WVCS223 The Social Construction of Race - Week 2 PDF

COP YR IGH T © 2 022 E DIT ION WVCS223 – THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE - WEEK 2 C REATED BY: PRO F. C H AN TELLE GR AY A N D D R AÏD A TER BLAN CH É-G R EEFF During the first week of this study unit, we looked at the creation of the gender binary and the inclu...

COP YR IGH T © 2 022 E DIT ION WVCS223 – THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE - WEEK 2 C REATED BY: PRO F. C H AN TELLE GR AY A N D D R AÏD A TER BLAN CH É-G R EEFF During the first week of this study unit, we looked at the creation of the gender binary and the inclusionary-exclusionary mechanisms it uses to reinforce certain gendered norms. These inclusionary- exclusionary mechanisms include heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity. We say that they are inclusionary-exclusionary mechanisms because the norms that they are grounded in and founded upon exclude those who do not conform to these arbitrary and made-up standards. The good news about social constructs is that when they no longer serve a useful purpose or become outdated – because we know more due to science and technology, for example – we can change them. Becoming aware of one’s own biases is the first step toward unlearning harmful practices and ideas. The National Museum of African American History & Culture describes bias as “a preference in favor of, or against a person, group of people, or thing” which is oftentimes unconscious and “rooted in inaccurate information or reason” (Smithsonian, n.d.). But biases are also part of being human. In the same way that we are all ideological (as you will learn in Study Unit 3), we all have biases, some of which are conscious or explicit, and some of which are subconscious or implicit, meaning you are not aware of these or how you express them. Implicit biases can manifest in a myriad of ways, for example how we think of and treat other genders, races and religions. The point is that implicit biases are grounded in stereotypes and their associations. In many ways, implicit biases are more difficult to identify than explicit biases. Think, for example, of how implicit biases might function vs explicit racial biases. The “latter typically manifests as overt racism or discrimination” whereas implicit biases transpire “unconsciously, typically without discriminatory intent” by well-meaning people (Maryfield, 2018). In this section, we will examine both implicit racial bias and explicit forms of prejudice such as racism and discrimination. Our aim is thus twofold. First, we will trace the history of race, racism and racial ideology in order to understand how and why it was constructed. Second, we will think about how implicit racial biases “can cause individuals to unknowingly act in discriminatory ways”, even when they are “not overtly racist” but have, nonetheless, had “their perceptions” moulded by harmful experiences that “result in biased thoughts or actions” (Maryfield, 2018). But before we continue, do you know what is meant by the terms race, racism and racial ideology? And do you know where the construction of race and racism stem from? To learn more about these terms, watch the following YouTube clip:  THE ORIGIN OF RACE (ORIGIN OF EVERYTHING, 2019) One of the most important ideas put forward by this video is that the construction of race was born from a combination of factors: the rise of global capitalism + colonialism + slavery + the Enlightenment So, to understand the construction of race we need to think about these four aspects. Let’s start with colonialism, “the practice of one country taking full or partial political control of another country and occupying it with settlers for purposes of profiting from its resources and economy” (Longley, 2021). This definition, as you may have noticed, is quite close to that of imperialism, because both practices encompass the hostile takeover of territory through political and economic means. To be brief, we can say that imperialism led to colonialism. “In most cases, the goal of the colonizing countries is to profit by exploiting the human and economic resources of the countries they colonized. In the process, the colonizers – sometimes forcibly – attempt to impose their religion, language, cultural, and political practices on the indigenous population” (Longley, 2021). This is where we get to slavery. Although slavery can mean a number of things – including human trafficking, forced labour, and forced and early marriage – the way we use slavery in this study unit refers specifically to what is known as the Middle Passage or the transatlantic slave trade when roughly 12 million enslaved Africans were passaged across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas to work on sugar and tobacco plantations. Before working through the rest of this study section, watch the following YouTube clip: THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE (HAZARD, 2015) In order to justify slavery, the concept of race had to be invented. In other words, the idea of race was created to impose a ‘natural order’ between races in order to make economic exploitation viable. But why were most slaves African? To find an answer to this question, watch the following video: W H Y D I D E U R O P E A N S E N S L A V E A F R IC A N S ( O R I G I N OF EVERYTHING, 2021) You may have noticed that although there is no generally agreed-upon definition