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Paper #102876 :: Deconstructing Racial Essentialism
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This paper addresses the question of how to define race.

Written in 2008; 5,023 words; 10 sources; MLA; $ 126.95

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the age old question regarding what constitutes racial identity. The paper relates that the theory that there is something inherent within each race that makes them vary from one another whether biologically, psychologically, was a truth that permeated the discourse of racial identity of both Black and White intellects. The paper then goes on to examine the emersion of anti-essentialist critique of essentialism, and more specifically how the debate between the two sides relate to the Black Power nationalist movement of the 1960s and its attempt to make a new cultural identity for the Black community of interests in America. The paper argues that the performative nature of Black Nationalism is a testimony against the very essentialist claims that it is built upon and that its heavy reliance on rhetoric and language demonstrates that like language, racial identity is indeed a social and historical creation.

From the Paper:

"The argument over what constitutes racial identity is one that spans centuries, continents, and (as it is a debate that is still being occurring between critical race theorists, political activists, and artists) disciplines. The theory that there is something inherent within each race that makes them vary from one another whether biologically, psychologically, was a truth that permeated the discourse of racial identity of both Black and White intellects. This paper is concerned with the emersion of anti-essentialist critique of essentialism, and more specifically how the debate between the two sides relate to the Black Power nationalist movement of the 1960s and its attempt to make a new cultural identity for the Black community of interests in America. While the Black Power movement was an endeavor to empower and politically mobilize a disenfranchised group of society, its politics, rooted in racial essentialism, became more about racial performativity than political policy. The Black Nationalist movement was about controlling a style, an appearance, and more significantly a language rooted in performance (particularly poetry) that was believed would mobilize the otherwise stationary black subject. The performative nature of the Black Nationalist Movement became difficult in that racial identity came to be closely linked to political agency for it was assumed that the language of the political activist could transform the Black masses because of racial essentialism. However, it is my argument that the performative nature of Black Nationalism is a testimony against the very essentialist claims that it is built upon and that its heavy reliance on rhetoric and language demonstrates that like language, racial identity is indeed a social and historical creation
"The main question at the heart of the discussion between racial essentialists and anti-essentialists is an obvious one: how does one define race? According to W. E. B. Du Bois "It is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses who are [...] striving together for the accomplishment of certain [...] ideals of life." (Bracey Jr. 252-53). This depiction of race as "family" is one that runs throughout essentialist discourse which, coupled with the imagery of common blood, emphasizes the idea of biological sameness. Paul Gilroy, a post modernist writer, critiques this definition of race as family as an "[...] absolutist approach to "race" and ethnicity which animated black nationalism during the sixties but which [...] has also failed when faced with the need to make sense of the increasingly distinct forms of black culture produced from different diaspora populations" (Gilroy, 98). According to Gilroy, the essentialist view of race as a family does not account for the various, differing ways in which populations involved in the Diaspora have manufactured culture."

Tags: biologically cultural policy tradition

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