Should we move on from the term "race"?

[Drifterwood]

Quod erat futandum demonstrandum.

DXJ - is Obama African?

 

[helgaleena]

I believe Obama is one half African by ancestry.

But one thing I have learned from linguistics is that the language a population speaks is often conflated with its genetic makeup by simplistic thinkers, hence the Aryan 'race' fallacious logic...Indo-Aryan is a language family which includes speakers nowadays of every biological race.

My grandmothers and grandfathers spoke Finnish, English, Swedish and Slovak. I speak Danish and German and Urdu but it doesn't mean I am giving up my genetics from the speakers of Slavic or Finno-Ugric in favor of Indo-European. And hooboy, the Cyrillic and the ideograms still baffle me when language is written.

Add in issues of complexion or customs and we will all be at sea with our definitions.

 

[mitchymo]

I am somewhat lost in this.

If we stop using general descriptive phrases to describe people, how DO we describe people?

I am all for a respectful level of political correctness but i'm buggered if i'm going to have to think about which of possibly umpteen other terminologies to describe someone else just because the person i'm describing might get offended that i did'nt guess their race to the 16th degree correctly.

 

[bek2335]

Get rid of Nascar and race.

Ha! That's a great comment. "Race", by the way, is a social and not a biological construct. There are, however, most certainly differences in general appearances in ethnic groups. mitchymo is right , let's not get stupid and stop using perfectly objective descriptive language about people. Bigotry, however, is a whole other issue.

 

[Tattooed Goddess]

Oh geez. More ways to talk about the same thing but using different words that most people didn't find offensive in the first place.

How far can we go with this before the word used to replace the word RACE is a bad word because someone used it as such and then we pick another word to replace the new word? See where im going?

If you are bothered by the word RACE, you should really be finding something constructive to do with your time. Volunteer at a homeless shelter or something.

 

[Drifterwood]

If you are bothered by the word RACE, you should really be finding something constructive to do with your time. Volunteer at a homeless shelter or something.

I am bothered by whether the term "race" is misused scientifically. Then I am interested in the social construct, as Bek points out, that has been built on something that in many ways is like a castle built on sand.

If you can't fathom the question, you should go do your hair. :tongue:

 

[Drifterwood]

I am somewhat lost in this.

Mitch, sign up for this, http://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/ and you will be able to see your ancestral journey as it really was.

 

[ubered]

Oh geez. More ways to talk about the same thing but using different words that most people didn't find offensive in the first place.

How far can we go with this before the word used to replace the word RACE is a bad word because someone used it as such and then we pick another word to replace the new word? See where im going?

If you are bothered by the word RACE, you should really be finding something constructive to do with your time. Volunteer at a homeless shelter or something.

Race, ethnicity and culture do not mean the same thing. Not even close. I don't think the point is that people find them offensive, rather that race is not an objective, "real" category but a construct with its roots in economic and political history.

As far as most people are concerned, Africans are black. Go and tell and Ethiopian or a Somali they're black! As far as they're concerned, they're red. When Jamaican rastafarians moved to Ethiopia in the name of African/Black unity, many Ethiopians discriminated against them saying they had fat lips and big noses...

This isn't useless nitpicking, but the important work involved in unpacking the categories we create that then produce discrimination and inequality in life chances. If racism is based on racial categories, the only way to undermine it is to rip the rug from under the feet of those categories...

 

[helgaleena]

I am with you on this ubered. And I am glad thought is part of the support services we offer each other here! Drifter, thanks for taking the trouble!

I had a mother-in-law who was Native American and would never wear white anklets because she said that NDN prostitutes in Chicago wore them. And lots of my inlaws hated black people even if their own complexions were darker than some of them. All this speaks more of acculturation than ethnicity to me.

 

[bek2335]

Human beings are...A MESS.

 

[Mark_UK]

My friend who is blind always says that he knows that he is blind, he is not offended by people saying that he is blind but he is deeply offended by people who try to avoid mentioning it, or worse people who refer to him as being visualy disabled or whatever weasly words they use, like he says those are the people who are scared of what he represents they are not afraid of offending him.

 

[Drifterwood]

With all due respect, Mark, it is not the same at all.

I recently had my DNA traced as part of the national Geographic genome project. If you take a look at their website, you will see that the old concept of three races is too narrow even if everyone only bred within their line, which they almost never have.

The socail context of the three race designation is not relevant today and its roots are at best dubious imo. What I really wanted was the opinion of biologists or people who know more about genetics than me.

 

[helgaleena]

Drifter, there may be better places to ask! If you have been in contact with the Genome Project you know fx about how important tiny populations like the Sami can be! Or my ex's Nation which still has under 600 official members... it's like seed-savers for humans instead of crops.

