Wrap-up to Video Series & Some Lecture Notes

I thought yesterday's (Thurs. 9/29) class went well, although we did not make the kind of progress I had hoped to make. So, I will be using this blog today to catch up a bit.

WRAP-UP OF VIDEO SERIES:

There are a couple final observations I'd like to make about Part 3 of the video series. Recall that the two main points we focused on yesterday were the Ozawa-Thind Supreme Court cases and the history of housing discrimination, among a few other points I made.

Toward the end of the video, they talked about America as a "colorblind" society. Many people profess to not see color, just people. Also, they talk about Dr. King's dream of a society where people will be judged based on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. But, we also need to remember that Dr. King was describing a DREAM he had, NOT THE REALITY. And the unfortunate fact is that we have a ways to go to realize this dream. And to realize it, we must first take race into account.

1. Supreme Court Justice, Harry Blackmun, acknowledged the above point in a famous affirmative action case: that we must take account of race in order to get beyond racism.

2. John Powell had the last word, observing that we should be UNCOMFORTABLE with the present arrangement.


NOW, TO THE "BASIC DEFINITIONS:"

A. Let's address some issues relevant to the definition of some basic terms in this field of race and ethnic relations. It is important to recognize some of the controversy surrounding some of these definitions, such as the definition of "race." It should also be noted that this is not an exhaustive list -- there will be many more terms we'll be defining and discussing throughout the term.

1. CULTURE: I decided to include this term because we will encounter other terms and issues that presuppose some understanding of it: terms such as "multicultural" or "cultural diversity." So what is culture?

a.) I purposely selected this long definition because it is all-inclusive -- covers both non-material and material aspects. Broadly, values, norms, material goods (really any object fashioned by human hands). Important to acknowledge the physical or material because many different groups have contributed objects, inventions, foods, music, etc.

b.) Interesting to note various things that Americans have made uniquely our own. Foods such as pizza; Mexican foods such as tacos; African-American jazz & blues. The English language itself is actually very multicultural -- many common English terms have come from many different languages.

c.) Various metaphors have been used to describe American culture -- "melting pot," which implies ASSIMILATION; and more recently (and I believe, accurately) "salad bowl," "stew," "stir-fry," all of which reflect CULTURAL PLURALISM, which implies that the various racial and ethnic groups that make up America maintain their distinctiveness (unique flavors) at the same time they share being Americans.

2. RACE: as you can obviously see, this definition is more than just a definition; it also embodies an argument or criticism of the concept along the lines that we saw in the video series, "Race: the power of an illusion." It is very controversial, although I believe it can be said that there is a consensus among biologists, anthropologists, and other experts that "race" as a biological classification (designating distinct groups of homo sapiens or subspecies) has little or no validity.

a.) Historically, it is a notion that has been scientifically challenged since it was first introduced back in the late 1700s. Ironically, one of the scientists who first propounded a racial classification, Johann Fredrich Blumenbach (1776), also upheld the unity of the human species against an alternative view at the time which argued that races had been separately created (which was a key claim of the Nazis). He defended the mental and moral untiy of all peoples; indeed, he campaigned for the abolition of slavery.

1.) Nonetheless, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, author of "The Geometer of Race:" "Blumenbach radically changed the geometry of human order from a geographically based model without explicit ranking to a hierarchy of worth, oddly based upon perceived beauty (a very unscientific criterion), fanning out in two directions from the Caucasian ideal." To underscore this point here, Blumenbach used a very subjective criterion to determine which race was the primal race at the top of the hierarchy. No doubt he was influenced by the prevailing belief in the superiority of European culture.

"...Blumenbach chose physical beauty as his guide to ranking. He simply affirmed that Europeans were the most beautiful, with Caucasians as the most comely of all. This explains why Blumenbach,...linked the maximal beauty of the Caucasians to the place of human origin. Blumenbach viewed all subsequent variation as departures from the originally created ideal -- therefore, the most beautiful people must live closest to our primal home."

"Blumenbach's descriptions are pervaded by his subjective sense of relative beauty, presented as though he were discussing an objective and quantifiable property, not subject to doubt or disagreement. He describes a Georgian female skull (found close to Mount Caucasus) as 'really the most beautiful form of skull which...always of itself attracts every eye, however little observant.' He then defends his European standard on aesthetic grounds: 'In the first place, that stock displays...the most beautiful form of the skull, from which, as from a mean and primeval type, the others diverge by most easy gradations....Besides, it is white in color, which we may fairly assume to have been the primitive color of mankind, since...it is very easy for that to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white.'"

c.) The American Anthropological Associations' official statement on race (1997) reviews a bit of the history of the concept. It emphatically rejects the concept of race as biological, but reminds us of the SOCIAL REALITY of the concept -- that people believed it to be true and used it to justify slavery and, later, segregation. It said, in part:

"BIOPHYSICAL DIVERSITY HAS NO INHERENT SOCIAL MEANING EXCEPT WHAT WE HUMANS CONFER UPON IT. The concept of 'race' is in reality a product of that process. 'Race' is a set of culturally created attitudes toward, and beliefs about, human differences developed following widespread exploration and colonization by Western European powers since the 16th century. In the North American colonies, European settlers conquered an indigenous population and brought in as slaves alien peoples from Africa. By the end of the 18th century a rising antislavery movement, produced by liberal and humanistic forces mostly in Europe, compelled slave owners to find new defenses for preserving slavery. 'Race' was invented as a social mechanism to justify the retention of slavery. 'Race' ideology magnified differences among these populations, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories, underscored and bolstered unequal rank and status differences and provided the rationalization that such differences were natural or God-given. The different physical traits became markers or symbols of status differences."

"As they were constructing this society, white Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each 'race,' linking superior traits to Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians. Thus, arbitrary beliefs about the different peoples were institutionalized and deeply embedded in American thought."

And a final observation from that same official statement:

"How people have been accepted and treated within the context of their society and culture has a direct impact on how they perform within the society. The 'racial' worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy is that it succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between human groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance; rather, these inequalities are products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational and political circumstances."


That's all for now. Next Tuesday, 10/4, we will pick up with the next basic definition, RACISM. Also, remember that your first essays are due next Tuesday as well.