My year has gotten off to a busy start and I haven’t had nearly enough time to write here or to read other’s journals. I’m beginning a new job as of January 22; I’ll be working as a legislative analyst, which means that I will perform legal analysis of bills, amendments, committee substitutes, and conference reports during this session of the North Carolina General Assembly. At the end of every day, I’ll write a summary of the bills and any changes for publication in the Daily Bulletin, a publication put out by the School of Government at UNC-Chapel Hill. I’ve worked in the legislative arena as a lobbyist on public education issues that directly impact students and their parents for the past five years, but this will be a new experience for me. I’m excited but a little stressed already! I decided to de-stress by checking out my alerts today.
I just read an interesting entry in TKS’ journal, Ramblings from the Edge. He writes of the vagaries of identifying people by race and the inconsistencies that arise from doing so. As always, it is a thoughtful and thought provoking post. TKS references a 2004 article written by Gregory Kane, a black writer who was a bit perplexed that Teresa Heinz-Kerry identified herself as African-American in promotional material for her husband’s presidential campaign. Heinz-Kerry was born and raised in the African nation of Mozambique and she now lives in the United States. In that sense she is African-American. However, I think Mr. Kane intentionally befuddles the real question with rhetorical nonsense. The real question is how do you define race? Does living in or being born in a particular country determine your race? That's not the typical application of race.
An individual of African ancestry doesn't become European because she is born in Europe; nor does an individual of European ancestry become African because she is born in Africa. Based on the societal norms that have been used to define race, it is not transmutable dependent on geography. Neither is race based on a shared language. Africa is a continent, not a country and many languages are spoken there. For example, the majority of inhabitants of Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Ethiopia are all Africans although there are multiple tribal languages spoken in those countries as well as European languages. I would not agree that Heinz-Kerry is African-American by any common usage of the term.
Identifying people based on a concept of race is a relatively new idea. Race was introduced in 1735 by a taxonomist, Carolus Linnaeus, in System of Nature. He identified four races: Americanus (American), Europaeus (European), Afer (African), and Asiaticus (Asian). Linnaeus also introduced the belief that inferiority/ superiority was defined by race. In 1776, naturalist Johann Blumenbach, building on the work of Linnaeus, published On the Natural Varieties of Mankind. Blumenbach expanded racial classification: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malaysian. Blumenbach identified as Caucasian the people who originated on the southern slopes of Mount Caucasus in the Georgian area of Russian. He concluded that based on their skulls and facial structure they were the most beautiful and therefore the most ideal race. In 1962, Carleton Coon’s Origins of the Races was released in which he tied behavior characteristics to the concept of race. Caucasoids (whites) were hard working and intelligent, Mongoloids (Asians), Negroids (Africans), and Australoids (Aborigines) were lazy and unintelligent.
The scientific notion of race was embraced in the late 18th century because it served as a justified basis for perpetrating systemic inequality. In other words, it was the natural state of some races to be inferior and the superior race was doing the inferior races a favor by looking after their interests, as they were incapable of looking after their own interests. It wrapped the justification of maintaining slavery, the owning of another human being, in a quasi-scientific blanket of respectability that was not inconsistent with Christian values. It gave legitimacy to continuing racial segregation after emancipation, and for the creation of laws to guarantee that people of African descent would not be treated as full citizens, entitled to all of the rights guaranteed in the US constitution. It is important to understand that racism in America was not merely social custom; it was supported by law. By the early 20th century, the United States government began a policy of identifying any person with even the so-called “one-drop" of black blood as African. The result is that individuals don’t have to look black to be black; having a single African ancestor is sufficient for classification as African-American. The same holds true for other minority groups that the US government had an interested in segregating and keeping in their place. So unless Heinz-Kerry can trace her ancestry back to some black ancestor, she doesn’t get to be African in any racial sense. She is an African in the same sense that I’m an American. It’s a matter of geography. She’s a person of European ancestry born in Africa.
In spite of there being no genetic basis for race and the current general consensus in the scientific community that race is an artificial, social construct, the United States has by custom, practice, and law made every attempt to elevate it to a science and the impact of race on societal norms, social interactions, and economic development is very real. I don't disagree with TKS’ fundamental principle about the sort of nonsensical results that arise from attempting to identify people by race. I just find it ironic that it was white America that attempted to define race in the first place and the confusion about who's who is a result of that need to identify people by race. Ethnic minorities did not initiate identifying themselves as being members of a minority racial group if great-great-great grandpa had a distant relative who was a member of that minority group. White America initiated the system of classification by race and insisted that any "contamination" of the bloodline made the individual non-white.
There is a website that I have previously recommended that I think you may find of interest if you want to really understand why an artificial construct has such hypnotic control over so many of our interactions with one another. It's a PBS site based on programming that was on TV in 2003. The title of the site is Race-The Power of an Illusion. There are a lot of interactive activities of the site. It's an excellent site for children as well as adults.
