Social Construction and Racial Identities

Abstract

Race was socially constructed through colonialism and global development affects poor nonwhite populations. Within US society, technologies of race and racism and individual racial identities, including mixed race, reproduce racial divisions and status. When segregation and marriage laws kept racial divisions in place through state force, custom now takes their place. Both monoracial identities and mixed ones, require constant internal dialogue, with or without external group support. Pragmatic and accommodationist approaches to racism allow nonwhites to live within racist systems by avoiding conflict. Politicized racial identities are forms of resistance. Racial eliminativism, based on the biological emptiness of race, is an ineffective social project and some scholars seek to retain minimal biological race.

Discussion Questions

• 1. Give examples from your own experience of how people encounter race in society as already constructed.

• 2. How is development continuous with colonialism? Does race construct development or does development construct race? (Explain both perspectives.)

• 3. What are the lessons from Rwanda in terms of competition among nonwhite groups under oppression?

• 4. Explain the difference between terra nullius and territorium nullius.

• 5. What is your assessment of Cross’s idea of Nigrescence?

• 6. How might a racial self be a dialogue in terms of Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness? Explain how that situation may not be unique to black Americans.

• 7. How is mixed black and white race a logical contradiction?

• 8. What are some examples of social technologies of race not mentioned in the text?

• 9. How is accommodationism pragmatic?

• 10. Explain how racial eliminativism is a more widespread position than the “race debates” indicate.

Glossary

anti-miscegenation laws

—state regulation of whether people of one race could marry people of another race.

accommodationism

—a reaction by those oppressed, which seeks to avoid confrontation with oppressors, in words or action, usually out of fear of violent defeat.

colonization

—political annexation or takeover of a territory or nation by a stronger national power, historically backed by aggressive force, with different degrees of economic, social, and political involvement following.

development

—economic and political projects by governments and international business in countries or regions that are relatively poor and lack the same infrastructure as the countries of developers.

postcolonial studies or postcolonial critical theory of IR (International Relations)

—theoretical and practical analyses of populations and countries in areas of the world that were previously colonized and believed to undergo the effects of colonization.

double consciousness

—W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea that African Americans view themselves both as they are in their own communities, and as whites view them; idea of the selfreflecting on itself, going back to Shakespeare in “Julius Caesar.”

eliminativism

—position that the idea of race should be discarded based on what is known about its lack of a foundation in the human biological sciences.

internalized racism

—an individual’s application to herself of societal racism against the racial group to which she belongs.

miscegenation

—term for racial mixing, especially in marriage, as in antimiscegenation laws that prohibited interracial marriage.

natural law

—tradition of European and English law that upheld basic or God-given order in the world.

oppression

—unjust treatment and control.

racial ideology

—false system of claims and beliefs to justify racial hierarchy and racial oppression.

racial essence

—posit of a spiritual or physical “something” that members of each distinct human race shared and which caused the traits associated with that race.

racial identity

—description that places an individual, racially, as a member of a group within social system of race.

racial hierarchy

—an abstract or real system of distinct races that ranks them with regard to one another with regard to status and social power, as based on posited traits.

racial uplift

— nineteenth century projects, undertaken by more successful African Americans to support and bring about racial progress for the wider group of African Americans.

segregation

—legally imposed or socially supported separation of people by race in the use of public facilities and amenities.

separate-but-equal

—US legal doctrine permitting segregation under the fiction that racially separate facilities were equal, which they never were.

social construction of race

—beliefs and practices pertaining to racial traits and the hierarchy of racial groups, which usually claims to have a biological foundation.

social technology of race

—social and institutional mechanism to provide for the functioning of a societal system of race.

terra nullius

— the justification of the ownership of first taker to what is owned by no one.

territorium nullius

—the doctrine that collectives without government did not own the land they occupied.

utilitarianism

— moral system based on the principle that moral good is the greatest pleasure for the greatest number.

white racial purity

—idea that white people have no nonwhite ancestry.