Where Have We Gone Wrong, America?*

I cannot escape racism. It paints my world in stark, thick, contrasting strokes of black and white. So it goes that I devote much thought to the matter of that social construct so casually referred to as race. (In a very similar manner, I might add, that I cannot help but to constantly consider gender as it shapes my world. But that’s another blog entirely.) And so I shall write yet another blog about race...

As a preliminary matter we must clarify a few important concepts:

Race is a social construct that causes of groups people who posses distinguishable physical traits to be held in low esteem by the dominant group. It is an ascribed status.

An ascribed status is a social status that an individual occupies irrespective of his or her actions, whereas an achieved status is a social status that is attained through one’s choices or accomplishments.

Hypodescent is when societies ascribe minority status to children born of unions between members of dominant and minority groups.

Minority groups are so defined because of their lack of access to power and privilege, not because of their numbers.

And with those clarifications hopefully clear, we shall proceed.

When considering the existence of racism I’m first struck by the observation that skin color seems a perfectly well suited mechanism by which to ‘otherize’ those that are not of your group. While that seems perfectly reasonable and benign, somehow it happened that the construction of modern racism has had disastrous consequences throughout my nation’s history.

From it’s inception America has been an experiment in the amalgamation of multiple cultures and ethnic groups. First, the brown indigenous Americans were colonized by the white Europeans. Then the brown indigenous Africans were colonized by the Europeans, and many of them were shipped over to the Americas as unpaid labor. The colonization of the indigenous Americans turned to genocide within 250 years (Indian Removal Act of 1830), all the while with the Africans remaining enslaved until 1863, with discrimination continuing into the present day.

Here in the year 2008 this sordid history has some profound and interesting results. Despite the philosophical, ideological and technological advancements America has made, she continues to be afflicted with the social ill of racism.

Somehow, skin color continues be a defining criteria of one’s life experience. I, for one, am horrified by this reality, and I’m at a loss as to what to do to fix it. All I can do, and what I am doing, is to educate myself and try to educate others, because ignorance breeds intolerance.

One of the most important things folks need to learn is that race is socially constructed, as mentioned above. In other words, there is no such thing as biological race. There’s only one race of hominid that we consider human, and there’s only a single such race in existence at this time. Skin color variation in hominins does not correspond to breed variation in canines. To speak of racial difference is a misnomer to describe human diversity in socially charged terms.

That being the case, that we’re all just humans with epidermis of varying shades, it's unfathomable to me that we continue to treat race as a concrete thing, as if skin tone should really make a difference in our day to day lives.

What do you think?

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*To give credit where credit is due, I'm hereby crediting Tori Amos with this turn of phrase.
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In the interest of full disclosure I’m compelled to offer a few details about myself so as to lay bare my biases and, hopefully - although not likely, circumvent anyone from making any baseless assumptions about my motivations.

I’m a white female. I was born in Alabama, a state that epitomizes the Deep South, and I’ve lived in Mississippi, another a state that epitomizes the Deep South, for more than ten years. It happened that I also spent over a decade of my formative years in South Florida. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my family has been crippled by poverty I would still call us poor. I didn’t graduate from high school because I stayed home for too long taking care of my baby half-brother when that was our circumstance dictated. Not one to let Fate commandeer my life course so easily I obtained a GED and scored high enough on the ACT to score an academic scholarship at a community college. I ended up working as a legal secretary midway through my community college tenure and I’ve been doing that ever since to make ends meet. In the meanwhile I got married (to a white male) and enrolled as a transfer student at an HBCU, again on an academic scholarship, and in May I’ll obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree in History.

Although I’m getting my degree in history I’m a sociologist in truth. Of the opinion that humanities studies ought not be so rigidly compartmentalized, I’m seeking a longer, more ethnological perspective of the ways societies have functioned (or ceased to function) throughout the historical record.