What does “racism” mean? Part 2/5 — What does “race” mean?
“Race” is another one of those words we all hear and say regularly. Most of us take it for granted that we know what it means and don’t think about it too hard. It’s just “common sense”. Everyone knows what “race” means. Right? Well, they do and they don’t. On the one hand since meaning is use and the language community does use it fairly consistently, the meaning of the word derives from their usage of it. Since they can reliably use it they know what it means on some level. It’s when you start digging around the edges that people start to realize that they’re not sure why they use “race” a particular way. They begin to realize that while they subconsciously know what it means, many of their conscious explanations of what it means aren’t exactly true. To take you on a tour of the meaning of the word “race” I’m going to talk about race as being culturally constructed as well as having a genetic basis. I’m also going to talk about how race can be passively constructed through shifting political realities as well as actively constructed through propaganda. First I’m going to talk a little bit about how I learned all of this though.
I took a three course sequence of training sessions at my place of work called a “Racial Sojourn”. The basic idea was to examine race through several different lenses and come out the other side with a better vocabulary and emotional tool set with which to discuss race and race related issues. That course taught me the skills to communicate things that I learned in the bayous of Louisiana growing up. More than that though, it taught me subtle things I had never considered before. One of the exercises we engaged in was a “racial timeline”. We were asked to make a timeline which began on our birthday and went up to the present day, marking each of the major race related events in our lives. The people in the class compared their timelines and one of the things which I found most instructive was which specific words different people used to describe the same event. Specifically, my timeline had “the LA riots” and a facilitator’s timeline had “the beating of Rodney King”. The difference between those two perspectives spoke volumes to me. We both identified the event as one of the top twenty or thirty race-related events of our lifetimes but had completely different perspectives when describing it. I focused on the violence and the property damage and he focused on the individual tragedy which sparked the whole thing.
That wasn’t the only difference which that facilitator and I had during that course. One of the major discussions we had was around racial integration and appropriation. Specifically, the whitening of black America. The insistence by some that if black people want to be treated with the respect that’s afforded to members of our society they should act the way that white people act. Assimilation as a prerequisite for equity was something that I was very familiar with. I’m a Cajun from the bayous of Louisiana. My great-grandparents died white but they weren’t born that way. Cajuns weren’t white. They were “coonasses”. For anyone who’s never heard that term before, it’s a racial pejorative phrase which was used against Cajuns. My parents generation reclaimed the word in much the same way that the current generation of African-Americans are reclaiming the n-word. It shows up now on playful bumper stickers that you can buy at most south Louisiana gas stations but in my grandfather’s childhood it was a term of oppression which highlighted the fact that Cajuns weren’t white. My grandfather loved telling stories about his childhood and my mother’s childhood. He helped me understand that Cajuns became white and they worked damned hard for it!
In order to make that journey from “other” to whiteness Cajuns lost, minimized or mainstreamed many of their cultural traditions. They sacrificed their religious beliefs on the altar of whiteness. They did what they had to do in order to avoid the stigmatization and hatred which comes with being “other”. A “boucherie” is the highly ritualized slaughtering of a pig. It usually involves twenty to thirty people and has a very specific sequence of tasks which must be performed in order to efficiently make use of the entire pig. It’s a day of festivity for an entire family and I don’t mean that sarcastically. In many depictions of traditional Boucherie’s one family member plays the fiddle while others carve the pig and children dance. I can count on one hand the number of people I know who can still tell you how a Boucherie is done in all the details.
“Traiteurs” were Cajun healers and shaman who combined elements of Catholicism with religious rituals and herbalism of the Houma tribe. My grandmother had a wart treated by a traiteur and my aunt was treated for chronic ear infections by one. The traiteurs passed along their knowledge from one person to the next through a form of apprenticeship and initiation. I used “were” because I’m uncertain if there are any traiteurs left. The last one I knew died almost a decade ago. There are probably a few left scattered here and there but I would be surprised if the number whose age was under fifty was very large. Having faith healers and shaman is a particularly blatant cultural sign of “other” so the traiteurs were hidden and then forgotten.
What about Cajun music and dancing? Swing music’s popularity meant that we were allowed to keep that along with Zydeco but except in small pockets of south Louisiana the language is gone as a spoken language. I can understand it just barely and my son never will. My uncle’s hands were swatted with a ruler each time he didn’t speak English. Their generation didn’t dare teach Cajun French to their children. They needed to be “white”. We either learned proper Parisian French or not at all. They needed to be treated as equals. They succeeded. The work of my grandparents’ generation and my parents’ generation has paid off. Cajuns, despite what Tom Segura’s hilarious routine says, are just plain old white people now.
