Race as a Construct

A panel from American born Chinese, a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. The character pictured is 

aimed to represent the stereotypes used to label and alienate people of Asian descent.

Understanding the idea of "race" as a construct requires that one understands the historical context of its conception and usage. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells us in Writing "Race" and the Difference It Makes, “Western writers in French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and English have tried to mystify these rhetorical figures of race, to make them natural, absolute, essential. In doing so, they have inscribed these differences as fixed and finite categories which they merely report or draw upon for authority” (Gates 6). Gates tells us that the creation, usage, and perpetuation of the idea of "race" only serves to alienate people from one another - particularly those who are less privileged in historical and contemporary environments.“It takes little reflection, however, to recognize that these pseudoscientific categories are themselves figures. Who has seen a black or red person, a white, yellow, or brown? These terms are arbitrary constructs, not reports of reality” (Gates 6).

The use of "race" has gone far past the simple usage of words. The tendency to use "race" when consuming media and when living in general in contemporary society is almost inherent, Sue Hum tells us in "Between the Eye": The Racialized Gaze as Design. “No one approaches images with an innocent eye. Designers’ perceptual habits, such as the racialized gaze, influence their choice-making processes, including choosing, sequencing, and combining resources. Art historian Ernst Gombrich tells us that visual stimuli, by themselves, acquire meaning only within a particular utterance, a set of shared assumptions [53–54]. That shared perception gains dominance as 'culturally inflected visual practices' and is specific to a historical period and ideology [Jay, “Vision” 3]” (Hum 193). Hum asks us to analyze what we can control within the realm of visual design and representation in relation to racialized gazes. “Constituting one manifestation of the gaze, the racialized gaze participates in what Michael Omi calls 'a system of racial meanings and stereotypes' [122]. If we seek to understand how Design enables or inhibits persuasion, then we need to consider the ways in which our perceptual habits have an active, systematic, and ideological impact” (Hum 193).

This concept is particularly applicable to representations such as cartoons (common examples being the animated feature films Mulan, Pocahontas, The Princess and The Frog, and Big Hero 6, just to name a few.) Hum particularly takes issue with Disney's Mulan, and writes an entire essay on it titled The Racialized Gaze: Authenticity and Universality in Disney's Mulan. She writes that the "increasingly complicated issue of the reception and interpretation of racial identity in popular films" has to be linked with the complicated and controversial idea of race (Hum 107). Gates also reminds us that the usage of "race" is not solely language based, but visually and symbolically based as well - “ … Language is not only the medium of this often insidious tendency; it is its sign. Current language use signifies the difference between cultures and their possession of power, spelling out the distance between subordinate and superordinate, between bondsman and lord in terms of their ‘race.’ These usages develop simultaneously with the shaping of an economic order in which the cultures of color have been dominated in several important senses by Western Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman cultures and their traditions” (Gates 6).

By continuing to use and perpetuate the idea of "race" as something that creates an "other," or a "not-like-us" narrative, we promote (even if inadvertently,) oppressive power structures between peoples, a domination, a superiority. In Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice From the South, she writes about how one group tries to define by another through writings: "What I hope to see before I die is a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both the Negro as he is, and the white man, occasionally, as seen from the Negro's standpoint. There is an old proverb 'The devil is always painted black - by white painters.' And what is needed, perhaps, to reverse the picture of the lordly man slaying the lion, is for the lion to turn painter" (Cooper 383). Cooper wants us to see how narratives can be painted by others for others - sometimes for reasons solely to set them apart from the privileged group. "They forget that underneath the black man's form and behavior there is a great bed-rock of humanity, the key to which is the same that unlocks every tribe and kindred of the nations of earth" (Cooper 382).




Cooper, Anna Julia. “Excerpts from A Voice From the South” (1892). Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Anne E. Boyd. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2009. 379-384.

Hum, Sue. “‘Between the Eyes’: Racialized Gaze as Design.”College English 77.3 (2015): 191-215.

Hum, Sue. “The Racialized Gaze: Authenticity and Universality in Disney’s Mulan.” Ways of Seeing,

Ways of Speaking: The Integration of Rhetoric and Vision in Constructing the Real. Ed. Kristie S.

Fleckenstein, Sue Hum, Linda T. Calendrillo. West Lafayette: Parlor P, 2007. 107-130.

Gates, Henry Louis. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 1–20., doi:10.1086/448318.

“Using Graphic Novels in Education: American Born Chinese.” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, cbldf.org/2013/07/using-graphic-novels-in-education-american-born-chinese/.