aWAC Supporter,
This is part 6 of a 10-part series by Dr. Charley Flint and Jeff Hitchcock, CSWAC’s founders, on our future direction. We value your time and support.
WEEK 6
Exposing the Monoracial Norm
Yes, race is a social construction. Biology has little to do with it. So, who constructed it?
Europeans did, from the 16th century onward. They named themselves “white.” But they didn’t stop there. They also named other groups as “Black” and “Indian,” for instance. Indigenous people in the Americas did not decide to take on a collective name based on the mistaken assumption of a European seafarer lost on his way to India. Black people did not decide their multitude of cultures in Africa could be subsumed under a singular group we now know as Black. Europeans set up the system of race and designated racial groups.
The naming persisted over the years as part of a white supremacist agenda that enforced a racial hierarchy to maintain social and political control. The racialized groups themselves began to form some internal coherence and identity as time moved on due to cultural similarities and a shared experience of oppression and resistance or, in the case of white people, dominance and exploitation. All this is common knowledge in anti-racist circles. It describes the racial structure of the United States that remains familiar and normalized in our everyday experience.
But when you think about it, there is nothing natural about separate and discrete racial groups. When people of different cultural backgrounds come together, they tend to intermix and blend. Over generations a new culture emerges. However, this process can be disrupted if one group is dominant and places boundaries to free association between all others concerned. That is what has happened in the United States.
We have been taught and consider it normal and natural that people each belong to a single racial group, and that same-race groups are normal and natural. We call this social expectation the monoracial norm. People whose identity is that of a single race (monoracial people) and people who interact in groups where all others are of the same race (monoracial groups) are doing what society considers normative. Like all norms, the monoracial norm is enforced through social conventions and sanctions. That’s a topic for another day.
For now, it’s important to note that the monoracial norm is a creation of white supremacy and serves the purposes of holding white supremacy in power.
Three central tenants of white culture support the monoracial norm. The first is “either/or” thinking. An object is either one thing or another, but not both. You tell the truth or not. You are happy, or you are sad. You win or you lose” You are Black or you are white.
Contrast this with “both/and” thinking in which you might tell the truth and not tell the truth at the same time. You may be both happy and sad at the same time. If you win, I may win too. You may be both Black and white. Life is complex.
This either/or approach works with two other tenets of white culture, which are “divide and conquer” strategy and “zero-sum” thinking. White supremacy sharpens the boundaries of racial groups and encourages division between us.
Finally, and this may be its greatest impact, the monoracial norm makes monoracial groups seem so natural and normal, we have not developed an understanding of how multiracial groups can emerge and function as natural structures.
The monoracial norm continues to be an essential element in the racial structure that white supremacy created. It seems very natural to us. That’s how norms behave. Left unexamined by most of us in our organizing, the monoracial norm quietly does its work.
Charley Flint . . . . . . Jeff Hitchcock
Next Tuesday: Who Owns Multiracial Culture?