Recently through class and outside readings, I have felt my self losing a sense of what race really is. I used to think I knew how to describe race, but thinking back, I feel as if I had no clue. I still find myself unsure about how to think and talk about race. I decided to do a bit of research surrounding the topic of "what is race?" What I found was quite interesting. I came across a survey or questionnare that was made for students at the University of Texas. It consists of 3 parts, one of them being a series of statements about race that are to be rated in terms of agreement or disagreement. Each statement left me even more puzzled about what race was than I had been just moments before. Statements range from If someone lives amongst a group of people long enough, he/she can adopt their racial group to The concept of race is made up. I found this series of statements really challenging because as I became more and more confused about what race is, I thought about what stereotypes I had been determaining race on previously. I suggest you all take a look at the survey. Just focus on the section of race questions that can be found on the personal information. There is no need to submit the information because it's a very long survey, but take a few minutes to look at it. I guarantee that you will be more intrigued and confused than before you looked at it!
Survey: http://survey.psy.utexas.edu/aumer/racelong/racelong-survey.html
Some questions to think about after:
How has your opinion of race changed?
Where there any questions that left you completely puzzled?
Where there any questions you felt you could answer with 100% certainty?
What did the survey make you think about the way you have been thinking about race in the past?
Has this survey made you think differently about our society and how we judge race? What are those judgements based on?
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6 comments:
ok well for one that survey was super long so I didn't get very far, but it started to get me thinking about race and mixed race in particular.
As a member and now leader of Hapa Club at Lick I find myself actually questioning the whole thing overall...Why is race so important that there need to be clubs about it? and why is mixed race in particular so important? Obviously there are a lot of answers to these questions.
One thing that is weird for me, is that personally I identify as being 3 different races, or multiracial...but from looking at this survey and talking about race in class, it's just really clear that race besides it's social construction has no real relevance or validity.
So then I am stuck in between rejecting the idea of race overall, which would be nice but is completely unrealistic in everyday life, and then sticking with my convictions and ideas about being a racially mixed person. The bottom line is, the more I learn about race, the more I am confused.
I have learned a lot more about race ever since the first day of class. Maybe I am more confused, but I think this is a good thing. Before school started, I probably would have defined race by someone's physical characteristic. While this is still true, I see that there is so much more behind it. Some of the questions in the survey were really hard for me to answer. Another thing I noticed is that I now answer some of the questions differently than I would have before looking at the "understandingrace.com" website. That homework assignment provided me with a lot of info that I didn't know at all. For example, I answered the statement "Every racial group has their own unique genetic makeup" as "strongly disagree." I knew this from the film we watched in class which said that humans of different races actually don't have different genes. Others that confused me were "By changing your physical appearance you can change your race" and "if someone live amongst a group of people long enough, he/she can adopt their racial group." I wasn't sure about questions similar to these and I think this survey has left me even more confused, just like Rachel.
like melissa, i am multiracial and i have just recently been enlightened to the fact that there is no biological determinant of race; it is instead, social construct (although i won't go so far as to say that it is arbitrary).
it is interesting, though, that because race has played such a defining role in our society for at least a century, how difficult it is to imagine a society that is race-free. which is an compelling topic in itself, why it is so difficult to imagine societal norms that are different from what they currently are.
but what most interested me was that in the genetic sense, race is nonexistant, but in the cultural sense it is alive, well, and dominating. i believe that hapa club (and other affinity groups) are extremely relvant today because, as a person of mixed heritage, i feel the need to encourage others to embrace and extend thier definition of race, specifically in regard to culture. to me, because our society operates largely on a platform of a scientifically nonexsitant category, it is even more important that we push people to let go of thier prejudices of the typing system (e.g. little boxes) used to define race as the first step towards freeing ourselves from the concept of race altogehter.
I've been thinking a lot about race and "colorblindness" and diversity.
The upside to "colorblindness" is that it allows each person to be jduged solely on the basis of his or her own talents and abilities. The problem with "colorblindness" is that even though race may not affect a person's abilities or talents, it can affect a person's situation. By ignoring someone's race, one can be ignoring their access to opportunities and privileges. Yet at the same time, this mentality can lead to an incorrect assumption that race is the sole definer of opportunity and privilege, one of the main faults that I find with the implementation of affirmative action.
This also leads to a discussion of what diversity is and if we should be pursuing it. Is diversity aiming to have a variety of ideas, experiences, and beliefs, or is it aiming to have a variety in the appearance people? I think sometimes what happens when we strive for diversity is that we want the former - variety of ideas, experiences, and beliefs, but we don't really know how to achieve this without turning to race because we believe that people of different race must have different ideas, beliefs, and experiences.
So my ultimate question is: What direction do you think society should try to go - should we aim to be a colorblind society or a society that aims for racial diversity?
In response to Melanie's question, I think that society should aim for diversity in terms of ideas, values, and hobbies, and not of race. While people of the same race might have similar lifestyles, that doesn't mean, for example, that a white person and a black person are totally different. Usually we associate the white race with the "privleged" race, but I know many people who are not of caucasian descent who still live a very privleged life. This misconception that race separates people's values is not always true. Therefore, I think that to achieve diversity, we can't always look at the outside of a person, rather we must get to know a person so we can achieve a diversity of ideas. To achieve real diversity, colorblindness is a necessity. I agree with Melanie's stance on affirmative action and its flaws.
Just to offer some perspective on what Julia said about living in a 'race free' society, when you take race out of the mix, it is only replaced by some other means of classification, such as socioeconomic class. The country of Bangladesh is 98% Bengali, so there is essentially no 'race' because everyone is the same race, so one might think that they have some utopian racism-free society. But that is not the case at all. I was there for only 3 weeks but thats all it took for it to become very obvious that classism ran rampant. My homestay sister - college educated, lived for a year in the US, upper class - had a social darwinistic view of the bangladeshi social hierarchy. In response to my question about how she personally delt with living surrounded by so many poverty stricken people, she described her situation simply as "survival of the fittest" (her own words).
Here, we can't imagine a raceless, or homogenous, society, but to my Bengali friends, they cannot imagine one with race. When they came to the U.S., they were astounded by all the different cultures, languages, and races. Many of them had trouble grasping that these were all Americans, not 'people from other countries' (though they might have been that as well).
So this leads to the question: do we need a way of classifying people, whether it be race, or socioeconomic class? Do we use these classifications to scapegoat certain groups? Do societies need scapegoats to function? Of course, in a utopian society the answer to all these questions would be 'no', but we don't live in Utopia, we live in reality.
Also, in response to Aileen's post about colorblindness, if we were colorblind, would that heighten some other sense (like wealth, looks, or any other way to superficialy judge)?
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