I have often remarked to others in casual conversation that—well one could call it a conversation starter or finisher, or downer… ah’hem—race doesn’t exist. It’s socially constructed, yet real enough that I consider it woven into the very fabric of my existence. Well, I view myself racially and ethnically as the physical and cultural extension of my ancestors, both ancestral lineages having been influenced by colonization and subsequent resistance to exploitation. Hence, the conundrum of someone like myself both wanting the notion of race (in particular racism as the derisive tool of subjugation and marginalization) to cease, when I simply can't or don’t want to fathom a world without this particular spectrum of identity. Being an African-American is partially about being proud of challenging the stereotype (when otherwise embracing those more benevolent racial attributes) or fighting against the establishment, aka the mythologized ‘Man’. One can always draw inspiration or eek out blame to others by pointing out the existence of the very real ‘glass ceiling’.
Like countless others, I have been following Faisal Shahzad, the naturalized American citizen of Pakistani descent who allegedly failed to detonate his homemade bomb in Times Square, mid-town New York City last week. He has been described as a sort of New Age terrorist, one who is ‘assimilated’ but fluidly living in two technologically interconnected worlds, ‘ours’ and ‘theirs.’ Literally, the next person committing crimes of mass destruction can be your neighbor or classmate or…friend?. How is that for a scary bedtime story? Do you still have an appetite?
Ethnic/racial lines can be drawn or redrawn by multiple actors and by increasingly diversified and accessible means—the Taliban on youtube seeking to forge a real and deadly network among a virtual community of believers, or unwitting politicians that inspire anger among racially profiled citizens. The media too has been charged with playing up, or in some instances, conjuring up rogue differences among otherwise would be kinsmen (patriots by birth or by naturalization).
Do you ever wonder why the boogeyman lives closer and closer to home? Why s/he might really be living in the closet? What is the hidden agenda by obvious fear mongering? Is there a precedent for this sort of thing—say, like the War(s) on Terror—and the nagging suspicion among conspiracy theorists that these were Petrol/Exxon/Revenge Wars of a magnanimous scale. Is it paranoid to simply wonder…aloud, that our notions of race are not intuitive or simply passed along from generation to generation, but that they are constructed, or were constructed at their conception (yes race didn’t always exist as a distinguishing characteristic of people the way that it does today)… and then for what means? Or rather…for whose purposes?
I am contributing a third self-authored article for critique and commentary on this topic.
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