Sarah E. Turner
Marginalized Cultures
Dr. Amy Aldridge Sanford
Reading Response 1
“Identity is biology, racial ideology tells us, and it is permanent and
immutable.”
Audrey Smedley, “‘Race’ and the Construction
of Human Identity,” pg. 46
“Because these connections are arbitrary, however, they can and do
change over time.”
A good place to start a dialogue is with an understanding of historical context of the subject at hand. That’s why I valued reading the Audrey Smedley article this week. I am aware of history from a broad point of view, but it was important to have connections made between what I would consider common knowledge for college students and the history that has been left out of modern text books. To think about white privilege is to look at life through a critical lens. Thus, our beginning discussions of white privilege will, for the majority of the class, be a lesson in learning to be uncomfortable. It can be difficult to see your life as something you’ve thought it wasn’t. The first time I seriously considered how my whiteness affected where I had gotten in life I felt cheated rather than blessed; cheated because I had originally viewed my accomplishments in life as the sole result of my hard work and dedication, and losing any part of that was a great disappointment. Since time has passed, I realize that my hard work is not without merit, but rather it is viewed as a different commodity than that of a black peer.
What is white privilege? It seems that Americans are most likely to buy into this idea of white privilege – a concern over race and social status. Although some examples Hall uses show instances of other cultures taking class/social status into account (Fred and Manuel picking the prettiest woman in the room), Smedley goes into greater detail about what it is in Western society that causes us to view different physical traits as being relevant to the discussion of culture/class. This is something I hope we discuss in class and find out what has personally shaped each person’s worldview of race and culture.
Smedley’s article made me wonder how I can use the term “race” from now on. She argues the point that “there is no relationship between one’s culture or lifestyle and one’s genes or biological features” quite convincingly, and if one is to buy the argument, they would feel compelled to discontinue use of the word race for discussions of culture (Smedley, pg. 47). The word that was originally used as a “classifactory term like kind, type, or even breed, or stock” contains connotations of negative imagery depending on its use. However, I’m not sure I would want to describe people by using a word that originally could have also been used to describe dogs, cats, horses, etc. For our discussion on whiteness, it will be difficult to maneuver around this word, but I would like to make a concerted effort to eliminate the use of the word from my personal life. Doing this might be a way to start seeing people for who they are rather than what they look like.
It seems that economic concerns were a reason for bringing race into the equation. Those who were already in power wished to remain so, and therefore created an added element of culture. They assigned value to it in the hopes of heightening their own position. Over time the oppressed culture has begun to believe in the truth of this idea, acknowledging it in ways that are subtle to our society (i.e. black music culture being dominated with sexist material). Bruce from “The Tyra Banks Show” illustrated this with his frustration over the “made-up” names his black culture had created. His dismissive attitude to the validity of names such as Deedrica seemed to reinforce the hegemony that black culture was at a lower rank than white culture. Because of the marginalized groups’ acceptance of its place in society, it could be argued that the bourgeoisie has dominated the proletariat, in this case non-white people. This argument is made all the more compelling when considering the economic status of many racially diverse members of society. This might be my crazy obsession with Marxism talking, but it seems that so much of what our society is based on is money, so this can’t go without saying. (I knew I was going to bring it up in this class at some point. Better to get it out in the open right away.)
Although Smedley’s article focuses most on the way whiteness dominates blackness, it also dominates other cultures. I was frequently reminded of our American Indian friends while reading this article. “And Native Americans had to try to reinvent their identities, whether in towns or isolated on remote reservations where traditional lifestyles were no longer possible” (pg. 45). (I was strongly reminded of American Indian mascots when reading this quote, and thought I had heard something very similar to this come out of Hugh Foley’s mouth on more than one occasion.) What is the appropriation of American Indian culture doing to this effort? In using American Indian mascots, white people are not only changing the culture of this group of people, they are disallowing American Indians to work on reinvention.
On a side feminist note, one part of Smedley’s article made me think about the power of women during the Classical period (pg. 41). “Men gave their daughters and sisters to other men, the historians tell us, because they desired political and/or economic alliances with powerful and wealthy men, without regard to ethnic origins” (pg. 41). Although women were treated as property, a commodity rather than a person, they were a way of gaining wealth. What does this mean about the power they held in society? If society is dominated by an economic interest, and women were a means of acquiring economic means, did this not assign some value to women? This was just one question I had in mind. Here are some more.
Discussion Questions:
1) With dialectic oppositions such as the difference between “savage” and “civilized” people, where can one find the grey area? How important is a middle area to intercultural communication (as Hall describes it)?
2) Which aspects of the media best maintain white privilege? Maybe a better question is which aspects of the media work to eradicate white privilege?
3) How can physical differences be discussed without regard to race? Because there are distinct physical appearances between blacks and whites, how can one talk about any physical differences (if there are any) without discussing race?
4) As noted on “The Tyra Banks Show,” there are different classifications within specific ethnic groups. How did this idea come to be? What impact does this have on our discussion of white privilege?