Listen in as three people --an African American, a White American, and an Asian American describe and unpack their racial identities. The three friends then discuss what it means when folks say that race is a social construct.
Identities, Race, and Social Constructs.
Will: What I've really been interested in is what shapes people, people's worlds, their sense of place and belonging, their understanding of how things work and how things should be and could be, which then force you to think about that sense of self.
Eric: You look at what was going on in the 16th century in Europe with these race taxonomists and going all the way to the to the to the 17th and 18th century. The Europeans were at the top. And invariably Africans at the bottom. You start to wonder what makes you you. I'm still wrestling with that and I'm still unfolding what all that means now. I think that this this would be unfolding that until I take my last breath.
Penny: Welcome to the diversity and inclusion for all project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Today, we are talking about race in America, and we have with us two guests and myself who have been doing different kinds of work related to all the different topics that could be understood as part of discussing and understanding race in America today. My two guests are Will Katerberg and Eric Washington. I'm going to ask each of them to introduce themselves a little bit, talking about kind of where they're coming from, how they come to the topics that are important to understand when it comes to race in America and give us a little glimpse of their cultural identities and sort of where their voice and their perspectives come from. Eric, would it be OK to start with you?
Eric: Sure. I'm coming from definitely a historical perspective. I would say that I'm an intellectual and cultural historian of Africa and the African diaspora in terms of teaching. I mean, I teach all of Africa, teach African-American history and teach basically Africans, the African diaspora, mainly in the Atlantic world. So so in in the Western Hemisphere primarily. And global history, which is like my meat and potatoes in terms of teaching semester in and semester out. And and I definitely bring the concept of race into the teaching of world history.
Penny: Will, what about you?
Will: So as a scholar, I've written about religion in North America. I've written about the relationship between religion and national identity in both Canada and the United States. I've spent a lot of time thinking about immigration, although ironically not so much about the immigration experience. So, I ended up writing a lot about anti-immigrant movements, nativist movements, movements by native-born Americans or native-born Canadians who felt that immigrants were oppressed. I've also written more broadly about Canadian-American comparisons, how the two countries of similar and different in all of these things. I think whether it's ethnicity or national nationality or religion what I've really been interested in is what shapes people, people's worlds, their sense of place and belonging, their understanding of how things work and how things should be and could be in many ways. My scholarship has, I suppose, been trying to figure out my own complicated background ethnically and nationally.
Penny: I kind of wonder if you could share with us a little bit about your own cultural identities and how you identify.
Eric: I identify as an African-American person. I would say “black” in terms of like a general catchall. But specifically African-American, which situates me as an African descent person born in the United States. So that's that's my ethnicity. And I will definitely say at the outset that there are nuances in terms of what we might define as African-American culture, but it's definitely a conglomeration of various west and west Central African ethnicities and cultures that over time and enmeshed together and been recreated. So I do know something about, you know, my my ancestry in the past, thanks to DNA testing and genealogy. So at least I know that I have a lot of ancestry, that that comes from what is now Nigeria and other parts of West Africa. So that enables me to, you know, pinpoint some cultural heritage and not just be a catch all in terms of what it means to be African-American, what it means to be to be black.
Will: I would say that I happily identify as American, as Canadian, as Dutch-American, Dutch-Canadian. I've lived in the United States as an adult now for over 20 years. But I would I think that emotionally I'm in my heart or in my gut, if you prefer, I'm probably more Canadian than American. And I, I have a still have a strong sense of that Dutch. I suppose I'd add a few things. One is that it's not just that I never thought of myself as white as a kid. I also didn't think of myself as European. To the degree that I recognize myself as European and as white, that's a relatively late experience in life. And it's one that was shaped not just by going off to college in the United States and then going off to grad school at the University of Notre Dame and studying these kinds of things. It was also that that's what I was experiencing. So as I said, I still identify as Dutch ethnically and my background and as both Canadian and American. But I don't really have an emotional connection to being either European or or white.
Penny: Thank you. For our listeners, too, I'd like to just introduce myself a little bit, because we're going to have some conversations about race in America. And we speak from our own racial, ethnic, cultural identity. So I think it's helpful to actually know a little bit about each of the speakers so you can contextualize and kind of have the background understanding a little bit of where we're coming from. So I spent the first five years of my life in Taiwan and then moved with my family to the United States when I was five and a half. I identify as Asian-American, but I'm also cross-culturally adopted. So…or cross racially adopted, maybe. So my parents would have identified as white Americans. And I was adopted into that family. And I grew up and I would say in a very majority culture kind of family. And with majority culture, I just mean United States majority culture, which means sort of the general culture of the United States that I say a lot of people would identify with things that are linked to sort of Western ideas of enlightenment, and that the individual person as an actor and an agent in the world and in his own life and has rights, ideas of democracy, those are all things that I would associate with majority culture, United States, America. And I feel very comfortable in in that culture. I identify as an Asian-American woman. I use she/her pronouns. And those are all just pieces of my identity and where I speak from when I'm talking about anything, but especially when I'm talking about race in America.
