Questions to Think About:
1) Should people of a particular race be allowed to define their own race?
2) Why does it seem that DNA ancestry tests are more popular in the United States than, say, Nepal?
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1) I don't think the issue of race is whether people should be allowed to define their own or not. Obviously they should be - and at an individual level do. However, the importance is at a larger level of how one race overshadows another and defines it in its own terms. Think of the ways we categorize black - all shades of dark skinned people into one category. Like Hartigan said, if this was important to us, we would have many more names for colors of skin. However, we lump them into a single category. To THOSE people though, they define themselves with respect to their own worldview and how they perceive themselves. People in Darfur, Cameroon, Sulawesi, Papua New Guinea, will define themselves in their own way with respect to their own relations, without us categorizing them as being black. Of course because of culture our minds categorize them as such - and I'm not saying that's right - but that's how it's happened in our culture. Of course they should be allowed to define their own race - and again, they do - it's just overshadowed (at least in our minds) by a dominant, western, hegemonic view.
ReplyDelete2) Simple - I think it boils down to money. But also important is the stress put on the cultural idea of knowing your lineage, as well as that knowledge that people already have. One could easily make the argument "What is DNA ancestry tests more popular with black people than white in the United States?" Well, for the most part many whites (who care to know) already know because they've traced their lines to a European ancestry, either through DNA or because they've had access to records. Within the black community, those records weren't kept, and due to the slave trade eradicated many forms of keeping track of an ancestral line. They want to know where they come from to celebrate their culture, history, etc. In Nepal, not only is technology probably not prevalent - but with what money people have they may not be interested in spending it on DNA testing. Additionally, their culture may not put as much stress on knowing where one is from, or they may ALREADY know where they are from. People trace ancestral lines differently and have different stories about how such lines are traced. In their culture, this could be completely different from ours or they may just not find it as important.
1) I guess I should have clarified what I was asking in this question. I really meant to say should it be people of a particular race that initially define racial categories? We looked in class at how many arbitrary categories of race there were in the past (i.e. "Hindu", "Japanese", etc.) These are, of course, not actual races. So my question is, should it be people of a particular race defining what it means to be that race? Not necessarily identifying with a particular race.
ReplyDelete2) I agree with the notion that many white people in America can trace their ancestry to a European lineage. But actually, there is evidence that certain people of Indian heritage are linked to Czechoslovakian lineages. Everyone comes from somewhere else, right? But I don't think that money is the main reason for why people go through with DNA ancestry tests. I do think that culture and social beliefs guide people to this. Western society is really based on individualism and stresses uniqueness. But in this pursuit of uniqueness, it seems that we must find these "exotic" and "foreign" roots that sets us apart from the norm. And I think that people use DNA ancestry tests to accomplish this to an extent.