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I wonder when people will realize that West Asians, Middle Easterners & North Africans are caught in a racial paradox in the US. We can't understand the full extent of our structural racial realities BECAUSE we are lumped in with white people. We only have our stories. A thread:
The U.S.'s current racial categories are directly rooted in 19th & 20th century white supremacist ideologies of racial science and eugenics. The Census has always been been a means of state-sponsored control and assimilation. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/will-this-years-census-be-the-last
First and foremost, race is a socially-constructed phenomenon that is created and reinforced on both a micro- and macro-level––through a co-constitutive combination of everyday racial rhetoric AND larger structural forces.
Although race is socially constructed, it has real-life stakes & far-reaching consequences. It structures our reality by delineating power and privilege to some (coded: white) while excluding & disenfranchising others, especially Black/Indigenous people who built the free world.
In the US, racial categories were historically constructed through intersecting mechanisms of religion, law, and “science,” paired with common conceptions of whiteness (read: white, Christian, Western European), all rooted in ideologies of white supremacy.
Following the Naturalization Act of 1790, one had to fit into the category of “free white persons” in order to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Citizenship was––and in many ways, still is––a conditional process; assimilation into the white mainstream is the pre-requisite.
But I think what people forget is that race is socially constructed and that individuals run structures. Racist laws, systems, and practices are primarily upheld by PEOPLE. The rhetoric we use everyday matters because alters how people function within systems, and vice versa.
The more we speak truth to these narrow and archaic racial categories––as if they are final, biological, and concrete––rather than listening to and prioritizing the real-life racialized experiences of people, the more we reinforce the power and hold of the state.
TL;DR: we have GOT to come up with better language (& many people have: https://swanaalliance.com/about ) and we need to actually start using it to refer to one another. Let's dream up new alternatives for this generation of "Other" checkers.