My academic background is actually … comes out of teaching world languages. And you're maybe thinking, oh, she came from Taiwan and is Asian-American. She probably teaches Chinese or something. But actually, I taught German for decades and I did a lot of work in intercultural learning. And intercultural learning and looking at different cultures and understanding that better, I think is a big part too of or helps me anyway understand race in America and a lot of the issues related to race and race relations in America.
Penny: I'm wondering if either of you have something to share about how you've navigated your mix of cultural identities or story to share that might help us again, kind of understand who you are and the spaces and places from which you are speaking and sharing in our conversations together.
Eric: I'm born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. And, you know, growing up in New Orleans, you view, thought, you knew that New Orleans was different from other parts of the country, just just anecdotally. I didn't travel much as a kid. I mean, furthest I think I've been aware before I graduated high school was was Kansas City, Missouri. My traveling was real limited. But anecdotally, I knew New Orleans was different, is the way the people in New Orleans would characterize it. But I also thought New Orleans was at the center of the universe.
I think, it’s during probably during high school and you're taking your history class in American history classes, and you start to wonder what you start to wonder what makes you you. I always felt a pull outside of New Orleans, felt as though there were other parts of me that lay elsewhere. I just had this, yeah, kind of mysterious in that sense, but that's what I felt. It wasn't until I got to college and I'm in a race and ethnicity class and in college where the professor assigned us to do a family tree. Now, 2021, and even a few years ago, I realized how how traumatizing that was for someone who I assume at the time I was a descendant of enslaved people.
So I didn't know anything about my genealogy beyond my grandparents at that time. And my grandmother, my mother's mother had just died a year before, I think, or two years before. My father's mother was long gone. And my my mother's father was long dead. So I didn't have grandparents to to to ask questions. I had to ask my oldest and my mother's sister. And she gave me she gave me some names, but not not many. She gave me my great-grandparents’ names. And I think on one side, she gave me a second great-grandmother's name. But in that in that description was very important. She said that. My second great-grandmother was Cecile LeBeauf Poirier Joseph. And she said that she she was born as an enslaved girl. And that her father was, and I'm going to quote my aunt, a French white, which really in our parlance in Louisiana, would’ve meant that he was a Creole born, born in the new world, but of French of French descent, French ancestry, French ethnically. But that's all she said. She didn't say, you know, she didn't get into the dynamics of that. So that's what… I didn't know was maybe she didn't know his name. So I'll put that down. So eventually I did the tree. And I can only say that one side of my family comes from Africa in general. Another I said from France. That’s all I had. A few semesters later I’m taking a marriage in the family class, in sociology and had to do the same thing all over again. I had a little bit more idea about my family because one of my father's had a family, had a family reunion. We had the family tree. Great. But other than that, you know, there's no mention of tracing heritage back to the continent. What were the experiences of our enslaved for-parents? Nothing like that. Those stories were lost. And primarily are still lost in our family. We don't have that. So as I'm learning more about history and I decided to combine an Afro-American history, that's what it was called then, and to attach it to my my sociology major. I began to think more about what was beyond American experiences of my family. And I wanted to know about African history and African cultures.
And late in my tenure as an undergraduate student, I began to swirl swirl around in my head about how to identify myself at this point. Late 80s into early 90s, like 1990, Jesse Jackson is coming out and saying that black folks would not call ourselves black folks anymore, that in America we are African-American. I was like, oh, OK, that's cool. But I still thought that was pretty clumsy at the time. So I'm thinking more about I'm saying, well, maybe we should be called New World Africans. Or something like that. I was really close to what scholars would come up with just a few years later and calling people of African descent born in New World, diasporic Africans or global Africans. I was I was on the cusp of something even as a senior in college. So like like Will I went to African history really to try to learn about my deep story of being an African person, but whose for-parents were enslaved in… during the Middle Passage. Endured enslavement in in in the Americas, and here we are right now. I'm still wrestling with that and I'm still unfolding. What all that means now, I think that this this will be unfolding that until I take my last breath.
Penny: So in your case, there's really a combination of very different, let's say, races and ethnicities and cultural backgrounds that feed into your who you are today. And a little bit like me, you're kind of discovering that a little later in life is not necessarily all the stories and cultural knowledge that you grew up with.
Eric: Exactly.
