{"id":41617,"date":"2015-07-01T20:55:55","date_gmt":"2015-07-01T20:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41617"},"modified":"2017-04-23T18:36:54","modified_gmt":"2017-04-23T18:36:54","slug":"the-social-construction-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41617","title":{"rendered":"The Social Construction of Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Social Construction of Race<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Jacobin<\/a>
\n2015-06-25<\/p>\n

Brian Jones<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Race is a social fiction imposed by the powerful on those they wish to control.<\/em><\/p>\n

The first friend I ever had was a little boy named Matt. We were maybe four or five years old. Matt came to me one day with a very serious look on his face and gave me a little talking-to. He explained to me: \u201cBrian, you\u2019re brown. And I\u2019m peach.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember saying anything back, but I think in my mind I was like \u201cOkay. . . ? Well these Legos<\/a> aren\u2019t going to build themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matt was trying to do me a favor. He was trying to introduce me to the very bizarre and peculiar rules that we all know as grownups \u2014 very important things to understand. If you didn\u2019t understand them, you\u2019d find American life and society very strange. You\u2019d do things you shouldn\u2019t do, go places you shouldn\u2019t go. You\u2019d mess up if you didn\u2019t understand the particular rules that govern the ideology of race in the United States.<\/p>\n

Sometimes when you go outside of the American context you begin to appreciate how particular and unique these rules are. I remember reading about a (probably apocryphal<\/a>) interview with the former dictator of Haiti<\/a>, Papa Doc Duvalier<\/a>, who referred to the \u201cwhite majority population\u201d of Haiti. The American journalist interviewing him didn\u2019t understand, so they had to define to each other what makes somebody white or black. The American journalist explained that in the US, one metaphorical drop of black blood designates someone as black<\/a>. And Duvalier replied, \u201cWell, that\u2019s our definition of white.\u201d<\/p>\n

The whole idea of this talk \u2014 if you take away nothing else \u2014 is this: the whole thing is made up. That\u2019s it. And you can make it up different ways; and people have and do. And it changes. And it has nothing to do with biology or genetics. There\u2019s a study of several decades of census records that found that twice as many people who call themselves white have recent African ancestry as people who call themselves black.<\/p>\n

This is not just a matter of folksy beliefs, or prejudice, or wrong ideas, though those things are all in the mix. This is a matter of law…<\/p>\n

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

Race is a social fiction imposed by the powerful on those they wish to control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,1467,8,26,6940,394,20],"tags":[20352,20328],"class_list":["post-41617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-slavery","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-brian-jones","tag-jacobin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41617","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=41617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53646,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41617\/revisions\/53646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}