My thoughts about  – What We Mean When We Say ‘Race Is a Social Construct’ – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic

During my undergraduate years, I had the privilege of studying Eugenics in America with Lawrence Mamiya.  So yes, I know how science played a key role in the construction of racial constructs, particularly those that determine what we call American and what we call “other” or “alien”. I even found this thinking informed some of DuBois’s thinking about the Talented Tenth. So as much as I agree with this, I do so cautiously.

Too often I hear people say that, race is a social construct in a past tense sort of way.  Many people state this in a knee jerk way. however, some are saying it in the same way that they talk about being in a  post-race age.  It is as if some of these “liberals” are saying, “we must now dismiss the validity of organizing on a phenotype-basis as it has no basis in reality and is an antiquated concept. ” Or more simply, Obama is president or as noted in this article look at Harold Ford and Halle Berry.  They are black successful happy…or wait not really black. In another age they would be like Walter White (pictured in article). Black with skin privilege America seems to have turned them into another race, like in South Africa or 18th century New Orleans.

None of that post-racial crap matters or is real. Racism is however all kinds of real. As is colorism within the Black community. So yes it is a construct, but know one has done any real deconstructing except in academia. Social construction creates an unyielding architecture. Its built prisons and schools and the fashion industry. So let’s not take it too lightly.

I realize the article is focused on measuring intelligence. Which in the scheme of things isn’t something we pay much attention to these days unless some idiot at the Heritage foundation brings it up. Otherwise, this is not the race-based issue I think we should be preoccupied with, but as usual Coates is brilliant and eloquent. So my problem is not with his main argument. Rather, I am launching a  neurotic preemptive strike at those who would use this as yet another reason to put a death knell in the NAACP, affirmative Action, or immigration reform. My issue is that as long as people are still suffering under the oppressive apartheid created as a result of these constructs, we need to identify them, but not dismiss their potency and the necessity to organize against them.