Penny: Each person has their own story and their own combination of racial things and ethnicity things, things they know and thinks they don't. And that kind of can be a lifelong journey to discover that. Will, I wonder if you want to add anything. You shared a little bit about your story earlier. I wonder if you want to add anything at this point.
Will: Interestingly, like Eric's, my sense of ancestry in some ways, still doesn't go that much further back to the 1920s and 30s. As a child of immigrants from the Netherlands who came shortly after World War Two, I grew up hearing about immigration stories, about how immigration was hard and occasions where immigrants were discriminated against or people tried to cheat them. But especially I grew up with stories about the war and what it was like to be occupied and to hear about the German invasion and the horror of discovering what was happening to Jewish neighbors or if they didn't have Jewish neighbors, what they knew was happening to Jewish people from the Netherlands in the cities. So I grew up when we as kids complained, we eventually get a story that ended with I don't wish it on kids, but you should grow up during war because then you know what hardship is as opposed to what you think it is. And in some ways, maybe the common ground is that in Eric's background was forced migration from Africa by people who were forced to become slaves. My background is immigration by choice. But but in some ways that was a cut that I had to go out of my way or I had to go out of my way if I want to think about my ancestry before my grandfather, grandmother and great grandparents.
The other thing I'd add is that when I self-identified, when we started this conversation, I didn't self-identify as white. I mean, that's because in my earliest roots, I never really experienced life for myself as white. I had a very strong and stable sense of identity as being Dutch, Reformed, Dutch, Canadian. I grew up in rural areas and small towns in the province of Ontario. We're only very rarely did I encounter people who weren't of European descent. The occasional missionary would come through and she or he might be Asian or African, but most of the time was Dutch white. But that was a rare encounter with a person from Asia or Africa. The people of color I occasionally encountered in Canada were either indigenous Canadians or First Nations people, or occasionally an African Canadian. I remember a boy a grade younger than me, who was adopted by a Dutch immigrant family of indigenous descent in Canada. And I remember in high school, an African-Canadian boy, again, a year older or younger than me, who'd been adopted by a Dutch-Canadian immigrant family. It wasn't really until I came to Calvin to Grand Rapids in the late 1980s that I encountered people of color on a regular basis, driving or walking down streets, shopping malls, on campus. And I was highly aware of people of color just because it was so unusual for me in my experience, to see people who weren’t white. And it was at that point that I really began experiencing myself as white, which then forced me to think about that sense of self.
And I suspect that I don't just suspect, I know, that that's a mark of my privilege. But I didn't have to think about race in the way that you and Eric described yourself as far as being aware of being Asian, of being a person of color, of being black. I didn't encounter that until I until I came to the United States and lived in Grand Rapids. And the other way I encountered something like that was when I went to Notre Dame for the first couple of years of grad school there. I encountered people who had immigrant experiences, but they were Irish or Italian or German and had a strong sense of religious identity, but it tended to be Catholic. And so it was fascinating for me to see some of the same kind of ethnic stuff, all the community interconnections that ethnic groups happened. But instead of being the insider, I was now experiencing that from the outside and observing it. And people who've grown up Italian, Catholic or Irish Catholic and that have really marked their childhood and young adult experiences. So very early on, I think what directed me as a scholar to exploring comparative history, comparative Canadian-American and to exploring immigration experiences, was those encounters with difference that I really didn't have until I arrived in the United States.
Penny: I really appreciate you talking about how. When as you grew up in a fairly homogeneous, all white group of people, that you didn't have to think about your whiteness and that and that you named it as privilege. Right? And I think at least I don't want to speak for Eric, but for me, because I looked so different from my parents and from all my parents’ friends and relatives, I think I was always aware that there is this difference. Right? And how I look and let's call it race for now. There's just no denying it or getting around it. It wasn't like we hid the fact that I was adopted. It was pretty clear. And that gave me this consciousness, I think, about about how these physical differences, the things that, you know, eye shape, hair color, long straight, straight hair, how that is perceived by others as different. So, you know, my relatives, my cousins, my sister, I look really different. And that made my experience different.
Penny: I think it would be helpful if we could unpack race a little bit, because, you know, I've read and I've heard “it's just a social construct.” I'm wondering if especially you two who are …this is more your area of expertise, if you could unpack that for me. When people say “race is just a social construct,” What do they mean?
Eric: I think when people say that race is a social construct, they mean that race has been invented, the categorizations of people according to birth region and then phenotype, and sometimes those those two are conflated, occurred at a specific time for a specific purpose. So all of the early taxonomies of what we now call race, all are hierarchical.
