Stanford Scholars Question How We Talk About Race and Ethnicity in America

Scholarship Suggests That Everyday Interactions Between People Create and Maintain Race and Ethnicity

STANFORD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--“Everyone’s just a little bit racist” is the title of a catchy song with provocative lyrics, sung by Muppet-like characters in the Broadway musical “Avenue Q.” The statement made by the song is also a point of discussion in “8 Conversations About Race,” the opening essay of a new book entitled Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century.

“Our hope is that after reading this volume people will become increasingly comfortable with the idea that race and ethnicity do matter.”

Doing Race is a collection of essays that offers readers a unique interdisciplinary analysis of race and ethnicity in contemporary American society. Co-edited by Paula Moya, a professor of English at Stanford University and Hazel Markus, a professor of psychology at Stanford, the volume investigates issues of race and ethnicity through the lens of different research perspectives, including history, anthropology, and psychology, to name a few.

In, “8 Conversations About Race,” their contribution to Doing Race, co-authors Moya and Markus describe and analyze eight typical conversations that Americans commonly revert to when talking about race or ethnicity, including “Everyone’s just a little bit racist.”

8 Misunderstood Conversations

In movies and newspapers, and on college campuses and in political forums, Moya and Markus repeatedly encountered a set of common conversations that they identify with phrases like, “That’s just identity politics,” or “We’re beyond race.” According to Moya, “these conversations are like stereotypes that re-circulate narrow and flawed assumptions about race and ethnicity. Some see difference as positive, others see it as negative, but what they all have in common is that they are all based on incomplete or flawed ideas about what race and ethnicity are.”

Moya and Markus delved into the assumptions and stereotypes that lay at the heart of eight of the most common and recurring conversations, and discovered the inaccurate assumptions that fuel each one.

Moya and Markus gave a presentation about their research at Stanford. Watch a video of the presentation here: http://vimeo.com/13468483

Race is in our DNA

Do you think race is genetically determined? Recent research on the human genome has led most Americans to believe that it is. The pervasive belief in this idea is one reason why Professors Moya and Markus included it as one of the eight common conversations. According to them, the “Race is in our DNA” conversation is inaccurate because it implies that a person’s race is a matter of biology or unalterable cultural characteristics.

“We social scientists know that races are a product of history and society—all of those interactions that people and institutions have with each other and that make up the world we live in,” Markus asserted. “Popular conversation has not absorbed the new scientific understandings about the source and meaning of race.”

Markus and Moya say that as research changes the way scholars think about race, a new definition of the term is emerging.

“We now know, based on all the science and scholarship that’s gone on, that race is not a quality of people, it does not inhere in individuals or in groups, rather race is much more complex than that.”

That’s Just Identity Politics

Markus and Moya uncovered troubling misconceptions just beneath the surface of another popular race and ethnicity conversation they call “That’s just identity politics.” As detailed in their essay, people often turn to this argument out of frustration when they feel that other people are benefitting from being a certain race or ethnicity.

“This conversation is really common among people who think that race and ethnicity are irrelevant to—or else perhaps, a distraction from—the more important universal concerns,” Moya explained. “Because of the widespread nature of race and ethnicity as important systems of social distinctions, there really is no contradiction between paying attention to them and being concerned about society as a whole.”

“‘That’s just identity politics’ is a favorite of those who think that drawing attention to one’s race or ethnicity is a strategy used by weak people to gain unfair advantage,” Moya continued. “They attach the word ‘identity’ to the word ‘politics’ to convey the idea that someone who advocates for something on the basis of race or ethnicity is acting illegitimately.”

Race Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Professors Moya and Markus were especially interested in addressing the growing acceptance of the idea that America has entered a “post race” era.

“People love to say race doesn’t matter anymore. After all, they say, ‘we have a black president.’ This common conversation confuses the powerful hope for a society where race does not influence one’s opportunities in life and that upholds the notion of racial equality, with the reality that we are in a culture where race and ethnicity still organize society and individual experience for all people—whether they are aware of it or not,” Professor Markus noted.

Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist

A common flaw among all eight conversations, Moya and Markus found, is that the reasoning behind each one is incomplete. In other words, each lacks the larger context within which the phenomenon being discussed is taking place. For example, Professor Markus pointed out that the “Everyone’s a little bit racist” conversation “usually just stops there, with that observation.” Unless people go on to ask “what the origins and effects of different kinds of racism might be, then the conversation ends up being a kind of cop-out. It basically ignores the fact that social, political, and economic power is unequally distributed among different racial groups, and fails to consider ways of rectifying the pernicious effects of ongoing racism.”

Like stereotypes, Professor Moya maintains, “These eight conversations give us the illusion of understanding, but they are narrowly based on limited, flawed, and of course, unstated assumptions.” In addition, she explained, “These conversations are pervasive, they are difficult to change and they have powerful consequences for our actions.”

Race Is Not Something We Are, It Is Something We Do

If there’s one message that Moya and Markus want their audience to take away from the scholarship in Doing Race, it is that people do not have a biologically given race or ethnicity, but rather that everyday interactions between people create and maintain race and ethnicity.

“Race and ethnicity come about as a result of social processes that take place over time and across space,” Professor Moya said. The point she and Professor Markus want to emphasize is that “if a person is associated with a particular race or ethnicity, and if she behaves in particular ways, it is not because of what’s inside, but because of her participation in a web of social relations.” In other words, Moya stated that, “people do race and ethnicity—all of us, everyday.”

“For example, right now in Arizona, a newly enacted law gives police the right to question and detain anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant. The claim is that this law is necessary to protect citizens in Arizona, but it creates a very threatening situation for all legal immigrants as well as all non-immigrant Latinos and Latinas who can be stopped at anytime just because of how they look. It is a perfect example of doing race institutionally,” Moya observed.

Professor Moya added that, “Doing race always involves three elements--creating groups based on perceived physical and behavioral characteristics, associating differential power and privilege with these characteristics, and then justifying the resulting inequality.”

Most importantly, professors Markus and Moya want more informed science-based race and ethnicity conversations to be a regular part of the public dialogue.

“Our hope is that after reading this volume people will become increasingly comfortable with the idea that race and ethnicity do matter.” Moya concluded by saying that she and Markus also want people to, “understand the vital need to continually have conversations about how race and ethnicity influence ourselves and society. We humans create and maintain the racial systems we live within, we have the power to undo them.”

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