5203.0: Wednesday, November 15, 2000 - 2:30 PM

Abstract #16817

Fabrication of race: vicissitudes of 'whiteness' in US political culture

This paper examines the forces in US political culture which historically generated "racial" distinctions, particularly the imperatives of market capitalism and the imperatives of a relatively porous, democratic culture. In this context, "race"--both as conception and perception--can be seen as a culturally determined and constructed idiom whose central feature is its power to mediate these contradictions.

Focussing on the rising and falling salience of a hierarchical order of "white races" in the late nineteenth century, the paper both illustrates this general principle and documents the fluid "racial" status of various immigrant groups who have only relatively recently become a monolithic "Caucasian" race in American discourses of identity and racial difference. Special attention is paid to those forces which generated such differences in the first place (roughly between the 1840s and the 1920s), and to those which gradually eradicated such differences in the middle decades of the twentieth century. By 1960 the contention that someone LOOKED "Celtic" had become quaint indeed, though such distinctions--along with the characterological baggage that such outward appearances were thought to reveal--were the very stuff of American political discussion only a few generations before.

A brief epilogue will explore some of the implications of racialization and its fluid boundaries for public policy makers, and will take up the vexing issue of how health professionals can be at once medically respopnsible to the biological realities of "race" (in treating cycle cell anemia, for instance) while also being SOCIALLY responsible to the anti-democratic tendencies of "race" as a cultural fiction and a political idiom.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will learn to identify different ways-political, scientific, social-in which the concepts of race and ethnicity have been measured and categorized and used over the course of the twentieth century. Discussion regarding changes in measurement and categorization over time will illustrate the historical concept of the "construction" of race.
2. Participants will learn to recognize race as a social, scientific, and political construct.
3. The session will also enable participants to discuss and describe the importance of history in understanding research and policy implications of racial categories and racial measurement in public health.

Keywords: History, Ethnicity

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.

The 128th Annual Meeting of APHA