| Race is an elusive, perplexing,
troubling, and enduring aspect of life in the United States.
Race has been a critical factor in the economic, social and
political structure of American society from its pre-colonial
beginnings to the present. Any examination of American social
history points to the legacy of America’s fascination
with skin color, caste, and social status. Race and beliefs
about race have had crucial effects on the course of American
history. For instance, European Americans used duplicitous means
to obtain land held by American Indians. Throughout American
history, Black Americans have been at the center of several
controversies arising from fundamental constitutional questions:
the debates over slavery during the framing of the Constitution
and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Civil War, and
the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1906’s
to end the denial of Blacks’ basic rights as citizens.
The history of Asian Americans in the United States provides
other examples of race’s influence specifically the Exclusion
Act of 1882 against Chinese immigration and the forced internment
of Japanese American citizens during World War II. These examples
demonstrate the broad-based and fundamental significance of
race in the Unites States.
I assume that race has been and is the variable that matters
most in the United States. A view predicated on the belief
that race is perhaps the most visible of all cultural differences
and on America’s history of racial segregation and racism.
In addition, race has been and continues to be the ultimate
measure of social exclusion and inclusion, because it is a
visible factor that historically and currently determines
the rules and bounds of social and cultural interaction When
race, in North America, is used as a social classification
system, physical characteristics of different human groups
are believed to reflect emotional, cognitive, psychological,
intellectual, and moral qualities. The qualities, both external
and internal, are presumed to be inheritable unlike ethnicity
or culture which are fluid and flexible and subject to change.
Strongly infused with the notion of race is the conviction
and unsupported belief that nature or God has made racial
differences as fixed and unalterable. The differences between
racial groups could never be bridged or transcended. So the
idea goes.
Race is defined as a sociopolitical designation in which
individuals are assigned to a particular racial group based
on presumed biological or visible characteristics such as
skin color, physical features, and in some cases, language.
For example, Hispanic is a sociopolitical racial category
assigned to a group of people who share a language and some
common cultural and historical elements. In fact, Hispanics
vary in terms of skin color and physical features, and therefore
do not constitute a distinct racial group on the basis of
visible characteristics alone. Nevertheless, White people
are designated White non-Hispanic to separate the groups.
For historically disenfranchised Americans, including Blacks,
American Indians, Asia Americans, and people of Latin descent,
racial classification is thought to reflect individual members’
and the group’s psychological social status. The reader
would be careful not to confuse genetics or biology with race
as noted by many scholars.
As one scholar writes “it [Race] was the cultural invention
of arbitrary meaning applied to what appeared to be natural
divisions within the human species. The meanings has social
value but no intrinsic relationship to the biological diversity
itself. Race has a reality created in the human mind, not
a reflection of objective truths. It was fabricated as an
existential reality out of a combination of recognizable physical
differences and some incontrovertible social facts: the conquest
of indigenous peoples, their domination and exploitation,
and the importation of a vulnerable and controllable population
from Africa to service the insatiable greed of some European
entrepreneurs. The physical differences were a major tool
by which the dominant whites constructed and maintained social
barriers and economic inequalities: that is they consciously
sought to create social stratification based on visible differences.
(Smedley, 1993, p. 22)
Racial Socialization and racial identity
In this country, racial segregation has been the norm, and
as communities and families serve as powerful socializing
forces, race is an integral component of our socialization
experiences. Who we see and do not see on a day-to-day basis,
the roles we see people assume, and importantly, how people
from particular racial groups appear and are treated in comparison
to others communicates powerful and lasting messages about
who we are and are not.
Racial socialization can inspire self-pride among racial group
members and help equip them with strategies to cope with the
forces hostile to their physical and mental well being. In
the private lives of Americans, socio-racial forces have the
potential to constrain individual self-expression for persons
of certain racial groups and to falsely inflate feelings of
self-worth in others. For all racial beings, racial socialization
can lead to the experiencing of conflict as well as the outcomes
that arise from having to reckon with a painful reality of
racial oppression. Instructive to an awareness of self is
an understanding of race's meaning in one’s life. Racial
socializattion provides daily unstated rules and guidelins
about how to interact with others in one’s own racial
group and not in one’s racial group.
Through racial socialization, individuals are imbued with
messages that determine the appropriateness of inappropriateness
of their roles as racial beings. Racial socialization intersects
with other socializing forces, such as social class, gender,
and ethnicity. In addition, religiosity, maturational factors,
skin color, and the quality of relationships one has with
those of similar and different races contribute to differences
in how people experience race and to their development of
internalized views of who they are as racial beings. Race
socialization is also influenced by the racial themes of one’s
generation. The range and compexity of racial influences and
forces make the experience of race deeply contextualized and
not readily recognized or even acknowledged. Remarkably, emerging
from these contextualized experiences in race is a pattern
of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that form the basis of
racial identity, that is, how people view themselves
and the world through racialized lenses.
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