when applications ask you to describe yourself, they ask about your race and/or your ethnicity. There's an obvious reason for this. If you were only asked to describe your race, you would have to find a way to accurately categorize your skin color. For those of us higher up on the "whiteness to darkness" scale, the word 'white' will be accurate enough. On the other end of the spectrum, black will do. But what about everybody else in the middle? Are you tan, light brown, beige, chestnut, or smokey topaz? Even if you were able to successfully label the color of your skin, it wouldn't tell us much about who you actually are. A person with a light brown skin tone may be Hispanic, African-American, Native American, Indonesian, Indian, or any other ethnicity that brown people belong to. Even if you're white - are you purely American? Or are you Jewish, Swedish, German, or Irish? You're likely a little bit of all of these. Still, we continue to use this construct even though it has proved to be faulty.

Over the years, Americans have tried their best to make this system work, often resulting in some problematic solutions. At some point, we decided that 'we' (white Americans) would try to give every ethnic group a color code. This obviously didn't work very well - Native Americans are not 'red' and Asians are not 'yellow'. In fact, African-Americans are not really black, but I guess brown wasn't "descriptive" enough. Nevertheless, we persisted. At some point, people gave up trying to figure out names for every ethnic group. That brings us to the way we operate today, where the only racial groups we really recognize are whites and blacks (and ever so often, brown people). Of course, the thought process behind this wasn't as benign as I'm making it out to be, but I think we all understand that behind all of this is deep-seated racism and ignorance.

I woke up this morning thinking about how strangely we discuss race in America, probably because it's a topic that my class is discussing in an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course. I was thinking about the nature of these conversations, and how it often seems to come down to a discussion about whites vs. blacks. Every time race is brought up in the classroom, I always wonder why it takes this turn. I'm often thinking, "What about everyone else in the middle? Why is race treated like a dichotomy?" I realize that I cannot fairly put the blame on others, because the construct of race is faulty, and attempting to discuss it will always be problematic. I also realize my own imperfections in that when the topic of race is brought up, I immediately jump to the conclusion that the conversation will be dominated by a discussion of African-Americans. Furthermore, I understand that when we decide to diverge away from the dichotomy of white vs. black, we're no longer talking about race - we're talking about ethnicity. If we want to have a more inclusive discussion, we have to make ethnicity the topic of discussion rather than race. It's easy to talk about white people and black people, but it's difficult to discuss tan, chestnut, brown and beige people, because at that point we don't really know who we're talking about. When we want to talk about these people, we start to use ethnic descriptors, such as Hispanic, Chicano, Native, Arabic, Asian, Cuban, and Indigenous. When we switch from race to ethnicity, it often leads to a much more productive conversation, because we have now allowed ourselves to use a much wider vocabulary. I think people tend to realize this, and generally we have grouped race and ethnicity together so that we don't have to be restricted to talking about skin color. So when someone says, "Let's talk about race", we often talk about ethnicity as well.

Regardless, we continue to attempt to discuss issues in the context of race, not ethnicity, as if that will lead to some profound revelation that we haven't discovered before, knowing that when we talk about race, it will come down to a very constricted conversation. I'm not sure why we do this; it may have to do with the constant reinforcement of a racial dichotomy that the media (social and commercial) provides. I think all of us can agree to some extent that society seems to be painted by the media as whites vs. everybody else (brown people), if not whites vs. blacks. All of us are exposed to some form of media, which is extremely influential. Perhaps if this construct was abandoned in popular media, and we were able to look past skin color in initial evaluations, it wouldn't be such a problem in our everyday lives.

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Before starting this post, I tried to find a solid definition of race that I could use to discuss and breakdown its meaning. I was surprised to find that there is no official definition of the word 'race' that pertains to the physical descriptor we use. There is a definition for 'racial', however, which is "of, relating to, or based on a race", according to Merriam-Webster. I found it funny that they felt the need to provide some sort of definition even though they had to define 'racial' by using an undefined word. It shows how irrational our use of this construct is, but also how ingrained it is into our society. It's because race is so entrenched in our culture that I believe will still need to discuss it, even with its many issues, misconceptions and various definitions. We don't need to have a destructive discussion on 'the battle of the races', or limit ourselves to talking about whites vs. blacks, or whites vs. the colored world. But a discussion about why we discuss race this way can be productive. Why do we emphasize a characteristic that is so basic, but so significant? How did we come to categorize people this way? What does the word 'race' mean to different people? Should we continue to use it?
I see these discussions popping up frequently today, and they always feature a multitude of opinions and attitudes, and rarely ever end up in a single conclusion. But I do believe that these discussions can be productive, because they're challenging this problematic construct rather than operating beneath it.

Ultimately, I'm promoting the use of ethnicity over race, even though ethnicity is another poorly-defined social construct with its own set of difficulties and problematic elements. We'll have to spend time breaking down the meaning and use of ethnicity in the same way, but I won't do it here. I also won't evaluate nationality, heritage, gender, sexual orientation or culture, which are all shifting entities that make up our messy and unique individual and group identities. All that I'm saying here is that race doesn't mean nearly as much as we are trained to think it does, and we need to search for other descriptors that get to the core of who we really are.