Baghdad Morshed
Sept 16, 2016. 

The Conceptualization of Race

Throughout history race is conceptualized to categorize people based on their physical appearance. Michael Banton (1989) explains in his book, Racial Theories, that race is no longer a “phenotype” which a means physical characteristic. When we use the word race we are more likely to think about the folk concept of the word. According to Banton, the folk definition of race is the social formation that is created based on everyday experience. The definition of such a word is no longer based on its real meanings; in fact the concept is based on what the old scientific theories, media, and history had created. While many scientific evidences proved that people have diverse genetic makeup even among those who share the same skin color. The racial formation of race as folk concept enhanced the idea that one’s visual appearance can explain the outcomes or the behaviors of the collectivist group that the person belongs to (Omi 2008).

First, the folk concept of race was first created by some racist scientific Europeans, who argued that people are genetically different from one another and used this explanation to group those who share the same ethnicity to place them at one level of the racial hierarchy. For example, the German Nazi categorized Jews as biologically inferior to those who have pure German descent (Banton 1989). What the German scientists ignored that sharing same religion does not mean sharing the same genes. 

Second, folk concept also continues to form through media representation. Media creates a social construct that misrepresented African American throughout history. Black people are portrayed as violent and dangerous. One of the consequences of this racial formation is the murder of a black man in Minneapolis during traffic stop by a policeman who claimed to feel threatened by the Black man. This incident demonstrated how media is disproportionately impacting Black people. According to the Yvonne Jewkes, a professor of Social Science, (2014) “there is little evidence that the United States has moved away from the centuries-old stereotype of Black males as “violent savages.” (Jewkes 2014, 5).

Race continues to reform around scientific theories that creates stereotypes. Racist ideologies used science to support certain claims to categorize individual based on what they call “genetic make.”Although it may seem that individuals with similar skin color share the same genes, the skin color genes have many versions. The diversity of the skin color gene results in diversely in skin color; there are people with different degrees of lightness and darkness. For instance, I am a Middle Eastern, and I am considered to be “White,” my skin color is not white, and I do not feel that this is the right category for me. This makes skin color not a reliable characteristic to group people. Therefore, using skin color to classify people is a silly as saying lets using fingerprints to group people.

An image of German anthropology that is measuring a woman’s
features to know whether her racial ancestry is Jewish or pure German.
By: The United States Holocaust Memorial 

A picture that was taken by Castile's girlfriend on her camera
phone after the police shot her boyfriend.
By: The Daily Mirror newspaper 

Works Cited

Allen, N., Rouge, B. (2016, July 7). Fatal Shooting Of Black Man Philando Castile By Police

During Traffic Stop In Minneapolis Caught on Video By Girlfriend. The Telegraph News. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/07/fatal-shooting-of-black-man-by-police-during-traffic-stop-in-min/

Banton, M. P. (1998). Racial Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-12.

Jewkes, Y. (2014). Punishment in Black and White: Penal “Hell-Holes,” Popular Media, and

Mass Incarceration. Atlantic Journal Of Communication, 22(1), 42-60. 

Omi, M.,Winant, H. (2008). Racial Formation, Understanding Race and Racism in the Post Civil

Rights Era. The Social Issues Collection. 1-99.