Take Your Marks, Race!

HW:  please read Racial Formation, an excerpt from the book by Omi and Winant.  Be ready to answer questions about it and discuss it.

Before beginning please answer based on what you know already.

1.  What is race?  Define it.  What determines what race a person is?

2. How many races are there? Name them (or as many as you can).

3.  Have you ever thought about what it means to be white?  Does discussing race make you uncomfortable?

Warning:  Sociology sometimes "makes the familiar strange."  It sheds light on areas of our life that we never questioned before.  This can be an eye-opening experience that is sometimes difficult to accept.  Remember that we are like fish in water never having to question or notice the water.  This lesson may do that to you.  Trust me and trust the process, but don't be afraid to ask questions.  I know that the topic of race can be triggering, but I am willing to help you understand and I want our classroom to be a safe space for understanding.

What is Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility?
 Robin DiAngelo has been teaching about race and racism for over 20 years and in that time, she has realized that whites have difficulty in discussing race and racism.  She examines the difficulty that whites have in discussing race and racism in her book called White Fragility.  Her website explains her work;

White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress. Although white racial insulation is somewhat mediated by social class (with poor and working class urban whites being generally less racially insulated than suburban or rural whites), the larger social environment insulates and protects whites as a group through institutions, cultural representations, media, school textbooks, movies, advertising, and dominant discourses. Racial stress results from an interruption to what is racially familiar. In turn, whites are often at a loss for how to respond in constructive ways., as we have not had to build the cognitive or affective skills or develop the stamina that that would allow for constructive engagement across racial divides. leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium. This book explicates the dynamics of White Fragility and how we might build our capacity in the on-going work towards racial justice.

NY Times examines Di Angelo's work.

The anatomy and biology of race

Now, let's consult the biology and anatomy textbooks and find out the answers to the above questions.

This is the beginning of our unit on race.  Before we begin, it is important to define what we mean by "race" as well as some of the other terms that get confused with "race".  In the United States, we are so familiar with the idea of "race" that we use it all the time but never really stop to examine what it is.  If you were asked to identify the race of students in our room, I bet you would be able to say what "race" they are, but can you say what exactly "race" is? 

What is racial hegemony?


Racial categories are hegemonic assumptions in the United States.  They are so ingrained in us that we never question them.  What constitutes different races?  Think about what traits people use to classify humans into "races."  If you lined people up from all over the world, they would resemble a spectrum instead of distinct groups.  People cannot be grouped distinctly into "races" in a scientific, biological way.  If you tried to separate them based on a trait, the categories you create would be arbitrary and subjective.  For example, we will examine skin color below.  You will see that skin color is not discretely divided into biological groups.  But before we do that, let's operationalize some terms related to identity.

Operationalizing terms - Define each of the following terms.

Nationality is the country where someone is a citizen.  For example, if your passport is from the U.S. then your nationality is the United States, often referred to as "American".

Ethnicity is a group of people linked by a common culture, ancestry and often associated with a geographic location.  For example, one might say that Italians are an ethnic group.  But ethnicity doesn't have to apply to a country, it can be a group like Assyrians, Amish or Southern U.S. citizens.


Heritage is where a person's ancestors can be traced to.

Genotype is an individual's specific combination of genes that makes up their DNA.

Phenotype is the observable characteristics that an individual manifests from their genotype interacting with the environment.

Race is a socially constructed idea that humans can be separated into distinct and discrete groups based on their biology.  For example, one society might say that there are 3 races in the world: Asian, African and white.  The belief is that people can be separated into groups based on their biological traits such as, skin color, hair, eyes, nose, genes, etc...



Traits and race; Humans look different, why is that not race?

Yes, humans have different phenotypes such as dark skin or curly hair.  These phenotypes do come from different genetic combinations, but these combinations are not divisible into distinct groups.  Instead, the divisions we create are arbitrary divisions. If you lined up all of the people in the world according to a trait, the divisions would be less obvious. It would look more like a spectrum that changes gradually blending into one another.  For example, think about skin color, one of the most obvious phenotypes in the U.S. and often the default for socially constructing race.  See this evidence about why skin color does not differentiate into discrete groups:

From the American Anthropological Association, The Human Spectrum activity shows that deciding how to categorize people is arbitrary.

 


From a post on the soc images blog, this artist created a palette of colors showing that human skin is much more of a spectrum than distinct groups.  See this post for more about the artist and the project, including a Ted Talk.
Where would you divide up this palette into different races?

For an explanation on the biology of skin color, the article "Skin Deep" by Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin from Scientific American  explains the science behind skin color and how around the world, skin color would look more like a spectrum than distinct groups.  The map below from the article explains the correlation between UV light intensity and skin color.  Going back to our metaphor about the traits, do you see how the trait of skin color is a spectrum rather than distinct groups?

Nina Jablonski explains the significance of skin color in her Ted Talk here.


Before moving on, questions?

Questions about traits and why they cannot be used to categorize people into distinct races?


Other phenotypes besides skin color are also not discrete

Click here to go to the Race; Power of Illusion website to see why there is no way of biologically separating people into "races"  based on physical appearance (including skin color, nose shape and head size), geographic origins or genetic similarities.

Race essentialism - an erroneous and persistent theory

During the 1800s and for nearly a century afterward, scientists, including anthropologists and biologists, erroneously concluded that humans evolved from three distinct groups of hominids.  Known as the "essentialist theory", this incorrectly posits that each group started as a "pure race" in three separate locations: Mongolia, Caucasia, and Nigeria.   Eventually, the groups intermixed but some individuals stayed more pure based on less mixing.  Using the scientific data that is available to us now, biologists, doctors, anthropologists, and sociologists know that this is not true.  Instead of evolving separately, all humans began in Africa and gradually spread out across the globe.  However, some people still promote essentialist race theory.

From Harvard University's School of Biomedical Sciences, this explains more detail how genes work and why they can't be used to categorize people scientifically into"races".

Anatomy Class.  The idea that people can't be categorized biologically into races is difficult to accept and process because race is so ingrained in our society that we never question it.  It gets validation from many places, including our very own anatomy classes! (until 2018) (click here for a clarification of the anatomy forensic lesson).

Bill Nye explains why there is no way to define race biologically.

A 2017 article from the NY Times explains that the latest evidence from genetics is that there is not a connection between genes and race.

Jefferson Fish also explains how race doesn't make sense in the article titled "Mixed Blood" from Psychology Today, 1995.

For more info you can checkout the April 22, 2005 episode of Odyssey, a radio program that used to air on Chicago Public Radio. This episode about the genetics of race and if you listen carefully to the caller segment, you can hear a very interesting high school sociology teacher commenting. [Listen the program here (the good part is after 35:26)]

This article from Slate explains why ancestry kits do not explain race.