Fadhilah Lokman - CAPs Blog 1

Topic: Racial Identity

Racial identity which is also called as race consciousness is a factious issue. In old days, humans were classified by their biological characteristics; however today scientists have changed that based on fluid social and historical context. Nevertheless, racial identity is identifying with a particular racial group. Although to many people, they can simply identify others based on their biological characteristics, it is not necessarily true.

This concept is conveyed strongly in Crash. This movie illustrates the concept very deeply that how bad misunderstanding and hatred could be derived from having this racial identity. There are different characters with different races in the movies such are Persians, Hispanics, African Americans and Whites. Although they do not know each other, based on outer characteristics, they quickly categorized people in different group of races. From this, some treated others very badly just because they are from different race. Even worse, just like in the movie, the White policeman purposely molested black couple. The husband was so helpless and could do nothing at that time for the sake of their safety. As Mantin elaborated in the text, this concept is controversial and ubiquitous. It is fine to have people of different races making up the world population but the problem comes when people start favoring own races and looking down on others.

Indeed, there are limitations to this concept. The theory itself is very arguable. As mentioned earlier, people might easily categorize others based on their biological characteristic; it is no longer credible when interracial marriages are happening everyday around the globe. Not only that, if a Chinese get marry to an Indian later their son which should be a Chindian (This is what we used to call in Malaysia) marry a Malay woman. What should we call their children then? Or what race is these kids should be in? One of them might have small Chinese eyes, dark brown Indian skins and others have round Malay eyes and fair Chinese skins. It would be very hard to simply categorize them into specific race because they are made of multiple races. Other than that, as there are only 55 genes out of 3 million that differentiate different groups, it is highly possible and proven biologically that some races share same biological features. For example, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese are three different races but it is hard to differentiate them even among themselves. After all, knowing this concept does change my interaction because I believe that even one does not prejudice towards others, there is a high tendency to favor own race. Talking about this issue itself can quite offending to some people, thus through positive way of communication, I believe any unfavorable things can be avoided. I remembered my junior who is a mixed Japanese and Malay said, "If I am racist, I won't be here today." That's what she said when people start talking about her dating with an Indian guy.

Reference:

Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T.K. (2009). Intercultural Communication in Contexts. McGraw-Hill Higher Education