Color as matter : narratives of race, ethnicity, and the deployment of color

Abstract

This paper has as its postulate that ‘race’, colors and appearances has been emptied of legitimate cultural content, and has been surpassed by a discourse of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ in regards to how we articulate differences across people. This postulate is worked against using a research question that states that ‘race/color’ in today’s public debate has become drained of legitimate cultural content, yet in the lives of people of mixed ethnic decent color acts as an ‘experience near’ concept that is given on the one hand positive value and on the other hand negative value. The goal is then to chart out some of the historical reasons why ‘race/color’ became illegitimate, and then try to show how in fact ‘race/color’ acts as a sort of ‘social subtext’ that is still in play in the lives of mixed ethnic individuals. This is done by using a document analysis ranging from the UNESCO statement on ‘race’ as it was formulated in 1950 and 1951 as well was analyzing near contemporary documents from the Norwegian Justice Department and The Norwegian Language Council. This is an effort of doing a short ‘genealogical’ analysis of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in the sense that Foucault used the term ‘genealogy’. From here the paper moves on to contemporary interviews with individuals of mixed ethnic decent in order to chart out how and in which sites color and ‘racialized’ knowledge about ethnicity is played out. It is in this part that the paper looks at the everyday importance of color and ‘race’ as it is played out across various social fields. The paper ends with a conclusion that is tentative, but which never the less makes the claim that ‘race’ to a certain degree and color and appearances matter in everyday discourse. Furthermore it is argued that in the documents analyzed, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ is conflated to such a degree that several paradoxes are born out of the historical conflation between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. These paradoxes makes it hard to conclude that ‘race’ as such is dead, but it is also claimed that ‘race’ has transmuted; both as it appears in the documents analyzed, but also based on the ways it is used in the lives of the people interviewed. As such ‘race’ as it occurs in the material analyzed is better seen as being part of a process of ‘racialization’ which links ‘ethnicty’ to ‘race’ in such a manner that ‘ethnicity’ bespeaks a corporal dimension as well as a cultural.