My previous blog entry included references to another topic that deserves a discussion by itself, that of racial categorization. I noticed while I was typing the previous blog, in the sentence, “We have Black and Chinese sections of town…” I originally did not capitalize black, and Word automatically capitalized Chinese for me. I thought this was somewhat strange and asked Denise if it would then be appropriate to capitalize “black” as well and we agreed it would be. However doing so legitimizes the category as a representing a certain population. This would then support the concept of race in general which was something Professor Don Foster also questioned today. He asked us if race was real? Is it?
Skin tones have infinite shades. It’s more than simply taking some non existent color called “skin” on a color graph and adjusting the luminosity of it; there are so many variations that there is no way to objectively categorize people based on skin color. Yet we do so constantly. We do it for other characteristics too, like hair and eye color, which can be just as unique as skin color. All are products of our genetic makeup. Yet because of the way we evolved as humans we somehow decided that this variable, skin color, would determine so much of our lives compared to the other, equally variable characteristics we have.
The issue then really isn’t that we notice race, but how we use it. It’s necessary for identification purposes to record hair color, height, eye color, skin tone, weight and so on. These aspects of an individual should not be any determiner of admittance into a job or school in an ideal world. And without getting into an affirmative action discussion at the moment, it’s important to note that we are taught that race is a more important indicator of an individual, it does not come naturally.
I remember learning about the civil rights movement for the first time in 5th grade. We were watching some video and then afterward had a discussion about how all people were equal and this was important to keep in mind. I remember thinking that such a concept was obvious, that we already were acting as such and by being taught about this part of history made me feel strange for even noticing the race of my peers. I was friends with a student who had one black and one white parent. I didn’t think much of it before that day and thought that teaching about how racism is bad may have negative implications because such a concept should be natural to a child. Anyhow, this is not to say I believe my education should have occurred differently, teaching about such history is very important and I would never advocate removing lessons about racism from course material. The issue is that recognizing others placed priority on this personal characteristic creates a chain reaction, causing our generation to deal with the consequences of this in a way that continues to focus on this factor, even though the purpose is to make it more neutral.
So by capitalizing racial titles we raise the significance of that form of categorizing over the other equally unimportant human traits which we leave in lower case. I’m going to attempt therefore, for at least the remainder of this blog to avoid capitalizing racial titles of racial groups in an attempt to show the insignificance of such classification.
Part of the problem is that white and black as racial signifiers only refer to skin shading, while Chinese or Indian refers to nationality. That alone is interesting. Why do some "races" get defined only by skin color, and others by region? Rarely do we actually hear the races of "yellow" and "brown" used. I think Chinese, American, and African all get capitalized just because their race or nationality has a proper noun as a root.
ReplyDeleteIt is also important to notice that race is sometimes, like on the census, used only for ethnicity or appearance, but other times refers mostly to culture. In the latter sense there is certainly a difference between Chinese, American, and Indian cultures, or even between White and Black culture. Fortunately the boundaries between those cultures are bluring, and membership in specific culture is no longer tied directly to skin or nationality. The new problem is that since cultural race was classified by skin color originally, there is now an assumption that all blacks are culturally Black, all whites White, etc. It has become a rhetorical trap where the use of words starts forcing cultural conceptions.
A possible solution, to some extent, or possibly just a clarifier, would be to have words to distinguish specific cultures from nationalities or skin colors. This way a Chinese nationality, or the levels of pigmentation in the skin, would not imply a specific culure or behaviors. Right now it can be helpful for understanding to know that a person is part of the Black, White, or Chinese culture. However, if there were specific words for these cultures, the fact a person is from China, or is black or white, would indeed be insignificant classification.