That you look at what was going on in the 16th century in Europe with these race taxonomists, and going all the way into the to to the 17th and 18th century, the Europeans were at the top, and invariably Africans were at the bottom. And there's a certain moment that this is taking place, is taking place. And as Europeans really for the first time venturing over to the (African) continent, but they're not going to visit that. They're not they're not going to to make social calls. They're going there to purchase Africans who they will enslave and transport to to the new world. So there is a historical context to that, and there's a purpose to that. And then it becomes ingrained because it has, what we might say, an intellectual backing to it, and then eventually over time, these are “races.” This is the way it is, and there's more nuance that comes out of that because it's just not about European / African. It's definitely about what we will say now different people in Europe. Because the person who I identify as an Anglo will definitely see himself herself as different racially than someone who's Polish and so forth and so on. So …
Penny: You're saying early on in in Europe in particular, people sort of tried to categorize. groups of people based on how they looked and they came up with this, or it's part of the construction of this idea of race, and part of it was to say Europeans are at the top; dark- skinned African people are at the bottom. And kind of as a reason or a justification to go take those people and treat them like property because they're they're at the bottom. They're less than us. Is that is that a fair way to interpret that?
Eric: I mean, fairly. But I would definitely say that in the beginning, when when these categorizations are coming out is definitely not about phenotype. It's more as more regional.
Penny: OK.
Eric: Again, I would say that if the two become conflated, you know, phenotype and and region.
Penny: But it definitely seems like it's linked to, to be honest, to making money and enslaving other people in a way.
Eric: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's there's this scholarship that's came out in the 20th century really linking the transatlantic slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade with with economics in that race and then race, racism and race become justifiers of that.
Penny: And our scientists really tell us that just sort of biologically there there isn't a such a thing as race, which is why we call it a social construct. Right?
Eric: Exactly.
Will: And the biology tells us that genetically and in terms of other ways of measuring differences, the differences among people of so-called “races” are as significant as the differences of people from supposedly “different races”. Beyond the economics of slavery as a source for racism for, in some sense, needing to justify and create these categories, we could also add, ironically, democracy. The more that in the United States during the revolutionary era in the nation, it became critical to emphasize that all men were equal because they shared something fundamental. It became even more important to emphasize that the people who didn't share those things must be different. So if all men are equal but women are different, then women don't share the same rights as men. If all men are equal, but non-white men are different, then non-white men don't share the equality that white men share. So ironically, the need to define who is free and who is unfree was exacerbated as you … as people began to more and more emphasize the commonality that white men share in the need to distinguish men, between men and women and non-white men from white men became also more exacerbated.
In the ranking of races as it evolved in the 19th century, when the science of race was really being defined. It wasn't just that Africans were one race and Asians were a race and Europeans were a race. The distinctions and rankings also took place within these regional groupings associated with race. So as Eric said, the English were one race and the Polish, another race. And in the United States and Canada, this shaped immigration policy. And so the racial hierarchy would have put northwestern Europeans like the Dutch and Swedish and the Norwegians and English and Welsh and so on at the top, ranked slightly lower, would have been Germans. Below that at the bottom of the European hierarchy would have been people from Southern Europe. So Spanish, Italian and Greek Europeans. And that was the place where Europeans, from at least a northern European perspective, were shading from white into something that approached color. So interestingly, Italian immigrants to the United States were among the non-preferred immigrants, in Canada and the United States, from the viewpoint of those who were concerned about immigration and who feared too much immigration. They saw southern Europeans as too .. and unwanted. By contrast, Italian immigrants to places like Brazil and Argentina were among the most highly valued immigrants. So whiteness, even among people who today (are) considered white, was relative. In some sense, we might say that Italians became white over time in countries like the United States, whereas they were seen as shading towards people of color during the immigration era from, say, the 1870’s to the 1930s. And much the same would have been true in Canada. There's a long history, in fact, a good book called How the Irish Became White, if you look at portraits of Irish immigrants in the mid to late 19th century, the same kind of descriptors that were used, say, for people of African descent were often used for the Irish. I can picture a cover from, I think Harper's magazine that has a person who's depicted as an Irish immigrant on one side of the scales of justice and a person who's an African slave, or at very least a descendant of African slaves is balancing against the Irish. And the cartoon is meant to depict them as both racial problems.
Penny: I think race is really pretty complicated and how we think about it. Right? It's not simple and excuse the pun, it's not just black and white, and it's changed over time. So how we think about race and how it gets used changes a little bit. But it seems like like from the beginning, race has been used and constructed actually to do harmful things in some ways, to keep people out, to justify me thinking of you as less than me, so I can do X, Y and Z in the world. And you can't. And even today, I think there's there's remnants of those uses of race in our in our in the United States and in other countries as well.
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