Philosophy of Race essay ,8 to 10 pages, Compare and contrast 2 ideas

How did people understand themselves as part of a group before the idea of race?

What does it mean to argue that race is not a biological fact but a social construction?

How did the idea of race function to oppress enslaved Africans in the US?

Explain Theodore Allen’s notion that the idea of race originated as a response to Bacon’s rebellion?

What does Smedley mean when she says we need to study the effects of a possible “transgenerational retention and transmission of an ethos of hopelessness” ?

Audrey Smedley, “’Race’ and the Construction of Human Identity”

American Anthropologist, Vol. 100, No 3, September 1998.

https://archive.org/stream/raceandConstructionOfHumanIdentity/SmedleyRace_djvu.txt

Audrey Smedley lays out her project in the first paragraph. She describes how the idea of race did not exist prior to the seventeenth century and her project of understanding the consequence of the use of the concept of race to understand human identity. She aims to show us the basis for disconnecting race from human identity.

“Race as a mechanism of social stratification and as a form of human identity is a recent concept in human history. Historical records show that neither the idea nor ideologies associated with race existed before the seventeenth century. In the United States, race became the main form of human identity, and it has had a tragic effect on low-status "racial" minorities and on those people who perceive themselvesas of "mixed race." We need to research and understand the consequencesof race as the premier source of human identity. This paper briefly explores how race became a part of our culture and consciousness and argues that we must disconnect cultural features of identity from biological traits and study how "race"eroded and superseded older forms of human identity. It suggests that "race" ideology is already beginning to disintegrate as a result of twentieth-century changes, [race, identity, history, ethnicity, culture]”

She also writes:

“Scholars in psychology, anthropology,  and other social fields need toexamine in much greater  depth the reality of "race" as identity in oursociety.We need to explore not only the consequences but the parameters and social correlates of "racial" identity.” 

Ethnicity vs Race

In the Old World people traveled a lot to other countries despite the lack of modern machines that make travel much easier today. To get to other countries took much effort and struggle on boats, camels and horses. Travel was undergone primarily for trade and during war and expansion. When in new lands peaceful travelers traded goods and culture with each other and intermarried. Interethnic interaction was vast and existed for a long time before the idea of race came into usage. Still the question of difference did arise but not along fixed biological notions. She asks:

“What strategies were used in ancient times to accommodate or transcenddifferences? How did ancestral societies perceive and  deal with humans who differed from themselves, both culturally and/or physically?”

In today’s society we question who we are. We look for an identity. Smedley notes this may be because we don’t have strong territorial limits belonging to kinship group. We live in an individualist society and individualism fosters isolation and insecurity. 

From as far back as the Old Testament we have records of ethic group formation. People were demarcated by land, language and culture and were able to understand themselves as different than other groups. Yet, ethnic identities were fluid and changed when individuals took on a new language and culture. When people were conquered the soldiers were encouraged to intermarry. Those who spoke multiple languages had access to other cultures and multiple senses of identity. With the rise of proselytizing Christianity and Islam, a battle was raging for souls and land. Before the rise of Christian Kingdoms under Muslim rule, Judaism, Christianity and Islam lived together with each other and even intermarried.

At this time there was no idea of racial classification. It did not exist as a concept under which to group people. 
What was absent from these different forms of human  identity is what 
we today would perceive as classifications  into "racial" groups, that is, the organization of all peoples  into a limited number of unequal 
or ranked categories theoretically based on differences in their 
biophysical traits.There are no "racial" designations in the literature of the ancients and few references even to such human features as skin color. 
 
In the Ancient world people interacted together and lived among each other without employing racial difference as a means of division amongst themselves. They traded with each other, lived and intermarried. Skin color was not given much weight and there was no idea that differences were fixed by biology or stagnant. 

When the idea of race began to develop physical differences were given social meanings that were fixed based on ideas of heredity. The idea of race developed in the eighteenth century in the American colonies and spread to the colonies controlled by Western Europe.  The term itself was used in the sixteenth century but not to refer to people in the slave trade. 

The English who came to North American had brought with them a notion of savagery that they had developed in their beliefs of superiority and domination over the Irish. Against the idea of savagery, the English understood themselves as civilized. This sense of superiority was supported by their technological, political and economic successes and independence from Catholic rule. 

