Difference: Constructing Race And Blackness

Difference: Deconstructing Race and Blackness

What is difference? Difference as defied by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as the quality that makes one person or thing unlike another. Difference is also a construction. It is a central deficit of the systems of oppression that determine how, power, privilege, wealth, and opportunity are distributed. Difference is responsible for sexism, racism, and other forms discrimination and of oppression. In society, people who hold the power use the differences of others or to judge, discriminate against and oppress them. An example of this is racism and the attitudes of whites toward blacks. Blacks have been labeled as inferior to whites because of Europeans. One may ask the question of how did they do

The concept of Blackness or black skin was used for both external and internal characteristics of a “black group” or “race”. Blackness is defined in the “Critical Perspectives on Bell Hook” by Arnold Farr as “the social construction of essentialist racial identities is oppressive and dehumanizing for people of African descent.” According to Farr, the essentialist racial identity is intensified by the system of white supremacy and maintained and perpetuated by blacks who are victims of racial essentialism. Bell Hooks urges, that” racial identity must be deconstructed and calls for a deconstruction of race and post-modern blackness as a way blacks asserting emancipation from white supremacy.” When race is deconstructed it enables anti hegemonic groups to be developed that confronts hegemony or dominant white supremacy. The reason for deconstruction is show that things refuse to conform to the static definitions given. In terms of race, racial essentialism tries to create fixed racial identities that robs or takes away the agency of black people. Difference deconstructs blackness in dictating that to be black means to be inferior or less human. So those who are black are treated as if they are non-existent because of their differences, and the stigmas, meanings attached to the color of their skin and what it signifies. These meaning for blackness were created and dictated by the western world or cultures and are so powerful that they have made it difficult for others to see blacks differently than how western society has defined them. Racial essentialism attempts to construct race as one set identity failed because many different racial signifiers surround race. In Stuart Hall’s “Race: The Floating Signifier”, Halls states that racism continues because there is nothing to pin it down. As a result, “race is a signifier, an empty sign because it floats in a sea of meaning and differences.”