What Does Race Accomplish?

In my paper I want to explore race the idea that it is a social construction. Most of us would agree that race has no biological foundation outside of physical ethnic characteristics. Instead it is a combination of factors that include appearance, ancestry, experience, culture and perceived community membership. Not only does one’s ancestry come into account, but whether one is aware of it and whether the public is aware of it. In one sense, an individual identifies for themselves what community they are a part of; but in another sense, it can be an identity that is pushed on him or her by other people. The race one identifies with can even be different than what the public identifies that person as. Appiah believed that they was no term that could do for us all the things we try to make race do and I think he was right in that assertion. There are numerous factors that go into deciding someone’s race and even considering all these factors together sometimes doesn’t give a clear indication of what race an individual belongs to. In his book Blackness Visible, Charles Mills identifies seven different factors that go into a person’s racial identity and showed how even when you can identify all the factors, a person’s race may still be elusive. I think, like Appiah, that we have made race too broad of a category; including appearance, experience, culture, and ancestry in one is a messy business and leads to much confusion. If the concept of race we identify today is so complex and flawed then why do we even use it still? Most people seem ready to admit that race is flawed yet we do not abandon the system. What do we gain by keeping a system as flawed as this so prominent in our conception society and the world? I think that, for the most part, it leads people to jump to incorrect conclusions and negatively affects how we interact on a day to day basis. While I suppose that there are different communities that make up the larger society, separating people by race only encourages and forces social separations. Even when we find little instances in which our conception of race works out, they are still vastly outweighed by the instances in which racial considerations lead to injustice and inequality.