Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #1: race 89
associated with race and any other aspect of human identity. Therefore,
having darker or lighter skin means nothing more than having any other
physical feature, such as height, weight, or body shape. Still, the racialist
idea continues to hold fast in many minds throughout the world.
Race offers a rare moment when semioticians and hermeneuticians (at
least the nonracialist variety) agree on something: race is a social construct
and not an objective fact. Semioticians, of course, see this social construction
as being rooted in discourse, something no hermeneutician could accept.
Regardless, a foundation for agreement is there. The second part of the
excerpt from Lawrence Blum outlines the social constructivist interpretation
on race. Blum might not be a cultural theorist per se because he does
not specifi cally link ideas about race to discourse, but he nevertheless provides
a succinct and clearly worded deconstruction of racial essentialism.
When reading that selection, note that Blum compares race to gender and
nation, two other identity categories we will explore.
Because social constructionists like Blum defi ne race as nothing more
than an idea, they are particularly interested in studying its history. By
demonstrating that a particular idea ebbs and fl ows in accordance with social
convention, social constructionists believe they bolster their argument
about race as a fi gment of society’s collective imagination. They argue that
the variety of views on race reveals more about the peculiarities of time
and place than any ontological truths about human nature. Wade and Blum
both offer an extended survey of the history of racialist ideas in their studies,
although we have decided not to excerpt those sections because we lack
the space for them. Their work reveals to us that historical studies on race
and the origin of racial ideas are numerous and diverse. For example, one
major school of thought links the origin of racism to material issues, mainly
the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the economic necessity of cheap labor.
Another traces its origins farther back, even to biblical times, and to longheld
cultural assumptions in Western societies that associate blackness
with evil. Regardless of these variations in interpretation, there is a widespread
agreement that Western modernity and its economic, scientifi c, and
imperial mandates bear responsibility for the consolidation and globalization,
if not the origin, of racial essentialism.
We will not try to untangle confl icting interpretations about the origin
of racial essentialism. We would point out that much of the research on
this subject was done before the notion of essentialism, in its cultural theory
context, was more widely accepted in the academy. Thus, much of the
historical research on race seeks out references to skin color but does not
necessarily identify racial essentialism. Recent research, based on a more