“Unemployment, imprisonment, and other life events can change what race those around you perceive you to be.”
“Stanford sociologist Aliya Saperstein discusses her research showing that the perception of other peoples’ race is shaped by what we know about them…Race is a social construction, not just in the sense that we made it up, but in that it’s flexible and dependent on status as well as phenotype.”
Almost 10 million Americans changed how they identify their race or ethnicity when asked by the Census Bureau over the course of a decade, according to a new study, adding further uncertainty to data officials already consider to be unreliable.
Using anonymized data for 162 million Americans who responded to census surveys in 2000 and 2010, researchers at the University of Minnesota and the Census Bureau concluded that self-identified race and ethnicity are fluid concepts for millions of Americans.
Keith Maddox and Sam Sommers, associate professors at Tufts University, speak on racial stereotyping and its effects on employment. They discuss the research behind claims of “colorblindness” and how this thinking is ineffective.
“Stereotype threat is real. Know the source of anxiety and work to diffuse it. Facing your anxiety can have long-term benefits. Make implicit processes explicit [and] strategize to minimize their impact. Understand yourself and your audience. It’s OK to talk about race … even necessary.”
Click here to read more.
NYTimes Op-Ed by Angela Onwuachi- Willig, University of Iowa College of Law Professor: Click here.
“In a world where Kevin Garnett, Harold Ford, and Halle Berry all check “black” on the census, even the argument that racial labels refer to natural differences in physical traits doesn’t hold up.”
Sometimes a picture is truly worth a thousand words. For those of us from the ‘multiracial’ or mixed race community, photos of our population — our people, our families, our children — aren’t as shocking as they are an affirmation of what we have already known: Race is a social construct.
Racism:
Racial Equity/Diversity Education:
White Privilege:
.png?1420310805)
Check out this video of Bill Nye the Science Guy using scientific evidence to argue that “race” doesn’t exist from a biological perspective. Nye first debunks the myth of purebred dogs by analyzing that canine breeding and evolution has yielded a broad spectrum of physical characteristics but no actual variance in species:
“We obsess about whether our dog is a pug-Jack Russell terrier mix with corgi overtones and an oaky finish…whatever. They’re all dogs, okay? And so the idea of a purebred is just a human construct. There’s no such thing – in a sense there’s no such thing as a purebred dog.”
He then draws s comparison between the idea of dog “breeds” and human “races”, both just being constructs:
“If a Papua New Guinean hooks up with a Swedish person all you get is a human. There’s no new thing you’re going to get. You just get a human…for humankind there’s really no such thing as race. There’s different tribes but not different races. We’re all one species.”
Any thoughts on Nye’s argument?
Click here to see more.