{"id":18484,"date":"2011-11-25T21:33:15","date_gmt":"2011-11-25T21:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=18484"},"modified":"2012-01-19T00:54:34","modified_gmt":"2012-01-19T00:54:34","slug":"racial-realities-social-constructs-and-the-stuff-of-which-they-are-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=18484","title":{"rendered":"Racial Realities: Social Constructs and the Stuff of Which They Are Made"},"content":{"rendered":"

Racial Realities: Social Constructs and the Stuff of Which They Are Made<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Global Dialogue<\/a>
\nVolume 12, Number 2<\/a> (Summer\/Autumn 2010)\u2014Race and Racisms<\/p>\n

Eric C. Thompson<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Sociology
\nNational University of Singapore<\/em><\/p>\n

How can we deny the reality of race? It is a truth so many hold to be self-evident. Travel around the world, from Asia to Africa to Europe to South America: people look different in different places. Travel about in major global cities\u2014Singapore, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, London\u2014and physical diversity is close at hand. It would seem absurd to argue that the visible differences so apparent to our sight are socially constructed. Physiological differences\u2014skin tone, eye shape, hair texture and the like\u2014are not the outcome of our human imagination. The material reality of physiological differences grounds racial categorising. It is used as a point of reference and point of realisation to assert rhetorically the undeniable truth of any given scheme of racial categorisation.
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\nThe purpose of this article is to emphasise the error of such assertions. I aim also to point out the weakness of arguments for the \u201csocial construction\u201d of race, which too often undermine their own case by denying the material reality of visible difference. I outline instead a way to incorporate the material reality of biological difference into an understanding of race as a social construct. My argument is simply this: biological difference is the material out of which our concepts of race are fashioned. These concepts are as many and varied as the diverse cultures of human societies around the world. In the case of race and other identities\u2014such as ethnicity, gender and class\u2014our social constructs are not fashioned out of thin air but out of material conditions. This said, the material conditions do not determine what we make of them\u2014what we construct socially\u2014any more than wood determines the myriad things a woodworker or craftsman might make out of a piece of timber.<\/strong>
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\nIn the first section of this article, I want to emphasise the socially constructed nature of \u201crace\u201d, \u201cethnicity\u201d and similar concepts. The idea that race is a sensible way to talk about the material reality of biologically inherited diversity continues to reappear in new forms despite our best efforts to teach students and colleagues about its socially constructed nature. The attempt to depoliticise such concepts, to make them function as objective categories in the service of science or medicine, is a fraught undertaking. Race and ethnicity are deeply political categories, as many investigations into the historical circumstances of their social construction demonstrate. I will discuss this history in general ways in the case of the United States and in some greater detail in the internationally less well-known case of Malaysia, with the development of the concepts of bangsa in Malay and minzu in Chinese, which map varyingly and imperfectly onto the English terms \u201cnation\u201d, \u201crace\u201d and \u201cethnic group\u201d. The imperfection of translation across Malay, Chinese and English itself demonstrates the tenuous relationship between these signifiers of types of peoples and the various extra-linguistic referents\u2014of biology and culture\u2014through which attempts are made to ground and reify such concepts as \u201crace\u201d and \u201cethnicity\u201d.
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\nBut I also wish to move beyond this by now well-worn understanding of the social construction of \u201crace\u201d, \u201cethnicity\u201d and similar concepts. The problem with social constructionist arguments, usually raised to try to dismiss racial, ethnic and other identities as ephemeral, is that they generally have no answer to the naive\u2014though by no means foolish\u2014realist reference to the difference and diversity of physical features, thought and behaviour which seem so true and apparent. There are people who look different from one another in patterns we map onto \u201cracial\u201d difference and who act differently in ways we attribute to cultural or ethnic difference. In response, I want to provide a means by which to take this sensible reality (i.e., a reality apparent to our senses) into account, to bring it into our understanding of the social construction of race, ethnicity and the like, while still maintaining the argument that biology and culture by no means determine such categories. Rather, biology and culture merely provide the raw materials from which we socially construct ideas of difference and community. As with raw materials out of which we fashion buildings or clothing, the materials we rely on have some bearing on the structures we build or the fashions we weave out of them, but they do not determine the form of the final products, let alone the uses to which we put them…<\/p>\n

…Compare this to the United States. Barack Obama<\/a> is widely considered to be America\u2019s first \u201cblack\u201d president. The default categorisation of racial identity in America, with Obama and others, is to classify individuals of \u201cmixed\u201d white and minority parentage as belonging to the minority category. In Singapore, by contrast, racial classification is a patrilineal inheritance: at birth, a child\u2019s race is recorded as being that of the father. In the United States, President Obama is considered black or African American primarily on a biological, not a cultural, basis. But while physical appearance derived from biological inheritance may be the main touchstone of race in America, and cultural traits may be the main standard for race (or ethnicity) in Malaysia, in both countries these two race signifiers are also greatly conflated and combined. Obama, for instance, has been scrutinised for his language, mannerisms, sports preferences and, most prominently and perversely, his religious affiliations, all as a measure of how \u201cblack\u201d or how \u201cAmerican\u201d he is. Similarly, in Malaysia, although \u201cMalay\u201d, \u201cChinese\u201d and other racial categories are associated more strongly with cultural traits, including language and religion, than with biological traits, the latter are frequently invoked when it suits a particular cause. For example, the former long-serving prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, known as a vocal proponent of the Malay community and head of the politically dominant United Malay National Organisation, was nevertheless alleged by some political opponents to be of paternal Indian biological lineage and therefore not to be a \u201creal Malay\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Racial Realities: Social Constructs and the Stuff of Which They Are Made Global Dialogue Volume 12, Number 2 (Summer\/Autumn 2010)\u2014Race and Racisms Eric C. Thompson, Associate Professor of Sociology National University of Singapore How can we deny the reality of race? It is a truth so many hold to be self-evident. Travel around the world, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,8,394,20],"tags":[8415,8416,8417,3760,3519],"class_list":["post-18484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-eric-c-thompson","tag-eric-thompson","tag-global-dialogue","tag-malaysia","tag-singapore"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}