I learned in anthropology that one of the key differences between race and ethnicity is that a race is assigned by a dominant group.
Now. Let's think about what kind of a connotation this gives race.
If race is assigned, then the power to choose an identity is taken away from the group which is being labeled.
If race is assigned, then dominance, and by default superiority, is built into the identities of groups, and the people that form these groups.
And if race is assigned, the dominant race has, because of its default superiority, a ready excuse for imposing conditions upon the labeled race that lack freedom.
In a way, racism is inherent in race.
And what of this superiority?
In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf comments on a text she read on the inferiority of women, saying that “possibly when the [author] insisted a little to emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.” I think that this idea can be stretched to the “line arbitrarily drawn between white people and black people” (Spiegel, 20) by early European explorers. Think about it. You are... I dunno, John Johnerson from... Europeland. You've just arrived in an unknown land, and everyone around you looks different from you. Not only that, but they have a way better idea of how to survive in this unknown land then you do. You (John) are probably feeling a little bit insecure, am I right? Back home, you're a big deal. You're the brave explorer who volunteered to brave the elements and venture into the wilderness. However, here in the wilderness, you are just Some Lost Guy: not exactly what you pictured when you started off on this journey.
So what do you do?
You label. You tell yourself, and everyone else, that you are better. Smarter. Stronger. Morally purer. And you keep saying it, over and over again, until you believe it, and your friends believe it, and their friends believe it. Not only that: you do your best to make sure that those people you are putting yourself above believe it too, do your best to make them, as James Baldwin said, “despise themselves” (Speigel, 18). And once this process has been completed, once your armor of false superiority has been cinched tight, once the paper bag of inferiority has been mercilessly placed over your victim's heads, it is then that you look at those you have labeled and see not a person but “[your] own reflection” (anthology, 317), your own power to do with the labeled party as you please. They exist for you, after all.
Explorers (like John Johnerson).
http://karenswhimsy.com/public-domain-images/european-explorers/images/european-explorers-3.jpg
We, as a society, have labeled animals as inferior. I don't know when it started, this labeling. We must have been very insecure when it began, must have seen their “depth of feeling” (anthology, 316), the love and the beauty that they exuded, and decided that their was a danger that we, as a species, could not compare.
And really, its not the label thats the problem. This idea of us and them is fine. Its the connotation we attach to it, the “we are better” that drips off of our labels, that messes everything up.
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