Race As A Social Construction Essay

American was a term first created for white European settlers to claim a new national identity and a homogenized white racial identity. Using racial theory, we can understand the historical function of the construction of the American nationality as the construction of the white state. Whiteness was constitutive to the American identity in its foundation; Black and Indigenous people were pointedly excluded as a means to undermine their personhood and naturalize their oppression and exploitation. While Americanness was legally redefined to include non-whites in the twentieth century, the sociocultural consequences of its violently racist history persist. To be American means to be inculcated into a culture of hegemonic white supremacy and settler

Race, as defined by racial theory/critical race theory, is a socially constructed category situated in specific temporal, geographic, political, and historical conditions. This definition unsettles the hegemonic discourse of race as a western scientific truth, reframing it as a shifting social marker that can be “formed, transformed, destroyed and reformed” (Module 2 Race as a Social Concept). Social construction theory as explained by Jackson and Penrose goes further, connecting race to nation and borders: “‘race' and nation are social constructions, the product of specific historical and geographical forces, rather than biologically given ideas whose meaning is dictated by nature” (Module 4 Social Construction Theory (SCT)). The American government historically conflated the two social constructs of race and nation in its creation of a white-only settler colony, drawing the boundaries of race and nation concurrently. Race gains cultural power over time through its incorporation into institutions through a process called racial formation defined as “the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings” (Module 2 Race as a Social Concept). American policy has played an instrumental role in racial formation through the

The census requires its participants to select their race(s) and its data is used to reapportion political representation through state population. The census is, in the words of scholar Dr. Michael Omi, “a form of national accounting that provides a collective portrait of who we are” (Module 2 Film & Lecture: Racial Classification & the 2020 U.S. Census with Dr. Michael Omi). Dr. Omi links the census to the conceptual frame of racial formation that offers a constructionist model and challenges conceptions of race as fixed or static. The census provides its participants with governmentally sanctioned definitions of racial groups from which we are meant to identify with and self select. However, as Dr. Omi points out, it wasn’t until the year 2000 that participants could select more than one racial category, as previously multiracial participants were encouraged to select the race of a non-white parent. Erasing whiteness in multiracial contexts is an example of hypo-descent and an exercise of white nationalism in that non-white racial identities are framed as a contaminant to whiteness and thus illegitimate. This picture of multiracialism is also built on the assumption that all persons of “mixed race” are “mixed” with whiteness, as there was no clear instruction for multiracial participants with two or more non-white identities, for instance Black and Asian,