While the concept of race remains fixed in our social psyche, social scientists question its relevance in understanding human diversity.
Based purely on skin color and facial characteristics, can you really spot a Latino in a crowd? Are you sure the darker-skinned person is a South Asian and not a Brazilian or an Egyptian? Would you be surprised to learn that the lighter-skinned "white" woman across the room has a Native American father?
Most of us cannot say with certainty which race another person belongs to. Some of us aren't even sure which racial category we identify with and a lot of us don't understand what the term race means. In a quest to understand the biological, historical, social and cultural aspects of race, we talked with experts on campus and realized there are more questions than answers on the issue.
Who am I anyway?
"There are millions of people in the U.S. who aren't sure where they fit—that's a major challenge to a conventional, artificial and rigid system," says Carol Mukhopadhyay, anthropology professor and co-author of How Real is Race?— A sourcebook on race, culture and biology (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2007).
In the past, census takers categorized people based on observable traits, coming up with five basic categories— White, Black or African-American, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander. But which category does a child who has an African-American father with ancestry in Kenya and a Euro-American mother with ancestry in Greece select?
"Until recently, you had to select one and only one racial category, subtly reinforcing cultural taboos on interracial marriage," says Mukhopadhyay. "Now, with a growing population of people with multi-racial backgrounds, the census allows you to select more than one 'race.'"
Yolanda Moses, anthropology professor at UC Riverside and co-author of How Real is Race?, explains the reason for these strict classifications. "Our social and cultural history has always focused on skin color," she says. "Race serves the purpose of maintaining a visible barrier among people in a stratified hierarchy."
Leslee Parr, associate professor of biology at SJSU, adds: "We perceive the obvious physical differences between people of different geographical origins and assign labels like Asian, African or European. The concept of race can, therefore, be a device of convenience, to enable our minds to organize information from the natural world and communicate about it with others." But the messages get mixed when the definitions vary from region to region across the globe, changing the classification of a person from "black" in the United States to "white" in Brazil or "colored" in South Africa.
Perception becomes a reality
Amorphous and vague as race seems to be, it is still deeply entrenched in our psyches as something substantial and real. "Geneticists and biologists say that differences within groups are greater than differences across groups, so that right away leads you to believe that race isn't real," says Marcos Pizarro, assistant professor in Mexican American Studies at SJSU. "At the same time it's very real in our lives—people see a group who shares certain phenotypical characteristics and assume that all the stereotypical things they learned about that group apply to everybody who looks that way."
Such assumptions often distort our vision of the person in front of us.
"I hear from Latino children that their school teachers have the perception that Latino parents don't care about students and Latino students don't care about studies," relates Pizarro. "Most teachers don't even recognize where they adopted these perceptions from. But when you go into Latino communities you see parents and children who care—their understanding of the school system is different, their ability to help their children is limited by the lack of their own educational experiences, but they want their kids to do well. And when Latino students learn that they're not expected to do well, they find it hard to function in that context." When some of these children do perform well academically, Pizarro says, they're often immediately labeled as exceptions.
Creating a stratified hierarchy
Rosemary Henze, SJSU professor of linguistics and language development, thinks racial categories are a way of juxtaposing groups so that they struggle over resources. She gives the example of various racial and ethnic groups of children competing to get a slot for ethnic assemblies in a school. "Although it's a social construction, it's very real," she says. "It pits people against each other."
Race is not the only factor fueling discrimination, observes Jonathan Roth, professor and chair of history at SJSU. "Individuals can belong both to a minority ethnic group and a majority religious group at the same time. African- Americans, Native Americans and Hispanics, from that perspective, are a majority—they're all Christians," he says. "So, while all of these groups think of themselves as distinct entities, if you look at them from the point of view of religion, they're all the same. This is one of the ambiguities of categorization."
Henze explains: "We lump people in a lot of different ways. It all depends on which categories are meaningful in which societies and why … and who has the power to make those categories important."
Roth relates incidents from 19th-century Europe, where rank trumped race. "It did not matter if a king were black," he relates. "In a procession he would always walk ahead of lower-ranked white people, simply because he was a king."
A lesson in history
According to the American Anthropological Association, "race," as it is understood in the United States, was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor. In the 19th century, the concept became a means to justify slavery, magnifying the differences between Europeans, Africans and Native Americans and establishing a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories that bolstered rank and status differences.
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| There is no physical reality to race. It emerged from historical circumstances, has shifted over time, and is being transformed as we speak. CAROL MUKHOPADHYAY |
The different physical traits of African-Americans and Native Americans became markers of their lower status in our society and slowly the cultural and behavioral characteristics associated with each "race" started to get linked—superior traits became associated with Europeans and negative and inferior ones were linked to African-Americans and Native Americans.