That’s what I took with me into that classroom. That intimate knowledge of just how hard my family fought to become white guided my viewpoint and my ideas. I stood by my family. When the same facilitator who had written “the beating of Rodney King” on his timeline suggested that America needed to stop demanding that black people assimilate, I thought to myself, “what makes him think he’s better than my family”. Then, because I have essentially no filters, I spoke my mind. I didn’t say those exact words of course but he heard them none the less. What I did was ask whether he thought that equity without true racial and cultural integration was possible. I asked if he knew of any historical examples where that had ever happened. The thirty of us in the class had been standing in a circle and the two of us began inching closer towards each other as we argued. It wasn’t until another one of the facilitators stepped in between us that I realized that everyone was worried that we were about to start a fist fight. I was taken one way and he was taken another and we were both calmed down.
Perhaps something that many people reading this have been shaken by is the concept that the Cajuns (or anyone) can “become” white. As though whiteness is some aspirational goal like wealth which a family can strive towards and if they only just work hard enough they can achieve. Believe it or not that’s not particularly far from the truth. Different groups of people are let into the whiteness club and every now and again people are expelled from the whiteness club. To find an example of the latter you need look no further back in time than my own childhood. When I was growing up, Persians were white. Just like Greeks, Italians and Turkish people today are white, their neighbors to the east were white when I was a kid. In fact the term “caucasian” comes from the mountain range which runs through the northern parts of Iran. They were literally so white that someone named the technical term for whiteness after them. Then the political landscape changed. It was no longer convenient for Persians to be part of the whiteness club so they were expelled.
Cajuns being accepted into whiteness and Persians being expelled from it are examples of the mutability of the cultural concept of whiteness. Some would leave it there and say that race is a culturally constructed concept that has no objective reality. While that argument is appealing it flies in the face of common sense. I can see who’s white. That means that while the category itself may be culturally constructed, it is constructed on the basis of objective traits that can be observed independent from the culture in which the observer or the observed lives. Specifically, it is constructed on the basis of observable physical expressions of genetically heritable traits. To refer back to the modern cognitive scientific theory of categorization, categories are formed around exemplars. Exemplars are the “prototypical” category members that are at the center of the group. Whether or not someone is a member of a particular race depends on how near they are to the exemplars. Nearness to the exemplars is based on those externally observable and genetically heritable traits. So there is an underlying genetic basis to race. People who are more genetically similar to one another are going to be more likely to look alike than two randomly selected people from two random places. Genetic similarity is directly correlated with externally observable similarity. That’s about as far as the relationship between genes and race goes though. No one is going around with gene sequencers in order to figure out what race someone is. They just look at them.
The fact that there’s an underlying genetic basis for race isn’t incompatible with the idea that race is culturally constructed though. There is no objective basis for selecting how many racial categories there are. There is no objective basis for selecting who the prototypical members of a race are. There is no objective basis for selecting where exactly the boundaries between one race and another are. Those determinations aren’t made arbitrarily though. They’re usually made on the basis of political alliances between ethnic groups. These aren’t necessarily negotiated alliances or explicitly answered questions. It’s not like the “Council of White Folk” got pissed off at the Persian delegate and kicked them out. Political alliances and allegiances shift over time. When those shift in a way that makes two neighboring culturally constructed races allies then they might merge. When an alliance shifts to pit a small group near the boundary of a socially constructed race against the majority then that group might get cut out of the race. These sorts of effects are enhanced or diminished based on whether there are also cultural and ethnic similarities or differences which might compound with the physically observable ones.
That’s not quite everything though. Race isn’t solely constructed passively as cultural allegiances naturally shift over time. Individual people can push or pull the boundaries. They do this using those prototypes I keep mentioning. They create propaganda which caricatures members of cultural groups in ways that accentuates their physical differences and presents them against a powerful emotionally negative backdrop. Whether the cartoon drawing has ridiculously enlarged lips or ridiculously tiny eyes it doesn’t matter. Maybe they have an exaggerated under-bite, toad-like nostrils instead of noses or maybe they have gigantic noses. No matter what physically observable differences exist between one group or another, the propaganda that is trying to get some particular group seen as “other” will dramatically overplay those features and, again, display them against an emotionally negative backdrop. That emotionally negative backdrop is key. They might be shown living in disgusting circumstances or they might be depicted acting in immoral or unintelligent ways. Whatever the particulars, those exaggerated traits get mentally bound to the negative emotions caused by the imagery and make you more likely to perceive people with those traits negatively. More likely to perceive them as “other”. More likely to say they’re another race.
That’s what “race” means. It’s a way of dividing humanity up using externally observable features along culturally defined borders, often through the usage of cartoon propaganda. That doesn’t really explain why humanity does it though. It’s simply a description of what the phenomenon is, how it comes to be and how it changes over time. The next part about what “individual racism” means will get more into the “why” of racism. It will specifically look into why the Italians and the Irish suddenly became white in the decades following 1865 despite how much white people hated them in the decades prior.
