Zeus Leonardo

Race is a relatively modern concept, whose origin can be traced to European expansion and the era of colonization. Distinct from the anthropological notion of a human race, the sociological concept of race is defined as a relation based primarily on skin color, which is then linked to other characteristics, like hair, eyes, nose, and lips, or cultural practices. More important, these traits represent the outward appearance of race, the essential issue being that race is essentially a relation of power. This explains why non-white people are called “minority” in terms of power even if they represent the majority in numbers, such as the South African case or future US demographic trends where whites are predicted to become the minority population. From its inception, race has functioned as a relation of super- and subordination.

As Omi and Winant argue, race is a social construction, which does not suggest that it is only an invention or idea.¹ Social organization based on race constructs groups in order then to stratify them in society, such that the darker a group, the lower its social mobility, and vice versa. Although genetics is partly responsible for the kind of skin color a person is born with, stratifying society on the valuation of color is evidence of a social, as opposed to genetic, phenomenon. The eugenics movement attempted to link intelligence with race and genetics but was eventually exposed as a pseudo-science. Modern race-as-skin-color should not be taken too literally because members of a racial group span the range of skin tones yet are considered to belong to the same group. In this sense, race is also about ancestry, such as how Black or African Americans are descendants of slaves. Because humans create institutions and behave based on imagined racialized meanings, the invention of race comes with real consequences. Therefore, race maintains real and non-real dimensions.

“Race” is not a synonym for “group.” Although race intersects with ethnicity, class, and nationality, it is distinct from these forms of grouping. Whereas race may serve as a proxy for skin color, status differences, and positionality within racism, ethnicity may also be implicated in relations of power but usually signifies a person’s relationship with culture, such as language. Cultural assumptions may accompany racial meanings, but within race analysis, culture articulates with evaluations of imagined skin colors associated with cultures, making it possible to denigrate “dark cultures” and elevate “enlightened” ones. As such, the diversity of European people, for example, is imagined, in fact simplified, under the rubric of white. The same process happens, albeit with different consequences, for other racial groups. Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese are significantly different from each other, but are classified as members of the same race in the United States. Likewise, “nationality” is sometimes used interchangeably with “race” or “ethnicity,” but is also different from them. It invokes the concept of nation, which may be geographically bound, as in nationalism within Mexico, or imagined beyond national borders, as in the Palestinian movement.

People tend to assume that the concept of race has always existed because it is conflated with commonsense understandings of group membership. Biblical scriptures included images of white and black, or light and dark, which take on important, but quasi-racial associations today. For instance, Jesus Christ is most often perceived as white despite the fact that whiteness did not exist 2,000 years ago because ancient societies were organized less on the basis of skin color and more on religious or cultural principles. Of course, these dynamics continue today, evidenced by the precarity of people who are not considered citizens within a nation. But these rather old notions articulate with race to create racialized notions of the citizen, religion, and culture. In other words, modern race is relatively recent, a roughly 500-year-old concept, even more recent if we base its history on legal statutes.

Despite this recency, people imagine the foreverness of race. We project race well into the past and awkwardly articulate it with history, even when it is inaccurate to do so. People also find it difficult to imagine a future without race, thus projecting it into perpetuity, which may or may not be the case. In all, projecting the permanence of race speaks to its power in social life. It explains facets of daily life, from apparently mundane issues like musical taste, to whom we are willing or are legally allowed (as in the case of anti-miscegenation laws) to date or marry, or at the most fundamental level, who merits the status of human.² In order for a society to become fully racialized, race must saturate its every nook and cranny.

It is difficult, even problematic, to discuss race without emphasizing the centrality of institutional or structural racism. But centering racism comes with challenges. First, it is an uncomfortable topic for many people to discuss for fears about feeling responsible for the history of racism on one hand, or having it reduced to individual acts of hatred or prejudicial attitudes rather than a structure on the other. Second, being accused of racism comes with social stigma that most people would rather avoid. If Terry Eagleton (1991) once pronounced that ideological thinking is akin to having bad breath based on the perception that ideology always resides in other people, then racism is like a flatulence that someone else in the room is always guilty of releasing.³ Very few people would likely confess to being either ideological or racist.

Finally, race discussions often occur within a black-white binary, which is problematic for non-white or non-Black people. However, the choice is not simply between endorsing or rejecting the black-white binary, but to leverage or use it when it compellingly explains a social phenomenon, such as the lowered mobility rates of darker-skinned people of any race compared to their lighter-skinned counterparts. This fact established, the binary is incomplete as a way to explain what Omi and Winant call the “racial formation,” or the complex and constantly shifting relationship between institutions, groups, and racialized meaning within any racial project, including forms of resistance.⁴ One thing seems to be clear: race-evasiveness does not recommend itself. If a society wishes to transcend race and racism, it must consider developing heightened race awareness if not also race consciousness.

Notes