There is one thing that really stuck with me from class on Thursday. It was when Dr. Johnson said “race is not genetic”. Because I feel that for someone who has never studied race, that could be seen as a very bold claim and one that may even seem ridiculous at first thought. However, after reading Alain Locke, it started to make more sense. Alain Locke calls the Anthropological Concept of Race pseudoscientific, because it holds that the notion of race is biological, inheritable, while also including non-physical characteristics. This seems contradictory, or at least paradoxical, like both can’t possibly be true at the same time. Locke is quick to say that race is a fact, but not a biological fact. It is a cultural and social fact.
I think my problem with both Locke’s idea of social heredity and the Anthropological Concept of Race is the extremity of the theories. I feel like there must be some sort of fusion of the two. I understand and agree that if someone says that a black person acts white, or a white person acts black, that doesn’t make sense if all we mean by race is physical characteristics. In the way that we’ve always talked about race, we have never been able to completely separate physical characteristics from cultural, linguistic, and moral characteristics. These are the things that would back up Locke’s theory. Having said that, I think that to call race an entirely social construct is taking it too far. In what he calls the “reversal of emphasis”, Locke says that the idea of race expressing culture should be changed to show that culture produces race, in the sense of producing racial categories. And while there is definitely truth in that I’m not sure if I completely buy into the idea of race as entirely socially constructed. Maybe I just have a narrower vision of race as a biological characteristic, and I take social and cultural issues in a different way, and look at them as a part of ethnicity. I recognize that Locke is not suggesting that the term race has lost its meaning and that we should get rid of it in favor of the term culture. He is rather suggesting that we should re-look at the relationship between culture and race and change the way that we talk about both.
So, what do you think? Does race express culture, as was previously thought, or does culture produce racial categories? Can all people even fit into racial categories? Or do culture and race have a mutually dependent relationship, in which they both affect each other, and neither can be explained without the other?
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Race is definitely a necessary distinction from culture because the physical features are still a major component of race. This is evident in the case of children of one race adopted by parents of another. They are raised in the culture of the parents, but they are also aware that they do not have the same physical attributes as the parents. So the cultural parts of race are not physical and thus not inheritable, but the physical parts of race are still a considerable piece of the definition.
ReplyDeleteI think that this was a difficult discussion because there are so many different interpretation of what race is! If we try to say that race is purely a physical component of a person, how then can we study racism? A people aren't discriminated against because of the color of their skin alone. They are discriminated against in response to socially constructed stereotypes. When the phrases "acting black" and "acting white" came up it really made me aware of the fact that race really is much more a social construct that is not dependent on physical characteristics of a person.
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ReplyDeleteTrying to think about race as not genetic was something very hard for me to grasp too because I have always thought of race as the skin color of a person; according to my thinking race would be genetic as the parents' physical traits are obviously passed down to the children. However, the concept of culture producing race confused me the most because if the physical attributes of a person were ignored then how would Locke identify between European and White Americans or African Americans and Black Africans because they each have different cultures but similar physical attributes; so are they still considered a different race solely based on physical attributes even though Locke claims that race is beyond just the physical attributes?
ReplyDeleteThis is a question I have struggled with a lot particularly after this class discussion. I agree with Kara and Manali that the idea of race not being genetic was very difficult to grasp. I do believe that culture does play a part in one's race. However, I do not believe that culture produces race, but instead that people produce culture. I'm still not quite sure of my feelings towards the subject entirely. But I do feel that while culture relates to race, it does not create race but instead is an important aspect of race.
ReplyDeleteAfter spending more time with this question I feel like I have created my own idea of what Locke means. I see that both physical appearances and cultural complexes are important in identifying race, but Locke sees that cultural complexes are More important. For instance, white Europeans vary from white Spaniards to white Brits all looking quite different from one another. Though the do look different, they are still white because they have the cultural bonds of socialism, capitalism, imperialism, so on and so forth.
ReplyDeleteI dont quite agree with him though because it seems to indicate that everyone of one culture should be of one race. And though people do not have a "race capacity" for a culture, a culture would have a capacity for a race which seems even more absurd.
I do believe that race and culture are mutually dependent. That race and the collaboration of a people foster the recognition of a culture, and that culture invariably cant be identified without racial bounds. This is where hybrids occur. It always happens when two cultures are in close proximity i.e. a white girl acting qhetto or a black meteorologist.