Race: What is it?

We live in a society where race is an important factor of identification for ourselves as well as how we identify others. Everybody learns some combination, some version, of the rules of racial classification, and of their own racial identity, often without obvious teaching or conscious inculcation. Race becomes 'common sense' - a way of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world (Omi & Winant 1994).

But what does race mean? Many people can say that race has to do with genetics but that simply isn’t true. In the film “Race: The Power of an Illusion”, a group of students from different races conduct an experiment in which they examine their mitochondrial DNA. Their expectations were that their genes would be similar to the people of the same race as them, and most different from the people of a much different race. In the results, however, it was found that even those of the same race had fewer similarities than two people of different races. This experiment helped prove that race is not a biological structure, rather a societal one.

In the founding of America, the opposite theory was implemented in society. Omi and Winant argue that the concept of race developed gradually and was created to justify and explain inequality that is characteristic of European colonization. The expropriation of property, the denial of political rights, the introduction of slavery and other forms of coercive labor, well as outright extermination, all presupposed a worldview which distinguished European – children of God, human beings, etc. – from "others"

Scientists developed systems to classify human beings in order to justify racial inequalities (Golash-Boza, 2014). These systems were biased and favored the white race, justifying their dominance. Some of the systems that were used were craniometry, a study used to prove that Europeans had larger brains than other races. This theory was later disproven after unconscious bias was found in the study (Gould 1996).  These studies favoring the superiority of whites contributed to the inequalities of race in America through a variety of laws such as the 1924 Racial Integrity Act and the Jim Crow Laws of the 1960s. The idea that whites were “better” than others created systematic racism that still exists to this day.

The influx of immigrants from all over the world into America has created a greater complexity of how race is perceived in America. Where do Asians, Middle Eastern, Latinos fit in society? As a Hispanic, I have always had trouble identifying myself racially. Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, because we are a mixture of different races. For example, my ethnic group is called Mestizo, which are people mixed of white European and indigenous people. It can be difficult when asked for my race in documentation because I find that I don’t fit into the standard boxes of White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander. Because of the color of my skin, I can sometimes pass as white, therefore some of my experiences in America have been different than those of darker skin Latinos. However, I still find that I completely identify with Latinos because of the culture in which I was raised. I am very proud of being Colombian, and I am proud of being racially mixed. I would like to understand more of my background, though, since European colonization wiped out a lot of my ancestral roots.

Los cuadros del mestizaje del Virrey Amat 

Works Cited

1.                    Omi, Michael; Winant, Howard (1986), Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2^nd ed. New York. Routledge.

2.                    Golash-Boza, Tanya. 2014, Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach, 23-24. Oxford University Press.

3.                    Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man, 106. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Links

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kimberly-cooper/a-look-into-race-as-a-soc_b_6787574.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-mean-when-we-say-race-is-a-social-construct/275872/