Most people that know me would not hesitate, if asked, to say that I am black. Some try and be politically correct referring to me as African-American, or of African decent, but one thing most if not all of the people that I interact with on a daily basis would agree on is the fact that I am black. That is my "race", that's the box that I check off on any government form that I sign, and that is the basis on which people make assumptions - good or bad - about the type of person I am before I ever get a chance to open my mouth. It wasn't always like this though. I remember growing up in Cameroon and almost never considering that I was a black kid. Then again, I was just a kid, and issues of race didn't really concern me. Nonetheless, I didn't ever consider the fact that the color of my skin could have such an impact on how people interacted with me.
In this unit of class, we learned about the concept of race. We came to learn that race did not exist biologically, but was rather a construct of society. To strip every individual down to their most superficial layer of un-melanated skin, and you would not be able to distinguish between an asian man and a european. We came to learn that in fact, that a 5'2" white man and a 5'2" black man have more in common biologically, then a 5'2" white man and his 6'0" white best friend. Many throughout history have tried to find countless ways of distinguishing races, but modern day science has proven that race does not exist. It is really silly to think that we live our lives as Americans for the most part, operating on something that doesn't exist.
Our social understanding of race is a classification in accordance to skin tone. This in itself is so flawed because no two places on earth have the same organization of race. We use words like black, white, mixed, asian, and hispanic to describe a variety of things. Our classifications are contradictory because you have black and white hispanics. You have children born of dark and fair skin, yet born of the same parents. It is hard to say that race is a set thing because there are so many possibilities. Our American system of race classification seems complicated, but has no match for the system established in Brazil. In Brazil, the order in which you were born is a factor that is taken into consideration when determining your race. This means that in Brazilian culture, race is not limited to the color of your skin. This fact alone means that there isn't a consistent definition of race.
So if race doesn't exist, why do we still use it?
We use race for the same reason it was used in the 1700's. We use race as a means of implicit and explicit racism. We create in-groups and out groups, and judge others based on whether they fall in the in-group or not. America was shaped on prejudice and discrimination - prejudice being the negative attitude that people held against those in the out group, and discrimination being the means by which people act on that prejudice. Given that we all understand the current classifications of race, we simply place people in those categories based on how closely they fit our mental set of a given race. This is simple enough to understand.
America seems to still be in the belief that although slavery, jim crow, and all of the other explicit forms of institutionalized racism that existed have been abolished (de jure), we still live in an America where the aftermath of those laws is still felt (de facto). To claim that we no longer experience racism because we have had a black president would be completely ignorant of the fact that in Florida alone more black people were shot by police than where white (consider that whites outnumber blacks by 3 for every 1white). To claim that the reason for this disparity is a result of blacks "looking for trouble" is ridiculous because in the same study unarmed blacks shot by police outnumber unarmed whites 2:1. This ration caries through with the tendency of blacks to be shot after being pulled over for traffic violations or while being thought to be "reaching for a weapon" but was just reaching for a drivers license. Blacks were even three times as likely to be shot for minor crimes like smoking marijuana or shop lifting. These are a few of the countless statistics that indicate that there is an obvious difference in the way that people are policed based on race. The law is said to be blind, but those that enforce it aren't. These numbers are even further skewed when we look at the treatment of blacks across the nation. This is only looking at the plight of black america. For those who blame black america for their "culture of not wanting to succeed", I haven't even started to discuss the challenges that blacks aspiring to be higher ups in corporations face. All of this comes to show that we do not live in a post racial america.
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