Race: The Power of Illusion, Essay Example

In the video “Race: The Power of Illusion” a compelling argument is forwarded that race is largely a social as opposed to biological category. Namely, racial constructs are created by social discourses – there are not some innate qualities that are attributable to each race. This, on the one hand, means an autonomy for the individual, in so far as it is an argument against biological determinism: the individual is not reducible to his or her biological material. On the other hand, however, the social dimension of race means that concepts related to race can be used as tools of hegemony and exploitation, for example, in American history, where the White race was socially constructed as superior to races such as the African and Native Americans, an ideology of race that possessed the clearly disastrous consequences of genocide and slavery.

The promotion of the idea that race is largely a social construct, while popular in academic discourse, has not penetrated into the common social discourse to the extent that clear instances of racism still abound in the United States, as demonstrated in the incidents in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City in 2014, incidents which sparked nation-wide protests. A common rhetorical trope that was passed off after the election of Barrack Obama as American President that was that the U.S. had somehow transcended its historically racist past. However, these incidents show that this is still a myth: although progress has been made, racism is still a systematic problem in American life.

For this reason programs such as affirmative action and other mechanisms which are sensitive to the racially divisive history of the United States are necessary: to the extent that institutional and social forms of racism still exist, which they clearly do as the aforementioned incidents have highlighted, then systematic mechanisms are needed to overcome them. These programs are a recognition of America’s racist past, as well as the social character of this racism: if race is a social construct, then radical changes must be made to the social construct itself, through all forms of social discourse, so as to eliminate racism from society.