Racial Formations: Reflection and Analysis

I am, without a doubt, completely uncomfortable discussing race. In fact, it is among my least favorite things to do. I mostly feel as if I do not confuse how to discuss race without offending someone, using the wrong word, revealing my ignorance rough many produces within the topic, changing my mind somewhat a accredited belief midstream, or just generally looking like a fool. I avoid these discussions at all costs because they put me in a place I am rarely ready to be. So, naturally, this nurture struck a chord with me before it actually even began.I related instantly and wholeheartedly to the question raised in the initiation If race is not real in a scientific sense, wherefore can I look around my classroom or campus and put one over that someone is black or Asian or white? This dilemma has plagued me for years. It beted to me that race had to be more than a companionable construction conventional centuries ago. It had never really made sense to me, and this questio n complete a personal connection for me to Omi and Winants subsequent invoice of this perplexing notion.The authors explanation of the history of race consciousness genuinely helped me in my quest for answers and gave me a some(prenominal) clearer showing of the origins of race consciousness. I could imagine the European settlers wonder upon discovering theirs was not the only existing race, thus challenging essentially both religious belief they held about creation. They could not explain this difference, and, as sympathetic beings devout in their religion, that was unacceptable. They needed explanation, and they needed to find it in the Bible.It is not difficult to relate to the anxiety and uncertainty they experienced. People of all religions seem to spend much of their practice justifying what happens in their lives both good and unfit within their particular religious texts. We take scripture, verses, lines, chapter, and so on and stag it fit into what makes sense f or us or, in many cases, make it cream to our advantage so that we can cope with what we do not understand or agree with. Having established how race consciousness came to be in the first place, Omi nd Winant address how race became a social concept, the issue at the heart of my original conundrum. As I read about hypodescent and beliefs about racial intermixture, I started to understand. The authors use of Marvin Harris work further established this understanding, particularly Harris statement, The rule of hypodescent is, therefore, an invention, which we in the United States have made in order to keep biological facts from intruding into our collective racist fantasies (11). That was it.This eighteenth-century manner of sentiment was a continuance of the European settlers need to justify certain behaviors. They may not have been using the Bible to do so, precisely the creators of hypodescent were merely creating a belief to help them get through the social structure they had established and accepted. Now that I have a much better understanding of race as nothing more than a social construct, I suppose my issue is not entirely with those European settlers and not with inventors of outlandish notions about Negro blood but preferably with current society.We are now at a point that we should sleep with better. We should know that no one race is superior. We should know that white is but pure and certainly does not equal better simply because it is white. We have more than enough information to move beyond these ways of thinking and into a new era in which we are able to, as Omi and Winant state at the end of the writing, break with these habits of thought (15).