Читать книгу Understanding Racism - Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl - Страница 8

Race and racism are in an ugly mutual engagement and cannot exist without each other. Racism birthed racial categories and our contemporary understanding of “races.” However, before further discussion about racism, it is imperative to know that race is a social construction and is without any biological reality. Race is the assignment of a categorical label to a group of people who are perceived to share a set of physical features. For example, Whites are often described as sharing the features of light skin tone, straight hair, blue or green eyes, narrow nose, and thin lips. Of course, there are some people who are deemed “White” who fit this description but many who do not. There are “White” people who have curly hair, a wide nose, brown eyes, and/or brown skin. A perceived set of physical features helps guide our day-to-day social classification of people into races, but there is no unifying set of features that would encompass all Whites, all Asians, all Blacks, all Latinxs, all Native Americans, or any racial group. Moreover, research shows that humans are 99.9% identical in their genetic makeup, and there is no set of genetic markers that is distinctly shared by racial groups.⁷ In fact, people who are of different races can have more genetically in common with one another than people who are deemed of the same race.⁸ Thus, race is not biological and is instead a social construction—that is, a construct created and maintained by society.

Racial groups, to reiterate, were created by and are maintained through society’s practice of racism. Racism is a form of oppression based on race. The word oppression comes from the Latin and French words that mean “state of being overcome” or “constriction,” which is revealing of the nature of oppression.⁹ Any social oppression is identified by an ideological belief that there is a classification of people who are at the top of a hierarchy and who are superior and that consequently there is systemic (of the system) and systematic (of a pattern) provision of resources, opportunities, and benefits to those at the top of the hierarchy, along with the simultaneous denial of resources, opportunities, and benefits to those at the bottom of the hierarchy. Oppression can operate through the micro level of individual engagement and at the macro level of institutions and structures. Oppression can be based on any type of social categorization that society deems important enough to assign value to.¹⁰ For example, classism is a form of oppression based on money and sustained by capitalism, and sexism is a form of oppression based on gender and sustained by patriarchy. Racism is a form of oppression based on race and sustained by White supremacy. White supremacy is fundamentally the valuing of people deemed White and the disvaluing of people deemed non-White. White colonialism and imperialism led to the creation of a racial hierarchy and racial categories wherein people with light skin and of European ancestry were categorized as “White” and were placed at the top of the racial hierarchy. Who is considered “White” has fluctuated throughout time, but the valuing of people deemed White has been consistent.¹¹ The continuing operation and ramifications of racism are addressed by the theories of racism in this book.