Race Power of an Illusion

Race: The Power of an Illusion

The constructed notion of race, as reinforced through good science, is also reinforced throughout the first episode of this PBS documentary. In the past, poor and racist science has attempted to classify human individuals according to racial categories and failed miserably. However, good science shows that the very notion of racial separations between individuals of different geographies and cultures is in fact specious, and genetically, under the skin, the human race shares more similarities than it does substantial differences, regardless of the culturally constructed notion of race and cultural attempts to use science to keep the notion of race a crucial part of scientific parlance and interest.

The series also notes that although the different nature of the races may appear different to the eye, and race is something one may assume one is an expert at, simply because one can see and because one experiences the world through the eyes as someone typified (or not typified) as a part or a particular racial category, this does not mean that categories such as Black and White or Chinese and Caucasian are manifest before cultural constructions of racial understanding. Rather, the category of race is essentially what we as human beings put into it as cultural beings. This is another reason to see race as a constructed notion, a notion more fraught with the emotional rather than intellectual implications of science.

Even from the point-of-view of the eye, this notion and method of classifying the human race can be unstable and tenuous. For example, individuals whom appear white may identify as African-Americans, because they have been brought up in African-American households and because their parents are dark of skin. Individuals may appear white because they are a part of the legacy of slavery in America, and white owners raped African-American slaves, causing some African-American individuals to have some racial characteristics of whites. Thus, one's genetic history may be present in that individual's long past, but not in a sense of 'whiteness' but in the legacy of slavery and of being black and oppressed in America. Science and the genetic legacy of race shows that race can easily, even within only a few generations, become a mutable, that is changeable and mutated category, because of history.

Thus, to a certain extent, history and genetics may be apparently written upon an individual's skin, but the idea that an African or black identity, or a white identity for some African individuals, to take only one example, is a seamless cultural identification for individuals whom are dark of skin is not true. Even the idea that blackness is sameness is constructed. Oppression may have caused slaves to be oppressed as blacks in America, but tribes created in Africa, for example, were often heavily contentious, and Zulus might react against other black nationals of the past with equal vehemence as Southern whites did against African-Americans.