The absence of real biological races and the location of racism in the effects of institutions and politics imply that race and racism are practical and ideological, matters of what people do and of values that benefit some groups in society, rather than how people intrinsically are.
In other words, race and racism are the result of historical events and power arrangements. Against that backdrop, it can be claimed that racial identities—what people are—are socially constructed. In the early twenty-first-century, most social theorists and their readers have an intuitive understanding of the concept of social construction. Speaking very roughly, the concept of social construction is in play with regard to race whenever beliefs about biological race are dissolved or beliefs about the psyches, character traits, and cultures of different races are shown to be false.
That is, if racial divisions and different behavior based on perceived racial differences persist in the lack of a biological reality of race, then what is taken to be real about race must be the result of what has happened and continues to happen in society. Thus, insofar as the biological sciences have not supported p.
To say that an identity is socially constructed is to deny that it has the objective reality ascribed to it. Rather, that identity is the result of beliefs and practices in society or specialized segments of society and it may or may not have a factual foundation apart from those beliefs and practices.
John Searle, in The Construction of Social Reality , offers an analysis that relates physical facts to mental facts, which explains social reality. One could account for ideas of race in society by making a distinction between human physicality as physical facts and mental facts such as attitudes and beliefs and also patterns of behavior based on both the prior physical and mental facts in the social world. Analyses based on that distinction could account for how the hard physical facts of health as associated with racial difference are in fact embodiments of mental facts Gravlee Closer to the subject of race, in several, very famous, short articles, Ian Hacking introduced the idea that people are made up in the social sciences, as well as in lay society:.
How does making up people take place? By a parody of Nietzsche, two new kinds of people came into being, the hip and the square. As is the way of slang imported from another social class, both kinds had short shelf lives.
But I am concerned with the human sciences, from sociology to medicine, and they are driven by several engines of discovery, which are thought of as having to do with finding out the facts, but they are also engines for making up people.
The first seven engines in the following list are designed for discovery, ordered roughly according to the times at which they became effective. The eighth is an engine of practice, the ninth of administration, and the tenth is resistance to the knowers: 1. Create Norms! Reclaim our identity! Thus, Hacking refers to professional practices of focusing on a population and distinguishing it from other populations according to available scientific and political technologies.
Finally, and very specifically relating to racial groups over US history, Michael Omi and Howard Winant have provided widely received accounts of how the main US social racial groups came into existence, where before their members were not regarded as races in important or problematic ways.
If "whites" were in their own category — with innate differences backed by science — then that category could be deemed superior. As a result, they could justify their own rights and freedoms while enslaving, excluding, and otherwise mistreating people who had been placed in different racial categories.
So the division of people into groups based on general geographical origins of their ancestors or descriptions of the way they look, is the basis of a manmade strategy for making sense of treating some people better than others.
If race were based on permanent, innate divisions of human beings, the American government wouldn't have to constantly scramble to change the definitions and qualifications for each category. But it does. All the time. As political priorities change, American racial definitions adjust right along with them.
So, for example, people of Mexican birth or ancestry were "white" until the Census snatched that privilege back. Since then, their status — white or Hispanic — has flip-flopped several more times , all depending largely on whatever the current thinking was about their role in labor or immigration.
Similarly, courts went back and forth in the early 20th century about whether people from Japan were white, finally deciding in that they weren't, based on "the common understanding of the white man. And what it took to be "black" once varied so wildly throughout the country from one-quarter, to one-sixteenth, to the infamous one drop of African ancestry that people could actually change races by crossing state lines. Then, suddenly, in , the government decided that Americans could be more than one race, adding options to express this to the Census.
In other words, one day you could be a single race, and the next day you could be as many as you pleased. With these constant changes, it's hard to make the case that the concept of race is anywhere near stable. Today, the term "European" is treated as largely interchangeable with "white" in America. But that wasn't always the case.
According a timeline published as part of the Race: The Power of an Illusion series , when immigration to the US from Southern and Eastern Europe increased in the late s and early s, many of the new arrivals worked low-paying jobs, were clustered in urban ghettos, and were seen as "not quite white.
Germans, Greeks, Irish, Italians, and Spaniards have all — either legally or as matter of public opinion — been excluded from the "white" category at some point. Today, the "white" census category is available to "a person having origins in any of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. The US Government uses the Census to determine the official racial makeup of the nation. That's important information because, although the idea of race has no biological basis, the various groupings we've embraced now shape social reality when it comes to law, public policy, and interpersonal interactions.
There's no question about whether race informs Americans' experiences with education, employment, the justice system, and countless other measures. The data collected can help paint a clear picture of how that works.
But accurately polling an entire country full of people who have different ideas about race and what it means has been tough, bordering on impossible. Accurately polling an entire country full of people who have different ideas about race and what it means has been tough.
As many as 6. As a result, the Bureau undertook what it called "the most comprehensive effort in history to study race and ethnic categories," hoping to convince fewer Americans to skip the racial identification question by the Census. Original post on saic.
Race: A system of classification not rooted in accurate biological or scientific truth that supports dividing and empowering some social groups over others. The construction of race reinforces a social hierarchy based on the following: This is reinforced by:. It means that its construction can be analyzed, critiqued, and through movement: redefined.
Reading lists are like the required summer reading before school starts. Full details for the pickup process are available on this page. First, race is inaccurately used as a proxy for geography. Certain diseases or conditions originate in particular areas of the world where the environment has caused an evolutionary response or genetic impact. Sickle Cell Anemia, for example, is an evolutionary adaptation to malaria exposure , and is most common in populations with ancestors that lived in regions of the world where malaria is or was common.
So while we see it at higher rates in people of Sub-Saharan African descent, we also see it in higher rates of people of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Indian descent, because malaria is or was widespread in those regions. The other aspect of what we see as racial health differences is explained by the field of epigenetics.
0コメント