Читать книгу Asian America - Pawan Dhingra - Страница 33

Even though race is a matter of historical and social construction, as opposed to biological processes, unfortunately it is not going away. Once categorized as a distinct racial category, people begin to believe it. Race is hard to eradicate at the subjective level, partly because both those who constitute the majority (when it comes to racial categorization, “majority” refers not to a numerical quantity but to one’s membership in the dominant racial group, i.e. white) and minorities (those classified as nonwhite) start to feel strong bonds to members of their socially constructed race. It is continually reinforced “as a fundamental principle of social organization and identity formation” (Winant 2000: 184). Being part of a group creates comfort. Cultural norms start to develop over time. Especially in a society that is so deeply organized by racial categories, not being straightforwardly a member of a racial group could make it harder for some people to feel attached to others (this may be true, for example for multiracial people who are phenotypically ambiguous and difficult to classify). Just as importantly, moreover, racialization has become embedded in many social institutions. Racial categorization was (and continues to be) codified in the law, for example. The US Constitution is a case in point. In the United States’ founding document, African Americans were defined as “three-fifths” a person. Today, we judge schools, for instance, based on how racially diverse they are.

Another challenge in eradicating race as a concept is our cognitive dependence on it, even as that dependence misguides us. The brain classifies people in terms of social categories, including race, in order to simplify our reading of people. The brain tends to put people, objects, or ideas into groups and give them labels, so that we can then act on them in a predetermined way without having to consider the item’s (whether person, object, or idea) individual characteristics. This makes daily interactions much easier. For example, we have a mental image of what a chair looks like: it has a level seat, four legs, and a back. When we see an object that fits that description, we perceive it to be a “chair” and so we know how to act on it: we sit on it. This makes daily life much easier than inspecting each chair we encounter. Once we have seen lots of chairs, we can allow objects that do not exactly meet that description to still be chairs (e.g. chairs with only three legs).

This is a useful cognitive device, but when it is applied to people, it can have negative consequences. We are quick to classify people based on little information. Skin tone and hairstyle are easy means of classifying people into what we call “race.” But as explained above, those characteristics do not tell us anything meaningful about people, like intelligence, morals, social skills, and so on. Still, these criteria persist partly because of their significance socially and partly because they are stark visual cues. For instance, we could classify people based on eye color or height. But these are more difficult to either discern or to categorize differently. What this suggests is that the criteria (i.e. skin tone, hair texture, etc.) we have used are relatively random. And the term we have used for these random categories that ultimately serve as cognitive tricks is “race.” For all of these historical, political, economic, emotional, and cognitive reasons, race is a social construction, but one that does not go away.