Defining, "Race"

Upon reading the first sentence of Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s, “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” I felt an overwhelming feeling of disagreement.  My brain instantly began flooding with example of literature in which race had a profound impact.  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Diary of Anne Frank” all seemed to jump out at me as books that have had a pretty profound impact on our modern society.  “How could Gates be so blind as to ask a question and write about a topic that is so obviously incorrect?,” I thought.  That is until I continued reading, got educated, and learned about the inaccuracies of the term that he was using, “Race.”

The one quote that really made everything clear up for me began on page four.  

“Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction.  When we speak of ‘the white race’ or ‘the black race,’ ‘the Jewish race’ or ‘the Aryan race,’ we speak in biological misnomers and, more generally, in metaphors” (Gates 4).

The issue of defining a race is nothing more than profiling due to gender, religion, sexuality or nationality.  In his text, Gates discusses the issue that race has on texts throughout history and the controversy that it has stirred up.  Additionally, Gates points to examples in history that deal with issues of different cultures interacting with one another, specifically those dealing with the incongruity of some religions in different regions.  

“The Pope, however, a rather vocal critic of the creative African integration of traditional black (‘animist’) beliefs with those received from Rome, emerged from his confrontation with the musical black Other in the heart of darkness, still worried about ‘great confusions in ideas,’ ‘syncretistic mysticism incompatible with the Church,’ and customs ‘contrary to the will of God…’” (Gates 6).

A second issue that I found particularly interesting was Gates’s statement regarding the similarity between race and science.  This theory was another example that Gates provided in an effort to reassure his audience that it is impossible to compartmentalize a person or group of people into separate races.  Race is impossible to define because it is a blend of so many different characteristics that have been shaped over the course of your life and the lives of your ancestors.  

This article turned out to be quite an interesting read.  The example that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. provided seemed my knowledge on the subject and its relation to literature in today’s modern society.  


Works Cited

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 1-20. JSTOR.      http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343459