Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Race

I think race is a socially constructed concept. Unfortunately for us, it's embedded in our society, such to an extent that we will never be able to forget it. I remember watching a TV game show which the objective of the game was to guess a 5-letter word in five or six tries. The white contestant yells, "Black! and realizes her teammate is black, and she teammate does not look happy, prompting the white contestant to purposely misspell the word. "B-L-A". She actually thought about it for a second and said, "K-E". Blake. So was the white teammate then conscious of her race, causing her to consciously misspell "black"? I think she was. White men & women don't think about the color of their skin. On the other hand, non-whites are constantly reminded of their "non-whiteness". In the show, this "slip of the tongue" caused the contestant to realize that she would be in an awkward position if she does finish the word because of the different color of their skin...

Or she may really not know how to spell black.

No comments:

Post a Comment