Hispanic Ministry Write-up 2 – Pages 27–46 in TEC: The Idea of Race
Latinos’ highly variant phenotypic expression, their history, and their perception of race itself all contribute to challenging the U.S. government’s conceptualization of “race.” Immigration and intermarriage have made questions regarding race in America even more salient. Race is not a self-evident fact requiring no protracted thought, as was once commonly assumed. Instead, race is fluid and variable. Race can be defined by a civil government, but when the civil government changes, the conception of race might very well change also.
Most often in the U.S., race is merely thought of as ancestral descent, a product of one’s genes, and skin-color dependent. Traditionally, then, what made a person “white” was not possessing “one drop” of Black/nonwhite blood. Historically, only four groups of people—the white (Europe), the Black (Africa), the red (Indigenous/Native American), and the yellow (Asia)—have been recognized as “races.” However, where does this leave the Latino, who could be a mixture of all of these?
The authors of CR posit that referring to “color” in ancient history is incorrect, because people were then identified by religion, culture, language, and other variables, but not skin color. What we consider “race” today is not the “race” of yesteryear; hence, it would be wrong to apply today’s assumptions to historic relations. It is humorous to me that Europeans were viewed as savages and “benighted barbarians” by most Romans. In antiquity, intermarriage was not expressly shunned and was quite common. Slavery was independent of race, and there were actually more white slaves in antiquity than any other people group.
In the 1700s, it was common for “exploited people” (often those of color) to be forced into rationalizing their oppression. 31% of the 51 countries in the Americas do not include race/ethnicity questions in their census data, which makes me wonder why America still does. However, in the 69% that did include race/ethnicity data in their censuses, there was a clear fluctuation and fluidity of race and ethnicity within them over the last 40 years.
Until the recent couple of decades, there was minimal literature regarding multi-raced individuals. What literature did exist generally viewed mixed-race individuals as marginal—with a neither/nor status, limited social assimilation, and even pathological personalities. I am still attempting to understand why it was once purported that those of a mixture of two distinct races were considered pathological. It was generally held that mixed-race individuals were merely the offspring of exploitive sexual unions between wealthy whites and poor people of color.
The increase in the number of interracial families, however, is forcing modern literature toward new perspectives regarding mixed-race individuals. In the past, mixed-race children were typically born to Black women and white men, but now that has been balanced—for example, by Black men and white women intermarrying. In fact, two-thirds of all interracial marriages in 1991 were between white women and Black men. It is generally held that leftist individuals, college professors, artists, entertainers, and others with international careers are most likely to intermarry across racial lines.
Race is a social construction, our authors deduce (p. 42). Most scholars today agree that “race” is determined by the surrounding context. Even though the U.S. Census requested a review of the classification of race/ethnicity following 2000, it has yet to act upon its inquiry.