Week 2: Post-Reading Responses

Growing up, and maybe even now, my definition of race was severely influenced by how society defined race. I learned to categorize people into a certain race because of their hair texture, their eye color, their skin color, simply by watching other members of society do it. Even my parents sorted people into races—because that’s what we were taught to do.

Race is simply a concept contrived by society—meaning that it’s only superficial. In reality, race is not biological at all. There is not a single gene in either your or my body. Frankly, I believed that race was biologically handed down from my line of ancestry. I believed that because my father was full Samoan and that because my mother was full Filipino, I thought that I inherited some type of gene that determined those races—I thought I was half of both of those races. Before the readings, I thought I was sure about what race and ethnicity was, however, now I feel as there is more to race than simply the color of one’s skin.

But race is a tricky thing to define. There are so many different definitions of race and ethnicity that most people think that the two terms are interchangeable. Because there isn’t one set definition for either word, many people become confused at the mention of either word. But one thing is for sure—society believes that race is biological.

Many believed that race determines certain traits that can be carried out to offspring. For example, the film explained how sickle cell, which was once considered as a trait only blacks carried, was revealed to be a trait that could be found in anyone who had ancestors that lived in places where cases of malaria happened frequently—including places where non-blacks lived. Besides health traits, many scientists and common citizens alike believed that because race was a biological thing, it affected many traits such as one’s learning ability, musical ability, athleticism, etc. In my school, many students (including me) thought joking about races and how a certain race does certain things well was perfectly ok. For example, at my school most of the students in Calculus, and most of the students involved in choir, band and orchestra were Asian. This played along to the racial stereotype that Asians excelled in math and were quite musically talented.

Although many times we as society believe that we could correctly identify someone as a certain race and in turn could determine what they are capable of physically, and mentally, in reality, it’s not as easy. As shown by the mini buzfeed experiment, many expressed shock and confusion as some “races” of mixed celebrities were revealed. However, the shock was to be expected. After all, as mentioned before, society was the one to teach us how to identify people’s races. If they had a dark complexion, they were black; if they had small, chinky eyes, they were Asian. In buzfeed’s list, Kid Cudi is revealed to be half-Mexican, something that most people would find shocking simply because he looks “just black”—meaning that only his dark complexion is what people see and thus identify him as only black. Another celebrity, Chad Michael Murray was revealed to be a quarter Japanese. We thought because he looked white, that he couldn’t be anything else other than white. But race isn’t measurable. It doesn’t matter what number you are according to the skin scale, you can be as white as printer paper and still belong to a race that supposedly consists of only dark complexions.

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