Week 10- Race

I found there to be many similarities between the Butler article from last week and Howard Winant's The Theoretical Status on the Concept of Race.  Butler presents gender as a performative act.  It is not something that we are born with biologically, but rather something that is formed through a series of repetitive acts.   In Winant's piece, he states that "race is either an illusion that does idealogical work or an objective biological fact.  Since it is certainly not the latter, it must be the former" (p. 53).  Winant presents the work of Barbara Fields who explains that race is something we have constantly altered and adjusted to fit our social vocabulary.  This allows us to "make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we choose to do now" (p.54).  Both Butler and Winant present gender and race in such a way that says that it is something we create, rather that a solid biological fact. 

However, one of the problems that Winant points out with Fields' idealogical concept is that it fails to recognize that race is a part of our identities.  Especially in the US, where people from so many different countries have come together, race is one of the ways in which we define ourselves.  

In September, an ad for L'Oreal cosmetics ran featuring singer Beyonce.  The ad generated a lot of controversy when readers noticed that the singer's skin color appeared to have been lightened.  L'Oreal denied that her skin or features had been changed, but the noticeable difference between the singer's looks in the ad versus other photos of her may have been to the lighting or "creative touchups."  I think in this ad L'Oreal was trying to blur the issue of race in order to reach a larger target audience.  While most people know that Beyonce is "black,"  by lightening her skin, the company is trying to make sure that the "white" population know that their haircolor line will also work on them.  

This issue gets more and more confusing as people from different ethnic backgrounds continue to marry and their children cannot simply break their race down into white, black, yellow, red, and brown.  In many ways, it will become more difficult to judge people on the color their skin because more of the population will no longer be an extreme, but will rather fall somewhere in the middle.