5 comments:
Wow! You took my rather trivial little ramble about Brazilians being excluded from the classification of Hispanics and turned it into something quite impressive.
I would like to share with you a further mystery. The term Hispanic is not truly a racial classification but is defined as relating to Spain or a Spanish speaking person. Which given this particular list was inquiring about race, it's curious why they would call Hispanics a race. It is however understandable, as the definition relates to language, why Brazil would not be included.
It also further supports my curiosity and question "Why does Belize get a pass?" given as I stated in my own journal entry, the official state language of Belize is English, not Spanish.
I’ve rambled enough. I would like to thank you for a wonderful post and an incredible response to my own little inconsequential scribbling.
Warmest Regards,
TK the Rambling Raconteur
http://journals.aol.com/tks333/ramblings
I detect a little bit of bias creeping in there. You state that "it was white America that attempted to define race in the first place," and, "white America initiated the system of classification by race." Yet, earlier in your piece, you tell us that the idea of identifying people by race was introduced by Carolus Linnaeus, a Swede, and further elaborated on by Johann Blumenbach, a German. While I certainly agree with you that these two were representatives of the "white race," they were not American, and Americans who took the idea of race and formalised it into convention, and even law, were only working with prejudices they brought with them from their original homelands.
The United States is not the only place in the world where racial discrimination takes place, nor does the "African American" hold the exclusive right to complain about racial prejudice. In fact, racial prejudice has been with us a lot longer than a mere three hundred years. Just read your bible. Racial prejudice was created by God.
Well, that's not true, is it? Racial prejudice was created by the people who created God. In fact, the entire reason the Abrahamic (read Judeo-Christian) God was created in the first place was in an effort to create a distinction between - as I commented on TKS' blog - *US* and *THEM*. God was created by the ancient Jews to use as a reason to go to war against their neighbours.
We're bad, we people.
-Paul
WOW what an interesting post, we here in England are only now getting around to dissecting the races and what it means in the supposed multicultural/racial society that we live in.
There was an interesting progrmme on just recently about people who though themselves as exclusivly English and why they thought that they were preserving the "RACE", It was interesting to hear their view point, for instance I am black born in this country so therefore English even though my parents are from the West Indies however to many I am not English because I cannot trace my ancestry back more than 4 generations, although within my family I am first generation "English" as I am the first one born in England , so does that mean if I had children and my childrens children and so on would become English?
To get back to this tv programme they tested there DNA and 4 out 5 were discovered to be mainly Eastern European the very people they thought were robbing them of their "Culture" and therefore their way of life, their eactions were mixed and with some made them re-evaluate how saw the cultural mix around them although I doubt less tolerant as racism is learned behaviour in most cases and not really a point of view.
Good luck with the new job sounds interesting and I willl check out those websites you listed, also thanks for the words of encouragement in my efforts to stop smoking.
Yasmin (cayasm)
The 'them and us' that Paul Little refers to in his comment permeates ancient history Sheria. It is interesting how the process of creating identity continues today, albeit in very different social contexts. Creating identity is where notions of race come from. As human beings we feel the need to identify ourselves with particular groups, so that we belong. Religion, politics, gender, cultural activities, slave, free, citizen, non-citizen, barbarian, and appearances (including skin colour) are all aspects of identity that human beings have used and still use to define themselves and others. You piece is very interesting, although I would argue that the writers on race in the 18th century were merely repeating ideas with which they had been conditioned with as part of western cultural mores and applying them to the emerging scientific outlook, in a very flawed way. Your piece is part of the continuing debate about how we define ourselves and others and how others try to define us. Fascinating!
Very good luck with the new job! It sounds complicated, but I am sure you are more than capable of it!
Kate.
http://journals.aol.co.uk/bobandkate/AnAnalysisofLife/
I would like to add a comment to this fascinating mix of attitudes toward the race question. To Plittle's comment that the ancient Jews created a God to justify going to war with other people. I would say that the Jews created a God for many reasons, one to try to instruct the Jews on how to conduct their lives so they didn't get into idol worship and the like (the ten commandments) Even though all recognize that the Old Testament is a far more bloody history than the New. We see attitudes about war there that still exist. With the new Testament I always thought we were introduced to the idea that you did not always have to go to war to solve problems. You could resist committing violence with great effectiveness. A more difficult concept to be sure to carry out. To me the Iraqui War was a return to the idea of war as the only way to solve the Saddam Hussein problem. Showing we still don't understand other solutions as well. especially after we have been the victm of a savage attack from the sky in our own country. We obviously lost our civilized veneer and hot headed leaders convinced everybody that needed to support it to go to war. It seems with race problems, people are always losing a civilized veneer and responding like savages as the entry on the messages on AOL testify. Gerry
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