Reddit reviews Racial Formation in the United States

Let's see. This'll be long, but I hope it helps out with the understanding.

"Bad things" is a bit of an understatement if we are talking about the experiences of black folks in this country throughout its history, as present day situations (i.e., discriminatory law enforcement and legal consequences, wealth gaps, gentrification, educational deficits, food deserts, etc.) are often the direct result of historic marginalization and oppression. Black folks are more likely to live in impoverished communities due to the recently-illegal-but-still-occurring practice of redlining that denied them the ability to purchase homes in certain areas. Funding for public services, like schools, are typically tied to the wealth of the community they serve, leading to underfunded schools in black communities that contribute to gaps in education and earning potential. High rates of poverty are always correlated with higher crime rates, and black communities tend to be the poorest. Since enslavement there has been a systematic effort to destroy and distort black cultural practices, with much of our current "culture" being derived from cobbled together pieces created during the darkest time in our history, and tinged with the poverty and crime in our communities. These negative messages are often perpetuated in mass media--as mass media is known to do--and regurgitated back to us as internalized racism; we accept that poverty, crime, and less-productive cultural efforts are what "real" blackness is (that last bit is my personal hypothesis, and what I'll probably be focusing on as I start work on my PhD).


I think revolting against the system is the plan for any manner of revolution, but the armed and violent kind is not the method being advocated here. Rather, we must do all we can to restructure the system so that it is just as beneficial to black and brown bodies as it is to white ones, and that is generally achieved through sociopolitical changes.

As for whiteness, I don't think there was an intent to portray "white folks as the devil", but more to think of how destructive the idea "whiteness" can be. To better understand this sentiment, one must understand how "whiteness" in this country came to be, a topic that I couldn't possibly go into in depth here, but I can give you the cliff notes. Essentially, European explorers and colonizers devised the idea of "race" as a method of categorization after nationality was no longer the biggest identifying factor. In other words, how can we fair-skinned Europeans differentiate ourselves from the darker skinned African slaves, and the darker skinned Native "savages". Notions of race and color were the simplest methods, but this became complicated when Mexico came into the picture (particularly the descendants of fair skinned Spanish colonizers, who were considered white), the approach to race and mixed heritage present in Louisiana, and the arrival of Asian immigrants. The idea of who was and was not white changed over time, but whiteness has always been used in this country as a way to differentiate those who were normal and could have things (land, votes, business, education, etc.) from those who were different and thus could not have. This divide was especially detrimental when it came to the idea of blacks, who were considered no better than property or livestock for a large chunk of our history. Today, the benefits of this system of classification are readily apparent, as whites outpace every other racial group in this country in nearly every positive metric, and white folks in this country continue to receive special favor due to the nature of the system underpinning our society. This favor is often unconscious and given without awareness, but it readily exists as privilege. A few really good books on this are The Racial Contract by Charles W. Mills, White by Definition by Virginia R. Dominguez, and Racial Formation in the United States by Michael Omi & Howard Winant.

So, the general idea of the speech simply echos many of the calls to action that have been made in recent years. It calls attention to the systems of oppression that have been put into place, the disastrous consequences of those systems for black and brown folks, the need for those in position of power and influence (regardless of race) to work towards dismantling unfair systems, the ongoing benefits white folks have in this systems (and the sense of complacency this gives rise to, since they of course stand to lose privilege and not gain much tangibly from equal rights), and the need for people rise up and fight for equality in oppressive systems.

>As far as I can tell, it is similar in meaning to "of colour" or simply "not-white / -Caucasian."

To be correct, it refers to the process of racialization, as in of assigning race to social groups ('racializing' people). Citing Omi and Winant:

>Race is ocular in an irreducible way. Human bodies are visually read, understood, and narrated by means of symbolic meanings and associations. Phenotypic differences are not necessarily seen or understood in the same consistent manner across time and place, but they are nevertheless operating in specific social settings. Not because of any biologically based or essential difference among human beings across such phonemic variables as “color” or “hair texture,” but because such sociohistorical practices as conquest and enslavement classified human bodies for purposes of domination— and because these same distinctions therefore became important for resistance to domination as well— racial phenotypes such as black and white have been constructed and encoded through the language of race. We define this process as racialization— the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group.

Another definition is provided by Miles and Brown:

>In sum, we use the concept of racialisation to denote a dialectical process by which meaning is attributed to particular biological features of human beings, as a result of which individuals may be assigned to a general category of persons that reproduces itself biologically. This process has a long history in precapitalist and capitalist societies. The particular content of the process of racialisation, and its consequences (including its articulation with political and economic relations), cannot be determined abstractly or derived formally from the primary features of the mode of production but are matters for historical investigation.

It can be argued that White or Caucasian people are racialized, too.

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>Where did this terminological practice come from

From researchers and papers interested in race and affiliated topics and concepts. According to Miles and Brown:

>One of its earliest uses was by Fanon in a discussion of the difficulties facing decolonised intellectuals in Africa when constructing a cultural future (1967: 170–1). Banton (1977: 18) utilised the concept more formally to refer to the use of the idea of ‘race’ to structure people’s perceptions of the world’s population. His usage was limited, and by implication, its scope was confined to scientific theories of racial typology as used to categorise populations.

The term then evolved from there. I would suggest the definitions provided above and the title of the books from which I cite those definitions provide an answer to the questions regarding its use for scholars interested in the topic of race and racism and what it allows to describe and to study.

> For example, black people and white people very obviously have different nose shapes.

This was refuted in literally my first week of Anthropology 100 in my undergrad. Which of these is the black nose?

This one?

This one?

This one?

This one?

This one?

>If it were only skin tone that influenced how we label different races, we'd find it impossible to tell the difference between, say, some Indians and some African Americans, but it actually isn't that hard at all.

Except it is, which is why a number of "African Americans" successfully posed as Indian during Jim Crow, for example Korla Pandit.

>but the one area where there is variation is in the characteristics we as a society have picked out upon to make the racial split in the first place.

You really should read the books I linked about the construction of race in America. To reiterate, those were Racial Formation in the United States, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race, The History of White People, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America.

One of the commenters who came from /r/sociology after you suggested I cross post in subs where the users have relevant academic training also added to that some Franz Boas, which I'd like to reiterate. A good introduction to biological anthropology will reiterate what I've said about white/black groupings that you're assuming and then reifying, as will all the resources here as will a good intro to sociology.

To reiterate (1) genetic populations exist, and may share some characteristics -- for instance, San people in South Africa are reliably different than Zulu people. (2) When you try to group those populations together into something like "black" it just doesn't work. The 5 or 7 or however many you want "races" do not have any basis in biological reality (3) groupings like "black" or "African American" are too diverse to make statements like "black people all share thus and such cranial shape/nasal capacity/whatever." Therefore, (4) it makes no sense to say that you can "hear" when someone is "black" because of something biological or physiological because "black" is not a biologically meaningful category, despite its incredibly high social salience. I further argued, above, that what OP does hear is likely an accent, from an ethnolect, which came about precisely because of the social construction of race. I have friends who have "black" parentage, but everyone treats them as "white" because they "look white" and "sound white." You cannot tell by listening that their parents are black, because it's not a biologically meaningful grouping that would actually affect physiology such that it had an affect on language.

A logical terminus of the inverse argument others have proposed above is that there are fundamental biological differences, directly related to race, which affect language production. We know this to be false.

Even in your aside on tone, you're still assuming "white" and "African American" are biologically meaningful groupings, when they're not.