by Herman Gray

About Herman Gray

Herman Gray is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and has published widely in the areas of black cultural politics and media. His books include Producing Jazz, Watching Race, Cultural Moves, and, most recently, Towards a Sociology of the Trace, co-edited with Macarena Gómez-Barris. His current research considers diversity, difference, and the cultural politics of media visibility.

Race

book Keywords for Media Studies

Race is a legal, social, and cultural invention rather than given in nature, and the knowledge of race and its deployment are exercises of power expressed in the encounter among groups for control over resources. The social construction of race trains our focus on the practices of race, including the terms of its creation, deployment, and enforcement as a mode of group subordination and regulation. Race as a technique of power identifies arbitrary differences such as skin color, hair texture, nose and eye shapes, and thinness of lips as sites of knowledge (classification, hierarchy, and value) about variations in human intelligence, capacity, creativity, development, indeed what it means to be human (Goldberg 2009; Wynter 2003). Constructionism provides an indispensable critical beginning (rather than endpoint) for thinking about the nature of racial knowledge taking shape today.