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Theories Of Racial Identity

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Identity refers to how people define themselves and others and this can include factors such as age, social class, religion and personality (Jenkins, 2008). Identity can also be defined by race, this is particularly important for this study. Racial identity has been described in terms of a biological category (Spikard, 1992) and from a social dimension (Helms, 1995; Spikard, 1992). When described as a biological category race consists of individuals “physical features, gene pools and character qualities” (Spikard, 1992, p.14). Europeans used these features to group people hierarchically by their physical abilities and moral quality and Caucasians were the pinnacle (Chavez & Guido-DiBrito, 1999). Through colonialism racial categories were enforced and this created a hierarchically racial arranged global order. This is the reason individuals use race to describe him or herself when referring to their identities, this is even more prevalent in South Africa or America as they are highly racialised societies. In South Africa the construction of the Coloured identity was as a result of political power, the government categorised people of mixed races and created an artificial category labelled ‘Coloured’ as these people could not be categorised into any of the other main races (Petrus, 2013). In Social Psychology …show more content…

This is in order to move away from the biological definition as this can be interpreted as a racist perspective (Chavez & Guido-DiBrito, 1999). According to Helms, (1993, p. 3) identity can be interpreted as a social construction, which “refers to a sense of group or collective identity based on one’s perception that he or she shares a common heritage with a particular racial group”. The Coloured identity has proceeded through these definitions; the different ways in which Coloured identity has been defined will be discussed in the literature review

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The need for categorization resulted to race being defined in institutional contexts such as “a group of people who perceive themselves and are perceived by others as possessing distinctive hereditary traits” (Ore, 2014, p.9). With this definition, it becomes easier to group individuals in limited categories, such as by their color. What is important to note is the attached perceptions and assumptions based on one’s racial background; this constitutes the social construct of race. As Ore (2014) explains, we do not create these assumptions due to their biological factors as individual people, but rather as social factors. Social construction of race goes all the way back to when the person is born.

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