Did these superficial markers have anything to do with genetic differences between these so-called races? "Race doesn't enlighten us on the degree of genetic variability within or between groups," says Leslee Parr, SJSU associate professor of biology, emphasizing that there is no evidence of "pure races" now or in the past. Also, Parr says, the division of humans into a few racial categories is not a useful tool to study our species' origins and adaptations to the various environments of earth. "The boundaries between geographic population groups are not absolute nor are they fixed over the course of history in our species. The concept of race, however, is fixed in our society, culture, and our minds."
As a concept, race has intermeshed seamlessly into our socio-cultural fabric and way of life. But when asked as individuals to describe our own race, ethnicity and culture, how many of us can do so?
When posed with this question, students in Rosemary Henze's class are often stumped. "Some of them put religion for culture, one said Taiwanese for all categories, one girl listed American as her ethnicity … there's a lot of confusion about these terms, understandably so," she says. "It is a great learning moment, though, because it just opens up the conversation and people realize that they have been using these terms interchangeably."
Mukhopadhyay adds: "We just keep trying to find the essence of these categories in reality someplace … yet there is no physical reality to race. It emerged from historical circumstances, has shifted over time, and is being transformed as we speak. Eventually, maybe, given inter-cultural marriages, these old categories will disappear." Or, she says, we may keep the old racial labels, but they might have different meanings in the future.
No easy fix
Roth, who calls race a "historical artifact," finds the concept counterproductive. "You can have a group of Arabs or Russians who are poor immigrants who were discriminated against, but when they move here, they are called 'white' and fall in the same category as the Rockefellers!" he says. "Or you can have a thirdgeneration Harvard graduate who happens to be an African-American, and will fall in the same category as a poor black guy from Compton. We keep focusing on race and ethnicity, but fail to recognize class—the people we need to be focusing on are those who are really disadvantaged and that has nothing to do with skin color, national origin or religion."
But for Pizarro, race is an integral part of who we are even though we try to discount it. "Because there was the civil rights struggle and because we had affirmative action, many people believe that we now all have the same opportunities and we don't live in 'that' world anymore," he says. He observes that there is a whole language in place which basically says—It's all over. "So how do we fight a war people cannot see.
The disparities in our social structure continue to exist, whether they started with our definition of race, or are being reinforced by class. And in an educational setting, the differences become more pronounced. "The playing field is definitely not level," says SJSU's Henze. "If we do away with the racial category data, we're not going to be able to track whether those public services in schools, healthcare, etc., are actually making any improvements. In schools and universities we need to know if there are any problem areas that are disproportionately affecting certain groups of students and, if they are, then we need to figure out what to do about it."
Heterogeneous environment
In the Bay Area, where we rub shoulders with diversity all the time, haven't we moved beyond these race issues? "Students here are in such a diverse environment compared to a lot of other places in the U.S.," says Mukhopadhyay. "Yet, while students appreciate meeting people from different parts of the country and the world, when you look at them in a social setting, you wonder how much of that intercultural interaction is really taking place." At the Student Union, Mukhopadhyay says she finds students clustered into their own homogenous clubs.
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| We keep focusing on race and ethnicity, but fail to recognize class—the people we need to be focusing on are those who are really disadvantaged and that has nothing to do with skin color, national origin or religion. JONATHAN ROTH |
Ethnic clubs don't necessarily help propagate segregation, contends Henze. "You learn more about your history, you affiliate with people with whom you have something in common and that's a good way for young people to develop their self-identity. But you also have to have institutionalized activities on a regular basis, so people can share common tasks across groups," she says. "We learned from desegregation in this country that just throwing African-American and European-American students together in the same schools and expecting them to socialize and become friends doesn't work—they just re-segregate."
It's the same way in society, but on a much larger scale. "In the Bay Area we tend to think that we know it all because we're the great melting pot or tossed salad," says Henze. "We think we're more aware, so there's nothing for us to talk about when it comes to race."
Questioning the status quo
For centuries people have puzzled over the origins of various human groups and how all of us relate to one another. More questions will be asked as the definitions we know crumble and new ones take their place.
Leslee Parr, biology professor, believes there are new and better ways to understand the diversity of our species. "We no longer need to partition people into a few units called races and try to explain them," she says. "The human genome has been identified by sequencing approximately three billion bases in our DNA and we now have the technology to deal with and explain human diversity without being bound by 17th-century thinking."
Yet, while experts discuss the apparent differences between people at a philosophical level and investigate microcosmic similarities, race continues to strongly impact our society.
Keep discussions going
"You can't talk about race issues without people framing it as a political agenda," says Pizarro. "Those who say let's keep the status quo are also taking a political position. The fact is, when it comes to race, all of us have some sort of agenda. All I want to do is talk about what is really happening in our day-to-day lives."
He gives an example of a Latino family in which one sibling identifies himself as a Chicano culturally, racially and ethnically, while another is the complete opposite—he distances himself from everything Chicano as a way of trying to be what he sees as American.
"We need to provide young people the opportunity to question these static ideologies," says Pizarro. "What does it mean to be Chicano? What does it mean to be Latino? What does it mean to be American? And I don't really care what people think in the end. I just want them to be able to think."
—Mansi Bhatia
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