Week 4 Memo
Vilna Bashi Treitler. The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
In this chapter, the author looked into understanding race and ethnicity within American society. Notably, ethnicity is considered the self-knowledge process leading to a self-naming joining an individual to a particular group with its culture, heritage, history, and homeland. On the other hand, the race will link one’s blood and phenotype to personal traits such as one’s propensity to succeed or fail to deal with common problems and opportunities. One interesting thing that should be noted is that race is a power relation founded on a hierarchy while ethnicity is not. The existence of race is due to the hierarchy created in the justification of having resources unequally distributed. The race has classified whites to be at the top and blacks at the bottom with the other races in between. In the 21st century, ethnicities are supposed to be more linear, with people simply are when ethnic classifications are considered. While ethnicity has always existed, the race is a “new” concept deemed necessary by the conquering Europeans for the distinctions to be established.
The two concepts of race and ethnicity have been continuously used to categorize human beings. For Africans and Indians, they were groups entirely developed through disparate countries that predated the European conquest. The two have become sibling mechanisms to have particular person oppressors. So the wealthy European individuals worked to gain power and wealth via military might and retained it via political control over the lower groups on the racial hierarchy.
The control exerted on those days, especially by the Europeans, continues to exist and has been referred to as white supremacy. White supremacy has been happening through antiblack racism, genocide, and orientalism. The antiblack racism meant looking at people as property; hence slavery and the modern forms of exploitation are rationalized rooted in capitalism. Genocide is rooted in colonialism where native people are disappearing and needed to disappear while the non-native persons get the right to everything that once belonged to the former. Finally, orientalism was rooted in the notion that particular countries or people posed an infinite threat to Western civilization and needed to be rationalized. While the U.S. is no longer engaging in the mass murder and removal of Native Americans, logics of genocide and settler colonialism persist. The country is rooted in white supremacy, such that granting the native people self-determination is not something they will do. Some scholars have indicated that the struggle against racism for the U.S. will need the country to challenge its existence as a legitimate state.
The author clearly indicated that the audience has so much to learn, including why human beings always choose to differentiate themselves. As some social scientists have indicated, the continuity in writing and researching the racial issues considered a collective myth had given strength to the mistaken arguments on racial differences. Persistently thinking about race means that race remains a divisive factor while ignoring it equals living with evils hoping that they go away independently. Racism is existent because a system that supports racial differentiation and hierarchy exist. To this effect, it is recommendable that racism is studied, specifically the systematic manner in which different “races” are rewarded and punished. Racism is easier to study than anything else that is race as the resultant inequalities can be measured, and respective measures to combat it are implemented.
There are various perspectives that one could look into the issues faced by the U.S. regarding racism. Considering the systemic racism framework, the U.S. society shows how antiblack oppression is a focal point of its existence. The disappearance of indigenous people through genocide is also a reason why the country exists. The settler colonialism perspective will argue that the U.S. is an illegitimate state due to its foundation being genocide. The history of genocide and racism in the U.S. does show that the country will need to make fundamental changes, including in its Constitution, if they are to fight the menace.
