The Racial Construct in Brief

The Racial Construct In Brief

By Rick Smith

"In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."

-Harry A. Blackmun, former U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice

There is an obvious and undeniable difference in the politics of the White race and others. Whereas it is common to hear slogans of “Native Pride” or “Black Power”, to substitute “White” for either of those would be considered racist. To understand the reasons for this phenomenon is integral to overcoming the culture of denial that has kept racism alive but subdued. This involves comprehending the differences between race and ethnicity, the anthropological perspective of race, and how race is seen in modern society.

Ethnic is defined by dictionary.com as being “pertaining to or characteristic of a people, esp. a group (ethnic group) sharing a common and distinctive culture, religion, language, or the like”. This, for example, would pertain to something like “German” as opposed to “Italian”. Race, on the other hand, is defined by dictionary.com as being “an arbitrary classification of modern humans, sometimes, esp. formerly, based on any or a combination of various physical characteristics, as skin color, facial form, or eye shape, and now frequently based on such genetic markers as blood groups”. This, therefore, is where issues such as “White” and “Black” come in without considering the subdivisions within White of Russian and French, or within Black of Nigerian and Ethiopian.

Race as a whole is considered an invalid construct by anthropologists. This conclusion is drawn from the history of race as well as the science behind it. In a historical context, race finds its most pivotal moment during the Age of Discovery. In particular, the settlement of the Americas led to a desire by the colonists to extract the natural resources of the vast continents. Notoriously, West African people were shipped by the millions to North America especially and used for slavery. In this way, the population of the colonies became divided into “Blacks” and “Whites”, whereas previously ethnicity was more dominant a factor. For this reason, anthropologists view race as being an arbitrary construct of humanity and nothing scientific in and of itself. In fact, in DNA terms, 85% of human variation occurs within ethnic populations, whereas race accounts for as little as 5% of human variation.

Common knowledge suggests that a slogan such as “White Power” or “White Pride” is racist, and perhaps so. White people as a racial group, although not always as individuals, occupy a privileged situation in North American society. This is because, in early American history, White people decided that having darker skin was morally reprehensible and thus spent centuries exploiting those of races classified based on physical appearance. Kept in slavery for that long, the emancipation turned Black people from penniless slaves to just plain penniless, and institutional discrimination for almost one hundred years afterwards continued to keep them down. In addition to this, while the law became race-neutral, that did not create any more opportunities in a society where the White race continued to hold power through their centuries of accumulated stolen wealth. A similar step-by-step can be applied to Natives in Canada in particular. Having been deemed one race, as opposed to the various ethnicities of Iroquois, Cree, Algonquin, etc, Natives were treated as a race inferior to Whites. Kept isolated from mainstream society, they were given the opportunity to enter through the residential schools which provided only sexual and physical abuse in an attempted cultural genocide. Today, a White man gets agitated when encountering Black Pride and is baffled when White Pride is seen as racist, but yet does not notice the lack of racism associated with pride in ethnic heritages among White people. For example, while there are African-American student groups at universities, there are Irish, Greek and Italian student groups alongside them. One is racial for a group that has historically been afflicted by race, and the other are ethnic groups for those who have grown up to recognize ethnicity as what defines them.

Calls for pride or power to a particular race other than white, therefore, should not be treated with alarm in the way that calls for White Power or White Pride should. They are invalid constructs, but they are constructs that allow the Black people who were categorized as such for the purpose of destructive exploitation to band together for collective strength to recover where sometimes White society is unable to help them. Natives feel they must unite to advance themselves because White people in history created the category for exploitation. When categories such as racial ones are made for such despicable purposes, the only choice those who have received such debasing treatment have is to recover by using that construct.