This paper addresses three interconnected questions about race in American history and contemporary society. The first section traces the shifting moral and social construction of race across three texts — Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Ross's Slavery Ordained of God, and Baldwin's Notes on a Native Son — showing how attitudes toward slavery evolved from guilt to celebration to raw aftermath. The second section examines racial fluidity, drawing on Saperstein, Penner, Eberhardt, and Jimenez to explain how race functions as a socially projected and institutionally reinforced construct. The third section applies Rosa and Bonilla's critique of racialized power structures to argue for community-based approaches, including community policing, as practical tools for reducing racial bias.
From Jefferson to Ross to Baldwin, a theme of struggle emanates from the issue of race. Jefferson (1781) acknowledged the problems that slavery placed on the nation, recognizing that "God is just" and that Americans were inviting divine judgment by continuing to enslave their fellow human beings. And yet he hoped that slaveholders — himself among them — would be good enough to free their slaves voluntarily, so that the social order could proceed in a stable and positive direction rather than a destructive one. Then came Ross (2005), the slavery apologist, who declared that slavery was ordained by God and was "for the good of the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family." This sentiment revealed that many Americans were not aligned with Jefferson's moral unease, and that the country was accumulating the very sins Jefferson feared would be punished. Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son leaves the reader with the final effect of all this tension: his father was torn apart and consumed by racism, rendered mean and psychologically damaged by the belief that all white men existed to oppress Black people. Baldwin had to fight his way through this nightmare of a home life to make his own way in a world he had been raised to fear.
The racial content in Jefferson's Notes consists of his description of the peculiar condition of slavery and the moral damage it inflicted on all involved. He showed how masters could lose their tempers and take out their rage on their slaves, and how this behavior could be absorbed by their children, who would grow up assuming such conduct was acceptable — all while, in Jefferson's framing, God watched and waited to see whether Americans would correct their moral failings and emancipate the enslaved. Jefferson's Notes are suffused with what might be called a guilty conscience. This stands in sharp contrast to Ross's work. Ross celebrates slavery and implies that God sanctions this arrangement as a benefit to all parties. It is the complete inverse of Jefferson's view, who, though a slaveholder himself, at least recognized the moral problem. Ross, by contrast, frames slavery as a moral virtue. Baldwin, in his writing, treats the aftermath of slavery — the effects of racism on the lives of real people, such as his father, who grew up in New Orleans and felt the sting of racism throughout his entire life.
The historical mutability of race is evident across all three writings. For Jefferson, race was something Americans needed to confront and resolve so that the social order — in which slavery figured so prominently — would not spiral out of control and lead to collective moral decay. Then, in the following century, Ross arrived to trumpet slavery as though it were a boon to mankind, even to the enslaved themselves. Whereas Jefferson appeared to recognize the slave as fully human and perhaps as an equal in moral standing, Ross seemed to regard the enslaved person as sub-human and in need of the white master's instruction and control — while the master and his family reaped enormous material benefit. In Ross's framing, it was a win-win: the slave had shelter and the master's household lived in abundance.
Then, in the twentieth century, the reality of slavery and racism struck with full force. Baldwin recounted the effects of racism on his father's mind — how it consumed and tortured him, how it finally bled into Baldwin himself, and how he had to let it bleed out through his writing so that the ghosts of the past could at last be expelled. Jefferson had called it: he predicted that God's hand would not be restrained indefinitely. Ross ignored the warning. Baldwin demonstrated that the reckoning was already underway, as Black and white Americans found themselves in profound and ongoing conflict.
As Saperstein and Penner (n.d.) note, people calibrate their sense of self based on how they believe others perceive them. If they feel that others are judging them as "white" or as "Black," they begin to become what they sense is being projected onto them. This is what is meant by the concept of racial fluidity. There is no single, static concept of race; it is flowing, shifting, and constantly becoming as people interact across groups. Racial fluidity allows individuals to present themselves in accordance with what they feel they should be, while also adapting their self-presentation in accordance with what others expect them to be. There is thus a constant interplay between the self one projects and the self that others project onto one.
Eberhardt (n.d.) also addresses this dynamic — how Black people are frequently associated with crime or animalistic behavior in the social imagination. In some cases, Black individuals may conform to this projection and perform a "thug life" persona, such as that seen in music videos where artists rap about being a gangster surrounded by objectified women. However, in real life, many of these same artists present themselves as ordinary human beings who are fully aware that they are performing a particular image for an audience. Their interior, looking-glass self bears little resemblance to the self-presentation they offer for the amusement or derision of others.
Racial fluidity carries two significant implications for how institutions racialize individuals. First, institutions tend to box individuals into a single racial category, even though race itself is a concept built on imaginary distinctions. Second, racialization intensifies racial fluidity by institutionalizing the pressure to present oneself as others see one. As Jimenez (2017) points out, this dynamic affects newcomers to the United States with particular force: immigrants arrive to find that Americans already hold preconceived notions of who they are based on race, and they often find themselves compelled to conform to those notions — even when those projections bear no relation to who they actually are. This is especially problematic in debates over immigration, where entire groups are suddenly labeled as criminals, rapists, or people seeking to exploit government benefits, when this characterization does not reflect the reality of most immigrants at all. Institutionalized racialization thus causes serious harm by labeling people of color and pressuring them to inhabit identities defined by a white establishment.
Racial fluidity both supports and negates conventional ideas about race in the United States. It supports them insofar as it reveals that race carries genuine social meaning — a meaning built from preconceptions, biases, and prejudices. It shows that race is, at its core, a projection of the mind: the attributes, characteristics, stereotypes, and behaviors that people associate in a prejudicial manner with particular groups. At the same time, racial fluidity negates race by demonstrating that it is little more than a performed behavior — a set of prearranged conditions that people conform to in order to navigate society. Race is a construct in this sense and carries no more meaning than what people choose to assign to it. If people assigned it no meaning, the looking-glass self would cease to function as a racial mirror, and the prejudice associated with race would lose its footing.
What Rosa means by urging Americans to redirect their attention toward the power structures that marginalize minorities is that advocating for marginalized individuals alone is like applying a bandage to a wound that has already turned gangrenous in a limb that requires amputation. The gangrenous power structures within the United States are what produce and sustain marginalized and oppressed communities in the first place. The system is what funnels Black Americans into prisons as though incarceration were a new form of slavery; it fractures Black communities and families, perpetuates cycles of recidivism, and generates the political conditions that allow racialization to remain a defining feature of public life (Rosa & Bonilla, 2017). Rosa's argument, then, is that Americans must confront and deconstruct the power structure itself if they genuinely want to end the suffering of marginalized populations.
The community-based approach is realized when people who are directly affected by a problem become partners in the strategic decision-making process aimed at solving it. It is an empowering framework that refuses to treat victims as passive recipients of aid, recognizing them instead as people capable of taking proactive action to right a wrong. Rosa engages in this approach through the VOCES project, in which he and a fellow teacher collaborated with Latinx Studies students to develop ways to "learn ethnographic research skills to document, analyze, and contest the stigmatization of language practices in a predominantly Latinx community where linguistic diversity is often viewed as a problem from mainstream perspectives" (Rosa, n.d., p. 112). By coming together as a community, teachers and students worked to reframe language as an opportunity rather than a barrier to communication and relationship-building.
"How institutions reinforce racial constructs"
"Rosa's critique of racialized systemic power"
"Community policing as a solution to racial bias"
You’re 77% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 3 sections.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.