Blog #9: Will someone please tell me what my race is!

I liked the site about Race the Power of an Illusion. I admit, that before reading it I thought there must be some genetic or biological basis for race. After all, I can identify who is black, asian, indian, or american indian. After completing the sorting people test and getting only a handful of people placed in the classification they put themselves in I did an experiment. I reloaded the sorting page and as fast as possible I moved people into categories without paying any attention to where I was putting them. I was going for random placement. When I viewed the results, I did about the same as when I tried to classify people based on their appearance.

It is insightful to realize that our appearances are just as likely to put us in one racial classification as another. However, this view of race still perpetuates one of the main problems about race: that you can be classified into specific racial groups. In this way the website has not gone past the idea of "menu-driven" races that Nakamura talks about (102).

However to the websites credit, when comparing skin traits the site demonstrates that lightness or darkness of skin color is evenly distributed between the people who classify themselves as different races. Since skin color is probably the most common trait used to identify race, this essentially destroys the concept that you can classify people into any single racial category and helps to go beyond the menu style of categorization.

The terms used in the discussion of race are so ingrained into society and the way we speak that elsewhere in the site they revert to this menu-driven idea of race. Under the race timeline looking at the year 1994 for example (other examples are available), they look at the different income levels of whites versus blacks. With the idea in mind that race has little to do with skin color, how can such a comparison be made? What they are really doing is comparing people who classify themselves as white or black. As constructionists, this makes it impossible to tell if the statistic is occurring because of race or if people are identifying themselves as that race because of the statistic. Don't people in a community tend to identify themselves as part of that community? If you live in a community that people classify as black, even if you are hispanic, would peer pressure cause you to classify yourself as black as well? Is peer pressure even required?

We now come to the title of the post. My sister married someone of hispanic decent, but he is just as white as I am. My brother married a women with dark skin, but she was raised in a "white" family and has no idea what nationality her birth parents are. As I look at the people around me I am beginning to wonder what race I am. I'm not entirely clear what nationality my ancestors are and since biology is not a factor it is entirely possible that I could be considered asian, african, or european.

I think the site is enlightening, but it often reverts to dropping people into racial buckets rather then allowing people to exists as part of many races. Many people, including Nakamura, contend that racial stereotypes (or cyber-types) can be eliminated. This is a utopian goal I believe we should strive for. Unfortunately, race is just one of the more recent ways in which humans are manifesting one aspect of our nature.

We are community creatures and we seek to participate in communities that will protect our interests. In order to unify the community we link our identities to the simplistic notions that bind the community together. We become "Recovering Alcoholics", "Jocks", "Black", "Intellectuals", "Republicans" or one of many others. As we take on these identities we begin to view others in terms of the communities they participate in; generally focusing on only one and ignoring the many others they are in. As we compete for scarce resources we pick out negative aspects of others communities as reasons why we should get the resources and they should not. History has born this pattern out using different criteria. Greeks used language, romans used their culture, Catholics used religion and in the future maybe we will use something similar to the digital divide. Weather you call it race, gender or some other trait, stereotypes are created as part of human nature. We must find a way to operate knowing these stereotypes exist rather then simply trying to eliminate them or we will usher in new discriminators as we push the old ones out.

Bibliography

California Newsreel. "RACE - The Power of an Illusion | PBS." Race - The Power of an Illusion. PBS. Web. 28 Oct. 2010.

Nakmura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.