What is a race? The term race is a very problematic one that has been used incorrectly time and time again. In Lifespan Development, a Topical Approach, Feldman describes that although race is purely biological, it has taken on many more meanings, such as skin color, religion, or culture. “Depending on how it is defined there are between 3 and 300 races, and no race is genetically distinct. The fact that 99.9% of humans’ genetic makeup is identical in all humans makes the question of race seem comparatively insignificant” (Feldman, 8). So really, racism is a repulsive and unjustified part of history, specifically in the US, that still, unfortunately, exists today.
In “Racial Formation”, Omi and Winant describe a case of a woman, Susie Phipps, who attempted to change her misclassified racial classification, but was denied by court. This was because the state law in 1970 was that anyone with 1/32nd “Negro blood” was identified as black. In “Black Behind the Ears”, Caldelario describes how Dominican and Puerto Rican families were discriminated against and included in the Jim Crow Laws, despite the discrepancies of the different ethnicities. He later points out that “one ceases to be white when ‘one-drop-of-(African)-blood’ is introduced into the family lineage (Caldelario, 60). Nowadays, with the world being a global village of people immigrating and migrating, assimilating and mingling, it is a rare thing to find a pure family line of a strictly “white” descent, especially including Latino, Dominican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Haitian, etc. and many other ethnicities into the definition of “black”. Both these cases are a few of the many incidences of a false basis for misplaced racism. So many people of different historical backgrounds are lumped together, when it is really illogical to group together such a large crowd that consists of so many different ethnicities and cultures.
So what is the basis for racism? As illustrated in the Lifespan Development book, there really is no logical explanation for the categorization of many ethnicities into a particular “race” and discriminating accordingly. Because, when it comes down to it, there is barely a biological difference between humans of different “races”. A race is not simply a collection of physical characteristics. It’s a “concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (Omi and Winant, 54). It’s a concept that has been an excuse for pointless discrimination and abuse. And it’s a concept that in a perfect world, would be irrelevant.
