The definition of race is ethnicity, and the definition of ethnicity is traits, background, allegiance, or association. In these definitions it does not say that your race has to do with the color of skin a person is, and I feel thats what society determines race to be. When someone asks me though to define race it is a very complicated question because there are so many emotions that conflict an answer to actually decide what race means specifically to me. When a person says race though the first thing that does come to my mind is the color of someones skin and how that actually does define where a person comes from. For example when a person is black you associate them with a culture that has black people in it, such as African Americans. Another example is when one sees a brown person when your in California one automatically thinks Mexican and that their whole family is Mexican even though that person can be a minority of things. If someone went around the world though and got definitions of race from different countries everyone would have a different opinion because everyone has different experiences with race. The experience that someone has with race is what gives that person that definition of race. So the definition of race in California might be a different definition in China.
Personally though race to me means where your roots, where your family is, and what rituals, religions, and beliefs one might share with someone else. When someone ask me what race/ethnicity I am I do not say Mexican, Honduran, and Jamaican because of my skin color, I say that because of the similar beliefs I share with those people and thats where my ancestry is from. The signs of respect we share, our food, our religion, and many more is what makes our race, not the color of skin I am. My father was born in Honduras and my mother was born here, so race has always been an interesting topic to me. People ask me what race I am almost everyday because my skin color does not give them enough information to base a ethnicity off of. Race will always be a complicated subject because there is to much history involved with it and to much emotion that comes with the word race. They used to enslave people based on what color a person is, and they still be little people on what color one is. So race as one can see will never be just black and white there will always be shades of grey in my opinion.
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Hi Nelson,
ReplyDeleteI very much appreciate you bringing in your personal experience with racial categorization into your blog- your anecdotes are great illustrations about how complex race in the United States is. I agree with you that this classification can get even more tricky because people do feel so emotional about them. It sounds like you are maybe saying that cultural classifications (ethnic classifications?) can sit within a racial group- i.e. someone's racial classification may be Latino, but in reality they could be Mexican, Honduran, Salvadoran or any other national classification. I also think you are right that peoples definition of race is based in their experiences, so then definitions of race will most likely be very different in different societies or countries. All of these different factors make race a very complicated subject- that is why we are tackling it in class! I hope, as a class, we are able to develop some working definitions.
Your view on race links directly with the idea that race is a socially manufactured construct. You continue to address the idea that we as humans base our definitions of race on our experiences, and thus we are creating our own beliefs as to what race actually is. Since in creating race we are also including various biases and individual thought. Like you said, there will always be grey areas on the topic of race.
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