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

96 reframing latin america
Races are often spoken of as social constructions in this sense. But while
there are, in fact, nations, there are not races. The groups we call “races” do
not possess the features popular understanding attributes to races. In this
sense “whites,” “blacks,” “Asians,” and “Native Americans” are not races;
they are racialized groups. By contrast, Nigeria, Mexico, and Thailand are
nations.
Unlike races, racialized groups are real, and like nations they can provide
a foundation for an appropriate and important social identity, for loyalty,
for a sense of community and shared fate (though not a shared destiny), for
sentiments of shame and pride. But as social creations they may wrongly be
viewed as if they were natural, and they may encourage misplaced attachments,
overblown and excessive loyalties, and disproportion in how one
regards one’s racialized identity in relation to other signifi cant identities.
Such distortions of racialized identities are likely to stem from wrongly
thinking that one is not merely a member of a racialized group but of an
actual race. But they are also possible in someone who is fully aware that
her racial identity is socially and historically created and contingent.
Imagine, for example, an Asian-American who recognizes and accepts a
racialized (not merely pan-ethnic) identity as “Asian”—seeing the source of
that identity in the resentments, discrimination, and stereotyping to which
her group is subject, not in characteristics inherent in her racial group. She
may exaggerate the importance of this racialized identity in relation to her
other identities—professor, Korean-American, parent, resident of Peoria,
woman, lover of tennis. She may, for example, become blind to the fact that
groups other than her own also suffer from discrimination and stereotyping.
She may fail to recognize that despite differences she has much in common
with other women professors.
Misunderstandings of Social Construction The idea of social
construction has been subject to misunderstandings (often with some
basis in the writings of its proponents) that bear clearing up if we are to
make the best use of it in understanding “race.” For one thing, “social construction”
has sometimes been taken to imply that we could do away with
what is socially constructed (genders, nations, racialized groups) if we so
chose. Certainly, to recognize something as a human creation implies that
it need not exist, at least in the form that it does, and thereby provides a
basis for hope that we could live without various forms of injustice, oppression,
and constraint attached to such creations. But to think we can simply
jettison those creations is to fall prey to a kind of social voluntarism regarding
social structures and identities. Racialized thinking is deeply embedded