Defining the master statuses: race and whiteness

1. Defining the master statuses: race and whiteness Douglas Fleming University of Ottawa

2. Race, sex and class can be classified as “master statuses” (Marshall, 1994): hierarchical positions that overpower or dominate other identities. • There are two basic ways that the construction of these “master statuses” can be perceived: 1) constructionist (which acknowledges that human perception will construct categories of race, sex or class) or 2) essentialist (which takes the position that these categories exist independent of human perception. • In western culture, dualism appears to be “natural”.

3. Since identities are not mutually exclusive (i.e. one can possess a multitude of identities), one can occupy various positions in power hierarchies simultaneously. • Racial schemes are, for example, are by definition a form of categorization and, as such, depend on processes of naming and labeling. Hence the emphasis that is often made on the “political correctness”.

4. The supposed biological definition of what constitutes “race” is what makes it distinct from “ethnicity”. Ethnicity is a (socially-constructed) term that emphasizes the common culture of a group of people. • Most definitions of race are based on skin color, the most obvious ‘racial characteristic’, given the fact that skin is the body’s largest and most visible organ. • However, attempts to correlate skin-based definitions of race with other biological factors have been unsuccessful. You will, I‘m sure, know about failed Nazi attempts to define ‘Jewishness’ biologically or physically.

5. Biological factors, including DNA patterns, don’t help us in categorizing humans. • The chromosomes for hemoglobin places Swedes and some South African tribal groups in one category and Italians, Greeks and equatorial Africans on another. • Epicanthic eye folds are shared by African Bushmen and those from Chinese or Japanese backgrounds. • Blood type patterns would link Germans with people from New Guinea and Estonians with Japanese.

6. There is no correlation between race and cranial capacity. • In fact, despite repeated attempts by anthropologists (Murrill, 1960), there is no correspondence between brain size and cranial capacity (the brain does not fit snuggly into the skull). • In addition, there is no evidence beyond highly problematic culturally-specific standardized testing that intelligence (however one defines it) is somehow related to race.

7. Skin color is an evolutionary adaptation to solar intensity. • According to Karger (2004), some studies have linked self-defined racial membership to ear lobe creases and health risk factors (most notably related to coronary heart disease). • However, the biological variation within racial groups is greater than between racial groups. Few people exhibit the full range of physical attribute that supposedly correspond to their particular race.

8. All of this strongly supports the notion that race is a socially-constructed concept and does not correspond to physical attributes or mental capacity.

9. Philip Rushton, at the University of Western Ontario, used a battery of standardized mental tests (mainly IQ tests) to argue that East Asians exhibit more cognitive abilities than Whites, who in turn outscore Blacks. Rushton contends that East Asians are more intelligent because of larger brain size, greater degrees of sexual restraint, slower rates of maturation, higher tendencies of law abidingness and more capacity for social organization. • He has even gone so far as to say that there is a negative correlation between brain and penis sizes. The bigger the penis, the smaller the brain. • Ruston’s ‘findings’mix physical and cultural causation, which as I noted above, are not co-dependent.

10. Being “white” is to associated with the “norm” and significant access to “invisible” privilege (Carr and Lund, 2007).