Picking Up Where I Left Off in Chapter 6
Speaking of race and difference and the resentment they needlessly yet inevitably enable, anthropologists like myself are taught to say and to be able to explain the fact that the concept of race has no biological reality, no gene-based salience.
In fact, if you analyze the genetic make-up of people living in Africa today and compare it to that of those people living beyond humanity’s first home, you’ll find that there’s more genetic diversity inside Africa than anywhere beyond it. Fascinating. These findings have to do with early human migrations out of Africa. More people stayed than originally left but those who left and went on to people the far corners of our earth reproduced amongst themselves for many generations. You can learn more about this concept if you go online and check out the American Anthropological Association’s website or ask an anthropologist. Believe me, it’s true.
Okay, once we accept that “race” has not biological relevance/reality, how do we come to terms with the fact that “race” matters socially and oh how it does?! Social versus biological reality. I guess it’s kinda like the difference between gender and sex. You can be sexed as a female, i.e., have breasts, a vagina, a uterus, hopefully the ability to bring new life into the world but you can have a gender identity of a man, you perform your gender as a man. And, culturally, this stuff varies across space and time. What being a “man” in Spain involves versus being a “man” in Germany versus being a “man” in El Salvador varies magnificently (and these are just space-based comparisons to say nothing of varied enactments of gender across time, decades, centuries, millennia). Behaviors, gestures, postures, words, attitudes. That’s what makes our world so fascinating.
That said, what does it mean to be white in the United States? That’s too big of a question. What does it mean to be white on my street in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC? Perhaps that’s a better question. But it’s probably not wise to isolate ethnicity (to use the double talk anthropologists engage in to avoid that bad, bad word, “race”) from gender or sex and age or class?
These are some of the very core components of identity and something I’m immensely fascinated by. Who are we? How do we understand who we are? How do we (en)act that sense of self? And, most importantly perhaps, how is that enactment understood by those around us? Does this take us to the age-old if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest-and-no-one-is-present-to-hear-it-fall-does-it-make-a-sound quandary? If there’s a red car in the dark of a subterranean parking garage in which there is no light to refract off of the pigment in the paint to produce what we perceive as “red,” is the car still red? Yes! Yes! It is. If I (en)act a middle-class, educated, freckled, white, female persona but no one is around to see the vaudevillian show, is that still who I am? Where do I end and you begin? Is all of identity intricately related to others? And perception? Am I nothing without being perceived as something? Is this all getting too deep and convoluted?
Speaking of race and difference and the resentment they needlessly yet inevitably enable, anthropologists like myself are taught to say and to be able to explain the fact that the concept of race has no biological reality, no gene-based salience.
In fact, if you analyze the genetic make-up of people living in Africa today and compare it to that of those people living beyond humanity’s first home, you’ll find that there’s more genetic diversity inside Africa than anywhere beyond it. Fascinating. These findings have to do with early human migrations out of Africa. More people stayed than originally left but those who left and went on to people the far corners of our earth reproduced amongst themselves for many generations. You can learn more about this concept if you go online and check out the American Anthropological Association’s website or ask an anthropologist. Believe me, it’s true.
Okay, once we accept that “race” has not biological relevance/reality, how do we come to terms with the fact that “race” matters socially and oh how it does?! Social versus biological reality. I guess it’s kinda like the difference between gender and sex. You can be sexed as a female, i.e., have breasts, a vagina, a uterus, hopefully the ability to bring new life into the world but you can have a gender identity of a man, you perform your gender as a man. And, culturally, this stuff varies across space and time. What being a “man” in Spain involves versus being a “man” in Germany versus being a “man” in El Salvador varies magnificently (and these are just space-based comparisons to say nothing of varied enactments of gender across time, decades, centuries, millennia). Behaviors, gestures, postures, words, attitudes. That’s what makes our world so fascinating.
That said, what does it mean to be white in the United States? That’s too big of a question. What does it mean to be white on my street in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC? Perhaps that’s a better question. But it’s probably not wise to isolate ethnicity (to use the double talk anthropologists engage in to avoid that bad, bad word, “race”) from gender or sex and age or class?
These are some of the very core components of identity and something I’m immensely fascinated by. Who are we? How do we understand who we are? How do we (en)act that sense of self? And, most importantly perhaps, how is that enactment understood by those around us? Does this take us to the age-old if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest-and-no-one-is-present-to-hear-it-fall-does-it-make-a-sound quandary? If there’s a red car in the dark of a subterranean parking garage in which there is no light to refract off of the pigment in the paint to produce what we perceive as “red,” is the car still red? Yes! Yes! It is. If I (en)act a middle-class, educated, freckled, white, female persona but no one is around to see the vaudevillian show, is that still who I am? Where do I end and you begin? Is all of identity intricately related to others? And perception? Am I nothing without being perceived as something? Is this all getting too deep and convoluted?
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