The Conceptualization of Race 

“ Race: The Power of an Illusion, Episode1,”is a film represents a scientific evident that within any racial group there are so many genetic differences. Students in the film who looked similar to their pairs thought that they would be generically more similar than those who looked different than them. Though, after the use of DNA generic test, students were surprised to found that they had more generic similarity to those who looked different than them. The film shows how our understanding of race is socially constructed. Race is socially conceptualized to classify people based on their physical appearance. While modern science shows that people have diverse genetic makeup, even among those who share “similar” skin color, the “folk concept” of race enhanced the idea that one’s visual appearance can explain the outcomes or behaviors of the collectivist group that the person belongs to.

 Michael Banton (1989) explains in his book, Racial Theories, that race is no longer a “phenotype” which 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 (Banton, 1989). The use of such a word is not based on the academy of science. In fact, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2008) would say that there is a racial formation that conceptualized the word race, which continues to emerge through scientific racism, and media (Omi& Winant, 2008).

The racial formation of race as a social concept was first created by some racist scientific Europeans, who argued that people are genetically different from one another and used this explanation to classify those who share the same ethnicity at one level of the racial hierarchy. In 1851, Samuel Cartwright, who was a physician, explains that“Drapetomania,”which is a disease related to mental issue, caused slaves to run away from their owners (Newitz, 2016). Cartwright’s works boosted the negative stereotype that portrays African Americans as dangerous.

Moreover, media continues to misrepresent African American as violent. 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 makeup.” 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 silly as using fingerprints to group people.

A picture for Samuel Cartwright by Equal Justice Initiative; 

A History of Racial Injustice

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

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. 

Newitz, Annalee. (2016).  “The 9 Most Influential Works of Scientific Racism, Ranked”    

Gizmodo Media Group.

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

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