Race

In the news lately: a story about Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who was head of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP. For years she has publicly maintained that she was black. Regardless of why Ms. Dolezal chose to identify as a black woman, she seems to have been a competent leader of her NAACP chapter, and no one has said otherwise. But the fiction caught up with her and in the ensuing controversy, Dolezal chose to resign as president of the Spokane chapter rather than let the distraction continue to escalate.

The ironic thing is that race isn’t real – at least not in the way that one’s biological sex is real. Sure, there are white people and black people and yellow people, but those are references to physical traits. At the level of genetics, race doesn’t exist. There is much more genetic variation within a racial group than between racial groups.

In fact, defining race as a set of physical traits is a fairly modern idea. Ancient people did not divide people by physical differences but by religion, status, class, or language. Later, race referred to one’s nationality. Winston Churchill used this sense of the word when he said of the World War 2 Battle of Midway, “… the qualities of the United States Navy and Air Force and the American race shone forth in splendour.”

The modern concept of race began with European imperialism and colonization and the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. America’s Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal” and yet slavery existed in the colonies when that document was written. Race was used to justify slavery, further tying the word to a set of physical traits.

Race is a social construct that is used to divide our population into groups such that some groups have advantages relative to others. It ensures that people are not born with equal opportunity.

We have trans-gender persons who identify as a different sex than their birth sex. Ms. Dolezal is perhaps trans-racial, identifying as a different race than her birth race. The US Census Bureau now asks people to self-identify their race. Respondents can choose multiple racial groups and can have any ethnicity. This seems to be an acknowledgement that race is a social construct rather than a real thing. If one parent of a child is black and the other parent is white, is the child white or black – and why?

This nation will have made great progress when a citizen can identify as a member of the race with which they feel an affinity, or no racial group, and everyone is ok with that.