for race, it has, historically, been used to divide people into groups, often with the aim of enslaving supposedly ‘inferior’ races. Thus, race affects how the world is structured and how we perceive ourselves and other people. Racism and racial ideology are what emerge from this arbitrary hierarchical structuring. Racism is the belief that the observable physical features of people, such as their skin colour or hair, are indicators of innate qualities that render them inferior to others. These ‘innate qualities’ include aspects like moral character and intellectual ability. To put it differently, racism “is a system of advantage based on race that involves systems and institutions, not just individual mindsets and actions. The critical variable in racism is the impact (outcomes) not the intent and operates at multiple levels including individual racism, interpersonal racism, institutional racism, and structural racism” (Smithsonian, n.d.). So racism does not merely denote individual biases or even group biases, but biases that have become institutionalised throughout society in implicit and explicit ways. Thus, as the National Museum of African American History & Culture (Smithsonian, n.d.) argue: “Racism = Racial Prejudice (Unfounded Beliefs + Irrational Fear) + Institutional Power.” When it is explicit, we can think of it in terms of racial ideology, or the belief that certain groups of people are superior to others and that this ‘natural order’ should be maintained through specific institutions, such as laws and employment prospects, that uphold the economic and political privileges of the perceived superior race. Many of these ideas were spread during the Enlightenment which, positively, promoted ideals of freedom and the equality of all human beings but, more negatively, thought that only certain populations were capable of progress. So the Enlightenment ideals carried within it a contradiction and a deep prejudice, especially against non-European peoples. Kenan Malik argues, however, that the idea of race was not so much a product of the Enlightenment itself, but rather because of a complex overlap between different processes, such as colonialism and slavery, as we have seen. As he says: ENLIGHTENMENT THINKERS CERTAINLY OFTEN HELD DEEPLY PREJUDICED VIEWS OF NON-EUROPEANS; IT WOULD BE ASTONISHING IF THEY HAD NOT. BUT THEY WERE LARGELY HOSTILE TO THE IDEA OF RACIAL CATEGORISATION. IT WAS IN THE NINETEENTH, NOT EIGHTEENTH, CENTURY THAT A RACIAL VIEW OF THE WORLD TOOK HOLD IN EUROPE, AND IT DID SO LARGELY BECAUSE OF THE ‘COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT’ VIEWS THAT SMITH LAUDS. (MALIK, 2013) What Malik is suggesting here is that in spite of their beliefs in freedom and equality, the idea of progress and capitalist expansion had ‘hijacked’ these ideas and ideals so that the 18th century fascination with human variety became transformed into an obsession with racial difference in the 19th century. This idea became further entrenched because Charles Darwin’s ideas of competition between species was misapplied to justify slavery and other forms of oppression. It is true that slavery was abolished between 1838 and 1888, but European powers continued to exploit Africa for its labour and natural resources long after – in fact this continues in more subtle ways to this day. The creation of race and the emergence of racism and racial ideology also manifested in other ways, for example in the eugenics movement which began in the late 19th century and continued well into the 20th century. In the U.S. eugenics “took a dark turn in the early 20th century” when “around 20,000 sterilizations occurred in California state mental institutions under the guise of protecting society from the offspring of people with mental illness” (History.com Editors, 2017). Many of these sterilisations were done forcibly on minorities. And did you know that similar experiments took place in apartheid South Africa vis-à-vis the country’s covert chemical and biological warfare program, particularly through “the production of narcotics and poisons for use against anti-apartheid activists” and the development of “a bacterial agent that would selectively kill Black people” (Singh, 2008:1,6). Thankfully, many of these projects failed. But similar projects were more successful in other parts of the world. You might even be familiar with perhaps the most ‘successful’ eugenic experiment which was carried out by Adolf Hitler. Drawing on American eugenics, Hitler declared in his book, Mein Kampf, that non-Aryan races, such as Jews and gypsies, are inferior to Aryan races and that “Germans should do everything possible, including genocide, to make sure their gene pool stayed pure” (History.com Editors, 2017). But Hitler’s biases soon turned even against the Germans. In 1933, “the Nazis created the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring”, and by 1940 Hitler had euthanised “hundreds of thousands of Germans with mental or physical disabilities” (History.com Editors, 2017). As if this was not enough, about 11 million people died during the Holocaust, largely because they failed to conform in some or other way to Hitler’s idea of a superior race. This is why it is so important to decode our social constructs, to understand where they come from and to think about our explicit and implicit biases. The most important thing about social constructs is that they can be changed.