I wager few on this board will be as interested as you.

 

[Drifterwood]

Drifter, there may be better places to ask! If you have been in contact with the Genome Project you know fx about how important tiny populations like the Sami can be! Or my ex's Nation which still has under 600 official members... it's like seed-savers for humans instead of crops.

I wager few on this board will be as interested as you.

They don't know what they are missing. Y chromosomal Adam. He's the Daddy :tongue:

I like the term nation, and Nick 444's point earlier. I link it to the Greek ethne, from which ethnic comes obviously. Ethne was the word used to translate the Hebrew Goyim.

Cultural and social identity don't always match the genetic reality.

I think a lot of people are scared of the truth that their DNA would show.

 

[deleted3782]

Long ago I grew frustrated with the vagueness of the term race. I remember having a roommate in college who was a self-described racist. He liked Europeans and hated Africans. One night I asked him about his perceptions of cultural groups ringing the Mediterranean, from Italy to Egypt and then into Sub-Saharan Africa. He was tripped-up in doing so in that his concepts weren't very useful in shades of gray...he could only operate within his ideals of "blacks versus whites".

I've removed the word "race" from my vocabulary and replaced it with "ethnicity". It's a much richer word, opens up further dialog and opportunities for elaboration.

Another word I have removed from my own use is "class". I dislike it as much as the word "race". It's been replaced with "income". Instead of "low-class", someone is "low-income". I know there is somewhat of a difference but for my line of work it does the job very well. Fortunately I don't have to write about Britney Spears much.

 

[helgaleena]

Drifter, there may be better places to ask! If you have been in contact with the Genome Project you know fx about how important tiny populations like the Sami can be! Or my ex's Nation which still has under 600 official members... it's like seed-savers for humans instead of crops.

I wager few on this board will be as interested as you.

OOPS! it's not that small, quite, it's under sixThousand... and now my kids are in it also :tongue:

Yeah, racist thinking always deteriorates under the onslaught of logic. Some of that 6000 are racists as well, but they are forced to look for mates elsewhere to avoid marrying their own cousins. Muwahaha.

 

[D_Martin van Burden]

Some social scientists are fed up with the terminology because of its imprecision. Anthropologists were among the first in the community to want to do away with the term for that very reason, but it never gained the kind of traction across disciplines. Certain sects of politicians certainly want to do away with it too and they try to score political capital while they're at it. Heated debates about affirmative action, particularly in college admissions, have also politicized the issue. And lest we forget, Judge Sotomayor's nomination heckled a number of conservatives who believed that she would use her race in order to trump neutral objectivity standards in reading legal precedent or issuing opinions. For a really good reason on this, I recommend Kairys' The Politics of Law.

FWIW, law is certainly rule established by people. And when the OP asks if we should move on from the term "race," it begs a further question. What really are we moving past?

I agree that race has been used inconsistently. At times it refers (indelicately) to skin color; at other times, it has referred more precisely to cultural classifications and even geographic ones. Today, we collect demographic information covering five races -- Black, White, Hispanic, American Indian, Native Alaskan/Aleut -- which cover all the grounds. Never mind the "Other" category, multiraciality, and all its mix-ups.

Race, at least in America, has had a burdensome legacy. Scientists in the early 20th century and even much longer before that thought race referred not simply to (rather arbitrary) phenotypic (physical appearance) characteristics, but the assumption was that these surface differences corresponded to real innate biological differences in athleticism, intelligence, personality traits, temperaments, and more. The Bell Curve was written (and debunked later) in an effort to show how Blacks are intellectually inferior to their White peers, net of everything else. Until the issuing of amendments for the protected racial classes, earlier drafts of the Constitution only gave the franchise to individuals who owned land -- white males -- not to women or any person of color. Blacks were given a 60% proportion of citizenship, and supposedly "one drop" evident in your family's pedigree made you Black no matter your skin tone.

I also read in Omi's article "The Changing Meaning of Race" that race became heightened in scholarship following a number of integral movements: the breakdown of colonialism in the 20th century, the Civil Rights Movement, critical race scholarship, among others. As scholars were questioning these biologistic assumptions, others were connecting the dots between race and inequality. On this, the community is divided. Some, again, want to fully reflesh out race to correct some of its arbitrariness while others treat race as an independent variable for some study of interest.

A panethnic affiliation means that you define your race in terms of some localized culture. The muck of figuring out if a Somalian is black, red, what have you comes from a cultural identification of peoples in similar geographic space. I think this is a bit more evident in Southeast Asia that, while falling into the "Asian" race, that these people identify with that region and its concomitant cultural membership than, say, a Chinese or a Japanese person.

