In our society, we often think that deciding who is white is an easy thing. Our racial categories have been naturalized, and so we've been trained to stop noticing how artificial they are.
However, there's no neat line that separates "white" from any other category. This is one of the reasons why we'll often talk about whiteness as a social construction. It's real only because of historical processes, not because of any objective reality.
Take this quiz to see how you'd define people from a given nation: http://www.understandingrace.org/lived/who_is/index.html
This quiz sees whether you can really always "see" race:
http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm
The idea here is not to categorize people, but rather to explore how the categories our societies have created are ambiguous and shift over time, or even from person to person.
Monday, October 29, 2007
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