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Talking with Mr. Jackson after this week's Chautauqua I learned about the one drop rule, i.e. if you have any sort of blood ancestor who is black you yourself are black, regardless of how you look. I guess I always had a vague sense of this, but why is that? If someone is 3/4 white, why are the identified as black? Isn't this concept outdated?
Along with the one drop rule are also things like the "paper bag test" (if you were darker than a paper bag) and "passing" (someone who had Black ancestry but looked white so as long as they didn't tell anyone no one knew) I think that you are still considered Black because a lot of society's views are based upon how you look, and if people perceive you as such then thats what you are. I think that its interesting how there is not as much emphasis placed on the intermediaries such as mulatto anymore.
Race as a social construction: If race is purely a social construction, wouldn't the first step to undermine racism itself and the institute it creates be to eliminate the societal outlook on race itself? While I understand the importance of not sweeping things under the rug - the sort of blind eye that was turned in much of the north during the 20th Century - isn't proliferating the idea of a socially constructed race, itself, debilitating to the movement to eliminate race?
so what then do u propose is the solution? you must recognize the problem before you can correct it, and if society as a whole does not acknowledge the fact that race is a socially construction then how can it be identified for change, or recognized as a change-able fact in and of itself? And I think that the fact that race is a social construction is important, it must also be acknowledged that the reasons it was created for are what need to be corrected as well... economic issues need to be addressed before real institutional change can be made.
That is exactly the point. If we believe race is PURELY a social construction, backed only by putative economic interests, then the only life blood for what we call 'race' is a continued acceptance of that same social construction we are seeking to eliminate. While we may argue that race was originally propped up by capitalism, it seems as to me that the argument has evolved to propose that racism now exists to keep capitalism afloat in modern times -hence why we consider racism to be an 'institution.'
I've added these comments to the "Racism" entry. Thanks for posting! --David Sheridan, 1/27/09
