NM's blog

A 'black' woman said that she didn't knew she was black until she was 16. Does that mean 'blackness' is like 'whiteness' a social construction? Yes, an individual not realising they are Black until later in life directly illustrates that  both "Blackness" and "Whiteness" are social constructions rather than biological absolutes.  [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]  While the physical trait of skin pigmentation is biological (determined by melanin), the act of grouping people into rigid racial categories and assigning meaning, status, or identity to those categories is entirely a human invention.  [4, 6]  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ HUMAN VARIATION │ └───────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┘ │ Is organized by society into: ▼ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ ...

“There are other times when I seek out the wisdom of those human beings who refused to turn their faces from forms of social terror and found strength to endure.” A good and stimulating interview . Contrary to the title though, the treatment of the relevance of Malcolm X’s ideas in the exchange between Yancy and Sawyer are marginal.  

Jean Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon “Make people ashamed of their existence.” Make them “face the world.” “But to what does this shame amount? What is shame’s sociogenesis, especially in situations of colonial or racial violence? To what extent is the feeling revolutionary? How does it provide the means to solidarity?” Marx : “ Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.” Mediating the error between class and race

"Since Europeans didn’t always think of themselves as ‘white’, there is good reason to think that race is socially constructed, indeed arbitrary. If the idea of ‘white people’ (and thus every other ‘race’ as well) has a history – and a short one at that – then the concept itself is based less on any kind of biological reality than it is in the variable contingencies of social construction." How 'white people' were invented