For the first page or two of this paper, I scratched my head every time the author said that people didn’t know how to truly define race. Isn’t it obvious? Black, white, Asian... how else can you define it? When he did finally explain what race actually is by writing that it is “an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing, plastic process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions,” I wrote a big, bold, frustrated “What?” next to the sentence. In my mind, it was obvious that we were all divided by race. Looking around in LA, you can see how divided the races can be, such as the mostly Latino community of Highland Park and the predominantly Asian city of San Marino.
It wasn’t until I read, “There are no genetic characteristics possessed by all Blacks but not by non-Blacks,” that it finally clicked in my head. Duh! Obviously our DNA and genes are not necessarily specific to and determined by our ancestral backgrounds and the color of our skin. Society has conditioned us to believe that our behavior, thoughts, actions, and beliefs are linked to our race. But the divisions that I had been assuming were about race have nothing to do with race at all; it’s about culture. For example, it’s not because you’re of “Korean/Asian race” that you are familiar with kimchi and watch dramatic Korean dramas. It’s because you were raised with Korean culture in the home. The thing that can and does separate some of us is culture, not race. Of course, there are other things that can separate us, too, like our gender, sexual orientation, class, etc., but those are also all different types of cultures. And what is culture but a construct of society?
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