Stuart Hall emerged as the leading expert in the field we now come to know as cultural studies in the 1960’s and 1970’s. (Procter 2004: 3) This British professor of sociology has devoted most of his time researching culture and race and why it matters so much to the human population in regards to classification. His focus is mainly on the subject of race, culture and society and his basic argument stemmed from this.
“Questions of culture…are absolutely deadly political questions”
– Stuart Hall
Hall questioned these concepts of culture and race and why we feel the need to classify people into specific racial or cultural groups. He looked at racism and how shifts have been made with regards to how we classify people into these different racial groups. Hall argued that racism is the natural connection that one makes between how one looks, ‘the difference between hair, skin and bone” - W.E.B. Du Bois, and their intelligence. What this came down to is that he saw racists as individuals who believe that race and the characteristics linked to it are biologically in our genes and are thus not a result of our environment. This is however not what he believed. He tried to prove that “all attempts to show scientifically, that blacks are not as intelligent as whites, have failed” by examining the discourses surrounding race. What he found is that, by taking a discursive position and analysing the stories and metaphors that have been told over the years by a culture about what physical