Illusion of Race Race: Power

Illusion of Race

Race: Power of an illusion

I scored 7/16 or less than 50% on 'Sorting People'! While I knew appearances are deceiving, and many attributes reveal more about stereotypes of the person who is assigning them than they do the individual being sorted, some of the results were surprising. I have had Black friends with very light skin and many European-descended people I have met have characteristics I would attribute to nonwhite heritage but one of the "white" portraits had dark enough skin tone I assumed he was Latino, and I got several of the Asian and Native American portraits miscategorized. If discrimination is perpetuated by surface appearance, then the Census should be asking about trait intensity, not race, if 'race' can pass but traits cannot. If some Blacks and Latinos can pass in the white world then preference and privilege seem assigned by attribute, which is then perhaps used to allege heritage.

"Explore Traits" was interesting to me because I don't know if the pictures represent the total alleged demographic and the individuals are examples, or if these are actual real individuals who have these characteristics, and the result is a demonstration that such results are possible, but not exhaustive: Does the absence of any of the American Indian portraits in the blood type B category for example mean that NO Native Americans have type B blood whatsoever? Or that none of these particular Native American individuals have type B but some others may? This implies the whole question of 'octoroon' etc.; i.e. how much blood is enough? [Later I find this addressed at length below.] I have a friend for example who was raised 'on the res,' but since his dad was only assigned 1/16th Indian blood and the mother is allegedly white, the son is not a Native and thus not recognized at law or by the Tribe. Furthermore the father was not born in a hospital and was given three names by white institutions until finally they gave him a birth certificate with an invented birthdate on it and no one actually knows what his birth date was anyway. We find out later in the timeline (1825) that Natives often granted full standing to non-Indians who assimilated fully enough. Our classification seems to do the exact opposite to Natives today, expelling them from recognition if they become too 'diluted.'

The Timeline examples that stand out to me are actually threads, because patterns illustrate how race is an ideology more strongly than do isolated incidents. In the slide 1868, we find the 14th Amendment is necessary to ensure equality under a Constitution that asserts all men are created equal. In the slide 1924, we find that since different states had different definitions of Black up until less than a century ago, so one's race could change crossing state lines, the result is a construct that would disappear without laws. They mandated something they couldn't define, and without the laws people would again be discussing attributes, i.e. preferences, which are not absolute. We call preference a 'reification,' an idea that does not exist in the tangible world and thus does not lend itself to quantitative measurement. Nowhere on earth is a thirteen-pound, six-foot long unit of 'scandal' or 'integrity' to be found, for example. Nor apparently can someone find a benchmark unit of 'race'.

The second thread runs through the slides 1887, 1934 and 1997. Jim Crow led to better homes for whites than Blacks even after they fought WWII side by side. What this demonstrates is one clear way we very literally live within the tangible outcome of discrimination today, and the Web site goes on to expand on this in "Where Race Lives" and "To See or Not To See" very convincingly. What interests me here is specifically the assertion that "Jim Crow unites poor and wealthy whites, while denying African-Americans equality." I do not contest that the U.S. legal, i.e. white, institution actively and deliberately removed non-whites' means to confront and dismantle discrimination at law. Nor do I contest that the intent of Jim Crow was to unite whites against non-whites. What interests me here is the depth of wealthy whites' 'unity' with poor whites: While skin color undeniably prevented non-whites from the polls and courts, white skin hardly guaranteed passage to privileged spaces endowed by wealth. The result demonstrates the last slide in this 'thread,' what discrimination aims to achieve, which I argue is privilege. Elitism is the objective of subordinating, rather than expelling or simply destroying the Other. Had whites hated Blacks that much they could have wiped them out like the Native Americans. But privelige is useless without someone to be better than. Jim Crow institutionalized Black exclusion but nor that did not enfranchise white women. It will be interesting to find out the demographic profile of subprime mortgage lending once the legal dust settles after another decade or so. Perhaps PBS will have a new slide called '2007: Reverse Redlining' to complete this series.