To move past race is to treat racism as if it is some troublesome artifact, I think. While Jim Crow laws have fallen by the wayside, racism has had to turn to more insidious covert measures. It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race nowadays, but whether we're talking about everyday interactions or systemic effects, "colorblindness" is just some idealized vision. Moving past race means that we're not talking about or thinking about how it impacts daily life. If that weren't the case, then I would clearly be out of a line of work. But not just my pocketbook -- rather, it would be equivalent to sticking one's head in sand, forgetting that we've come a long, long way in this country in our racial relations and yet have so much more room to go.

I'm willing to put away race when it has been shown time and time again, consistently, across scholarly communities and the general public, that race has no effect on life. But I don't think that day will ever come. We're steeped in consciousness and inequality.

 

[helgaleena]

'We are steeped in consciousness and inequality---' Consciousness includes the capacity to discriminate! Muwahaha~ I have to stop this cackling...

 

[D_Fiona_Farvel]

Some social scientists are fed up with the terminology because of its imprecision. Anthropologists were among the first in the community to want to do away with the term for that very reason, but it never gained the kind of traction across disciplines. Certain sects of politicians certainly want to do away with it too and they try to score political capital while they're at it. Heated debates about affirmative action, particularly in college admissions, have also politicized the issue. And lest we forget, Judge Sotomayor's nomination heckled a number of conservatives who believed that she would use her race in order to trump neutral objectivity standards in reading legal precedent or issuing opinions. For a really good reason on this, I recommend Kairys' The Politics of Law.

FWIW, law is certainly rule established by people. And when the OP asks if we should move on from the term "race," it begs a further question. What really are we moving past?

I agree that race has been used inconsistently. At times it refers (indelicately) to skin color; at other times, it has referred more precisely to cultural classifications and even geographic ones. Today, we collect demographic information covering five races -- Black, White, Hispanic, American Indian, Native Alaskan/Aleut -- which cover all the grounds. Never mind the "Other" category, multiraciality, and all its mix-ups.

Race, at least in America, has had a burdensome legacy. Scientists in the early 20th century and even much longer before that thought race referred not simply to (rather arbitrary) phenotypic (physical appearance) characteristics, but the assumption was that these surface differences corresponded to real innate biological differences in athleticism, intelligence, personality traits, temperaments, and more. The Bell Curve was written (and debunked later) in an effort to show how Blacks are intellectually inferior to their White peers, net of everything else. Until the issuing of amendments for the protected racial classes, earlier drafts of the Constitution only gave the franchise to individuals who owned land -- white males -- not to women or any person of color. Blacks were given a 60% proportion of citizenship, and supposedly "one drop" evident in your family's pedigree made you Black no matter your skin tone.

I also read in Omi's article "The Changing Meaning of Race" that race became heightened in scholarship following a number of integral movements: the breakdown of colonialism in the 20th century, the Civil Rights Movement, critical race scholarship, among others. As scholars were questioning these biologistic assumptions, others were connecting the dots between race and inequality. On this, the community is divided. Some, again, want to fully reflesh out race to correct some of its arbitrariness while others treat race as an independent variable for some study of interest.

A panethnic affiliation means that you define your race in terms of some localized culture. The muck of figuring out if a Somalian is black, red, what have you comes from a cultural identification of peoples in similar geographic space. I think this is a bit more evident in Southeast Asia that, while falling into the "Asian" race, that these people identify with that region and its concomitant cultural membership than, say, a Chinese or a Japanese person.

To move past race is to treat racism as if it is some troublesome artifact, I think. While Jim Crow laws have fallen by the wayside, racism has had to turn to more insidious covert measures. It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race nowadays, but whether we're talking about everyday interactions or systemic effects, "colorblindness" is just some idealized vision. Moving past race means that we're not talking about or thinking about how it impacts daily life. If that weren't the case, then I would clearly be out of a line of work. But not just my pocketbook -- rather, it would be equivalent to sticking one's head in sand, forgetting that we've come a long, long way in this country in our racial relations and yet have so much more room to go.

I'm willing to put away race when it has been shown time and time again, consistently, across scholarly communities and the general public, that race has no effect on life. But I don't think that day will ever come. We're steeped in consciousness and inequality.

Posts like this remind me why I love your blog, D. :smile:
You've given a lot to consider here and I will try to locate the Omi article through my university. Perhaps on JSTOR?

 

[D_Martin van Burden]

That should do it, Lady. Believe it or not, Google Scholar is a pretty decent site to get stuff. Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, if your university has a Virtual Private Network, you can log into it and then surf for academic writings from the comfort of your own home. Check with your campus computing center for more details.

Oh, and thanks for the kind words; that's sweet of you.