Although I'm selling this as an article, it's actually a sociological study of race. Before you continue on this ride, please put on your sociological imagination hats. Now, buckle in for the ride. Sociology focuses on the intersection between social facts and an individual’s everyday lived experience. The ability to analyze this intersection is referred to as sociological imagination which my sociology textbook (Ferris and Stein's "The Real World: An Introduction To Sociology") defines as “the ability to understand “the intersection between biography and history” or "the interplay of self and the world.”
Although our history is collective, the byproducts of it are processed in different ways depending on our social facts. Therefore, I find it necessary to reveal my own social facts to the audience. I’m a Black male of Haitian and Jamaican descent from a middle-class neighborhood on Long Island, N.Y., where I alternate time between my parents’ home in a joint custody arrangement. I was born outside of marriage in the middle of a suburb surrounded by immigrants from Latin American countries and the West Indies. These social facts are relevant because I’ll be utilizing standpoint epistemology which places emphasis on the authenticity of knowledge produced from the exclusive viewpoint of a specific person.
One of the main facets of our capitalist society is the existence of a hierarchy which assigns people different roles and expectations based on the categories they belong to. Every individual can have different statuses concurrently. An achieved status is “one we have learned through our own efforts (such as an occupation, hobby, or skill) or that has been acquired in some other way (such as a criminal identity, mental illness or drug addiction)”. My achieved status is that of a college student at a prestigious institution ranked twenty-first in the nation amongst national universities.
An ascribed status on the other hand is, “one we are born with that is unlikely to change (such as gender or race).” My ascribed status is that of a Black male. This being the case, I find often that the pigmentation of my skin supersedes all the other categories placed upon me, making it utterly inescapable. According to Frantz Fanon's, "Black Skins, White Masks", it becomes the means by which I’m stereotyped and, “I’m not given a second chance. I am over-determined from the outside. I am a slave not to the 'idea' others have of me, but to my appearance.” This immediate identification by others provides a stark contrast to the sense of normalness I feel amongst others in the Black community. This is probably because I’m not Black in the traditional sense of the word.
My parents are both first generation immigrants. I felt like the other. I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I felt more aligned with the Hispanic children than Black children culturally at a time before I knew the difference between ethnicity and race. According to, "Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race", by Charles W. Mills, The main cause of my otherness was “the rise of black essentialism and the corollary emergence of identities that “come with normative as well as descriptive expectations,” stipulating “proper black modes of behavior.”
I’ve observed this as a tendency amongst my racial peers to try to quantify and define blackness as they saw fit. I don’t blame them at all for this attempt, categorization and identity formation are all natural products of creating the self. However, the experience left me feeling alone as if there was no category or group I could comfortably belong to. Thus, I’ve often wondered what it means to be authentically Black and whether perhaps there’s a less stifling way of viewing racial identity. In my opinion, the key to understanding my own Black experience is analyzing the function of race, definitions of self, normative indoctrination in public school, hyper-masculinity, and ethnic identity -- which I'll do in the coming weeks.
