Topics Race

Question On the subject of race. Why is there a tacit assumption that all persons are white unless identified as some different race? Example: Maybe a guy is lost from his group at a big convention or something and he tells someone that he is looking for "these three guys... one of them is black, and one of them has a big nose ring?" Like black-ness is an unusual trait to be used to pick somebody out of a crowd or a police line up, like a scar or a tattoo. I hope this made at least some sense.

Accepted:
May 30, 2006

Comments

I'm sure there are more and less worrisome ways of answering this question, and I'd never wish to downplay the reality of racism. But, in some such cases, there is a fairly simple answer: Black-ness may be an unusual trait in certain circumstances, in the sense that there are relatively few black folks in the relevant group. If so, then mentioning that someone is black may contribute rather a lot to the effort to identify or individuate them. It's easy enough to imagine circumstances in which that would not be so. Maybe one is at the NAACP convention. Then one would be rather less likely, I'd think, to say, "I'm looking for my friend. He's black...."

It is also, sadly, easy enough to imagine that racism infects the use of this method of identifying people: Some or even many people may be inclined to suppose that the relative number of black people in a certain population is lower than it actually is. So someone might say, "the black congressman" or "the black professor", thinking those descriptions are individuating when they are not.

I agree with Richard. But there is also another sense in which racism leads people to underestimate the number of 'whites'. I am thinking here of the practice of counting somebody as unequivocally 'black' if their ancestry is half European and half African, or even 80% European and 20% African. If skin colour were not considered to be socially and politically significant, this would make no sense at all.