1/ Not that @jbouie needs me to pump up his work, but I will anyway. This essay is excellent for scholars who do work in U.S. Black populations but are not explicitly trained in the theory and history of racial stratification...
nytimes.com/2020/08/14/opi…
nytimes.com/2020/08/14/opi…
2/ A lot of people have learned that race is "socially constructed." But what does that mean? This article explores that question at a macro level (get ready for a quick historical tour) and at a meso/micro level in the person and story of Kamala Harris.
3/ An aside: earlier this week, I walked past one of my neighbors, a 60-something Black American women, sitting out on a swing. She was wearing a distinctively pink and green t-shirt. I told her "Congratulations!" That was it. That's what I said. We smiled. @akasorority1908
4/ The thing I love most about @jbouie's essay are lines like this: "Slavery bound African captives together into a group; the desire to assert their personhood — to build community, to find respite, to resist — was cause to adopt a common identity....
5/ "...In turn, that common identity gave those individuals and their descendants a foundation from which to challenge the structures that bound them together in the first place."
6/ "...Race hierarchy and racism set in motion a process of group formation and social action, the aim of which was to transcend and overcome racial domination, and racial categorization itself."
7/ "Black people did not create themselves as 'a race.' Race is an ideology, not a biological reality. It arose at a particular time in history... in an effort to resolve the contradiction of a freedom-loving society that held large parts of its population in bondage."
8/ "It was enslavers who deemed their African captives a 'race,' but it was those captives who made themselves into a people."
🛑 Stop and take that in. It's a beautiful line.
🛑 Stop and take that in. It's a beautiful line.
9/ In my empirical #epitwitter research world, I see a lot of political progressives saying, "Racism, not race." But when it comes to interpreting model coefficients for race or other markers of social stratification, I don't entirely agree...
10/ Because those coefficients capture not just racism inflicted on a group of people but also the effects of their resistance, the effects of their building a community among tribes and people without existing affinities or bonds...
11/ Building community for survival but not only that, building a people in order to resist the very same racialized domination that bound them together in the first place. What genius! What a turning on its head of a thing!
12/ So when I look at those model coefficients, I think of a range of counterfactuals. I think of a world without racism. But I also think of a world *with* the same racism but without the building of community and the making of a people. That's a darker world...
13/ I think of how much worse it could be... WOULD be... without the resistance and bonds of care and grassroots organizations (shout-out to @GirlTrek & @akasorority1908). I see a RR=1.8 and think about how our care for each other is the reason the RR isn't 4.8 - or higher.
14/ Over the past year, I've been lucky enough to work with organizations like @UniteThePoor and @MCJCenter. These organizations are doing powerful work against a strong relentless current. And it might seem like it doesn't matter. But it has and it does.
15/ Anyway, this is why I like decomposition as a conceptual framework for thinking about racial inequities in health. Because yes, structural racism, is promoting negative outcomes, but community bonds & care also contributing in the opposite direction. I want to see both.
17/ ...but his larger argument -- that the social formation of Black American identity by a racist ideology was turned on its head and used as a tool of resistance -- is an evergreen point that we should keep in mind when interpreting model coefficients for Black race.
