What is "race"? How do you know what "race" someone belongs to? We began this lecture by listing the characteristics of "race" on the board. What we finally came up with were a list of signifiers, such as skin color, eye shape, and hair texture, which seemed to indicate certain signifieds, including racial stereotypes.
"Race," like gender, can be defined as a set of cultural signs assigned by various social mechanisms (which, as Althusser tells us, are largely ideological, largely part of the ISAs of a given culture) to human bodies. The physical traits of these bodies, as in gender, become signifiers of "race"; what is signified, then, are the ideologies of "race"--what and how "race" as a concept has social meaning.
As a set of signifiers attached to cultural signifieds, "race", like any mode of signification, is ARBITRARY. There's nothing inherent in hair texture, for instance, that indicates social role or ability, yet that is what the cultural constructions of "race" try to create. Once we see "race" as the arbitrary connection of signifiers and signifieds, we can start to see how racial signs might be analyzed.
Does "race" also fit within a structure based on binary opposition? Certainly in regards to racial hierarchies created by the opposition "white/non-white," ideas about "race," or racial ideologies, certainly seem to follow that familiar pattern. If "race" does operate within a structure of binary oppositions, what social mechanisms--material and/or ideological--hold that binary in place? This is what Gloria Yamato and Maria Lugones look at, in their articles.
Once we have understood how the basic ideas of "race" as signifiers and signifieds are constructed, and have seen how ideas about "race" form hierarchies within a binary structure, we can ask--along with Yamato and Lugones--what "racism" is, and how it functions to maintain the binary structure of "race." Does marking distinctions between people based on the racial signifiers--skin color, nose shape, eye color--necessarily mean being racist?
In answering this question, you might think about the two different meanings of the word "discrimination." On one level, "discrimination" means the same as "distinguish": you can discriminate between two different types of wine, for instance, or two different types of fabric, without necessarily judging one as better than the other. On another level, distinction between two things becomes a hierarchy, where one this is superior to the other; that's the structure upheld (according to Derrida) by any binary opposition.
Similarly, "racism" can have a neutral and a pejorative meaning, just like "discrimination." Our culture attunes us to recognizing "race" as one of the fundamental categories of identity. Just as you instantly notice what sex a person is, you usually make some sort of racial identification about a person. As soon as you notice someone's race, you are being "racist," in the neutral sense of that word: racism is any practice which makes distinctions based on race. If you then make assumptions about that person's ability, social role or function, or lifestyle on the basis of your awareness of their race, then you are being "racist" in the pejorative sense: making assumptions and value judgments (positive or negative) on the basis of race.
Gloria Yamato's article discusses four types of negative/pejorative racism:
1. Aware/blatant racism
2. Aware/covert racism
3. Unaware/unintentional racism
4. Unaware/self-righteous racism
Her article discusses each form in some detail, along with some suggestions or solutions to disrupt racism. For people of color, she recommends the recognition of internalized racism, or, in Althusserian terms, how people of color become subjects interpellated within racial/racist ideologies. For Anglos/whites, she recommends self-education, learning about the dynamics of race, and about cultures other than one's own, but not at the expense or effort of people of color.
Maria Lugones' article provides a different set of strategies for understanding race. First of all, she provides a model of a racial or cultural "subject position" in the text itself. By writing her essay in both Spanish and English, she necessarily excludes people who do not read both languages from becoming speaking/reading subjects in most of the text. In so doing, she reproduces the experience of being excluded from the dominant discourse, as a representation of what people of color, or people who don't speak the dominant language, experience every day. She also privileges the idea of being bilingual, as a model of being bicultural or multicultural; those who will best understand her text are those who can move easily back and forth between her two languages, the two cultural subject positions offered by the text. (You might think here about how Lugones would understand Bakhtin's idea of dialogism).
Lugones also defines racism differently than Yamato does. To her, "racism" is the lack of awareness of, or acquiescence to, the structures of the racial state. Thus racism has both an active and a passive component: you can be actively racist, by complying with and agreeing to the racial hierarchies within a culture, or passively racist, by being unaware that such hierarchies and structures exist.
Lugones defines what she means by the "racial state" in a lengthy footnote on p. 49; I think this is one of the key parts of the article. Her "racial state" is analogous to Althusser's ISAs and RSAs, the social organizations and institutions and mechanisms which encode and enforce racial signs. These are some of the ways the signifiers of race are connected to its signifieds, or how the binary structure of race is upheld. Most of Lugones' 8 points about the racial state explain the racial ISAs, which help interpellate individual subjects, like you and me, into racial ideologies, so that we believe the signifiers of race really do point to the signifieds.
1. The racial state classifies people according to physical characteristics; this classification creates "race" as a cultural construct.
2. This classification is not "natural"; as we said before, it's a relation of signification, so it's arbitrary.
3. Because it's arbitrary, this classification is historically variable. Different racial signifiers are associated with different racial signifieds over time. (Think, for example, about ideas about the meaning of "blackness" during slavery, versus what meanings "blackness" might have today).
4. The classification system of race works as something NORMATIVE, as Gayle Rubin discussed with sexuality. Certain RSAs (such as laws) and ISAs articulate what racialized behaviors are allowed or illegal. For example, until very recently it was illegal for a person of color to marry a white person.
5. Classification structures presumably NOT associated with or based on race directly are always about race. An example of this might be in thinking about the concept of "great" literature. The humanist definitions of "great" literature make no reference to race; rather, they note qualities like timelessness, universality, and truth. But these concepts are coded along with racial constructions, so that people belonging to the non-dominant racial group are excluded from the ranks of "greatness."
6. Racial classification imposes "false identity" on people, and arrogates the power of self-definition. This is another way of discussing internalized racism, or the interpellation of members of the non-dominant culture into the racial ideologies of the dominant culture.
7. Racial classification is given meaning by particular organizations of social, political, economic (etc.) interaction. In other words, the dominant culture sets the rules, via RSAs and ISAs, for how members of non-dominant cultures can act, or what social roles they can fill. An example of this would be segregated education, or racial discrimination in employment.
8. The racial state creates ideologies that justify the systems of racial classification and the structures and organizations based on such classifications.
According to Lugones, everyone belongs to a racial state, and is thus interpellated as a subject within the ideologies of the racial state. Within the state, however, exist marked and unmarked racial categories--what Lugones calls "victims" and "oppressors," meaning people of color and white people. Whiteness exists, in our culture, as the "unmarked" category, the non-racial category; whiteness is taken as the norm, the default position, and generally race is only specified when it's non-white. Lugones argues that the first step in thinking about racism lies in recognizing one's own subject position within the racial state, whether that's marked/non-white or unmarked/white. "Race" as a cultural category, as a set of signifiers and signifieds, affects white people just as much as non-white people in our culture; white people, however, as members of the dominant culture, usually have the luxury of not being forced to think about their own racial identity as such.
This leads Lugones to her warning, on pp. 50-51, about the dangers of being unaware of one's position within the racial state; this follows Yamato's warnings about unaware forms of racism. Becoming aware of one's racialized subject position, according to both Yamato and Lugones, is the first step toward undoing--or even deconstructing--the ways the racial state constructs inequalities on the basis of racial signs.