"Race" emerged as a social classification that reflected  this greatly expanded sense of human separateness and  differences. Theodore Allen (1997) argues that the "invention" of the white race took place after an early, but unsuccessful, colonial revolt of servants and poor freedmen     known as Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. Colonial leaders subsequently decided it would be useful to establish a division among the masses of poor to prevent their further  collaboration against the governmental 
authorities. As  African servants were vulnerable to policies that keptthem in servitude indefinitely, and European servants hadthe protection of English law, colonial leaders developed a policy backed by new laws that separated African servants  and freedmen from those of  European background. Over the next half century , they passed numerous laws thatprovided resources and benefits to poor, white freedmen and  other laws that restricted the rights of "Africans," "mulattoes," and "Indians."   Calling upon the model of the Chain of Being, and using  natural       differences in physical features, they created a new  form of social identity. "Race" developed in the minds of  some Europeans as a way to rationalize the conquest and  brutal treatment of Native American      populations, and especially the retention and perpetuation of  slavery for imported Africans. As an ideology structuring social, economic,    and political inequality, "race" contradicted  developing trends in    England and in Western European  societies that promoted freedom,      democracy, equality,  and human rights. Europeans justified this       attitude toward  human differences by focusing on the physical features of  the New World populations, magnifying and exaggerating their      differences, and concluding that the Africans and  Indians and their   descendants were lesser forms of human beings, and that their          inferiority was natural and/or God-  given. …. Myths about their          inferior moral, intellectual, and behavioral features had begun to  develop and these facilitated proscription of any competition with     Europeans. By the mid-eighteenth century, Negroes had been segregated  from poor whites in the laws of  most colonies and transformed into    property as slaves in a  state of permanent bondage. 

This theory argues that wealthy whites feared the collaboration of poor whites with black and Indigenous peoples after the uprising of Bacon’s Rebellion and used race and laws to align poor whites with wealthy whites along race and separate whites from uniting along class lines. 

Edmund Morgan (1975) also interpreted the actions ofthe early colonists in the process of establishing "racial"  identities as stemming from  the propertied colonists' fear  of poor whites and possibly slaves     engaging in rebellions together.Colonial leaders consciously formulated poli-  cies that would separate poor whites from Indians, blacks,  and mulattoes and proceeded to provide the white poor,  whom they     had hitherto treated with contempt and hatred,  with some privileges and   special advantages. In time, class divisions diminished in the minds ofpoor whites and they saw themselves as having something in common with the propertied class,symbolized by their light skins and common origins in Europe. With laws progressively  continuing to reduce the rights of blacks and Indians, it was not long before the various European groups coalesced into a white "racial" category whose high-status   identity gave them access to wealth, power, opportunity,  and privilege. 

Race eventually became the way people understood their individual and group identity. After the Civil War race ideas were strengthened. This continued to have a devastating affect on blacks, deemed the lowest social group. 

The problems that this has entailed, especially for the     low-status "races," have been enormous, immensely complex, and almost intractable. Constant and unrelenting  portrayals of their inferiority conditioned them to a self-imagery of being culturally backward, primitive,        intellectually stunted, prone to violence, morally corrupt, undeserving of the benefits of civilization, insensitive to the  finer arts, and  (in the case of Africans) aesthetically ugly and animal-like.Because of the cultural imperative of race ideology, all Americans were compelledto the view that a  racial status, symbolized by biophysical attributes, was  the premier determinant of their identity. "Race" identity  took priority over religion, ethnic origin, education and        training, socioeconomic class, occupation, language, values, beliefs, morals,    lifestyles, geographical location, and  all other human attributes that hitherto provided all groups  and individuals with a sense of who they were. The dilemma for the low-status races was, and still is, how to  construct a positive identity for themselves in the light of the       "racial" identity imposed on them by the dominant society. 

Some responses to racism and racial oppression have been Negritude, Afrocentrism and Nativism. But these notions rely on a racial world view and the assumption of innateness and immutability that do not exist. Still, all these movements aim to restore pride and self image.  And while this is critical it must be remembered that  there are no real connections between culture and biology. Anyone can learn about another culture and there is no cause to think that one is obligated to learn about cultures because of a genetic connection. The connections are social.

Racism in its various forms, legal, social, educational, economic, etc. has had devastating consequences. 

Many minority youth today not only are suffering the consequences of   the oppressive and mean-spirited policies of white America, but they   are descendants of men  and women whose spirits were broken by these   practices  and who too often turned their pain and frustrations inward It is not enough to emphasize black resistance and overcoming           oppression. There are too many African  Americans and Native Americans who do not have the  skills to enter mainstream arenas, who seem to   have dropped out of the social system, or who are incapable of  dealing with the reality of modern life: those into the drug  culture, the    undereducated, those in our jails and prisons, or the homeless. We need to understand how to remove the  barriers that have kept them down. 
Too few people have studied the phenomenon of the  transgenerational   retention and transmission of an ethos  of hopelessness. But some filmmakers have documented  the heartbreaking stories of black men and women who  suffered unbearable discrimination in our nation's indus-  tries. 13 And others have told the painful stories of the hopelessness       suffered by so many on Indian reservations. Their  sons and daughters  felt their pain and the degradation they  have experienced. We need to study this phenomenon and to understand what these kinds of experiences have done  to the self-image and self-esteem of low-status minorities.