Constructing Race

A Reflection

Bibliographic Data

ID3404246
AuthorsDavid Brion Davis (corresponding author)
Year1997
Volume54
Issue1
Pages7
Publication date1997-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2953310
OpenAlexW2333819205
LanguageEN
Citations received24

A LTHOUGH political rhetoric often conceals this truth, as we complete the twentieth century and prepare to enter a new millennium, no issue in America is as sensitive, potentially explosive, and resistant to resolution as the issue of race. To understand the meanings of race in the future, we must first uncover the historical and cultural contexts of the past in which separate human races were conceived. Since responsible scientists have long discredited any biological or genetic definition of racial groups, historians have increasingly recognized that the so-called races of mankind are the fortuitous and arbitrary inventions of European and American history, the by-products, primarily, of Europe's religious, economic, and imperial expansion across the seas of the earth. The arbitrary and cultural character of race has often been illustrated by contrasting the North American Negro, defined to include anyone with even a slight trace of African ancestry, with the complex gradations of racial intermixture found in Latin America. Why is someone who has seven European great-grandparents classified as black? We no longer speak of an Alpine a Mediterranean or a Hebrew race. But by what logic can the natives of Karachi, Madras, Yokohama, Manila, and Canton be conflated as Asian? And by what means did the Irish, Jews, and Arabs, at one time regarded as barbarous and even subhuman, become white? If race differentiates and divides groups of people, how important has it been as a means of unification? Of course, racial categories are no less real even when deprived of biological substance. Like serfdom, social castes, and royal or noble blood, concepts of race influence perception, including self-perception, and can above all represent a shared historical experience, such as that of Amerindians and African Americans in the United States. If there is wide agreement that races, including the white race, have been socially constructed or invented through history, the articles in this issue point to some momentous questions that historians and other scholars have not resolved. Are human beings universally inclined to dehumanize people who differ from them in physiognomy, phenotype, language, religion, social status, and even gender? When we categorize people by such criteria, temporarily repressing what we share and accentuating our differences, does the resulting Otherness inevitably debase and demean even if it sometimes emits a surreptitious appeal? Is racism simply a variant on intergroup prejudice, hostility, and genocide, such as that between Tutsis and Hutus in

Programming language · Race (biology · Reflection (computer programming · Sociology · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Race, History, and American Society

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