Doggone it, you guys
would have this discussion while I'm at school!
I'm hungry, I'm tired, and I don't want to read all five pages right this second. I'll read them after lunch and my nap. Ergo, I may say things now that other folks have already said.
One usually self-identifies as belonging to one race or another, although again there are certain exceptions. Tiger does not consider himself black. When asked to label himself, he chose "Cablinasian," meaning caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. But in general, no one tells you what race you are; you tell them, and you determine it by what you learn in your family. My family self-identifies as white, and always has. That's how I know I'm white, aside from my obvious pale skin color and European facial features.
Race is easier to determine at the extremes, and gets progressively harder to determine as we reach the indeterminate middle. This is but one clue of many that it's not a cut-and-dried issue.
Race does have meaning; in fact, it has levels of meaning, within context. Some of those meanings are now outmoded (i.e. black people are stupid, Latinos are lazy, Indians are drunkards, etc.) and so their meaning has become empty and useless. In that sense alone, the concept of race is meaningless. But race definitely has other kinds of meaning which are pertinent and important.
The exceptions I mentioned above, about people "telling you" what your race is, usually occur in matters in which race will earn you (or deny you) a benefit. For instance, if the Cherokee Nation is offering scholarships to tribal members, then not just anyone who wants to self-identify as Cherokee qualifies, and proof would be necessary, such as a tribal enrollment card. Someone on the scholarship board could, in a manner of speaking, tell you that you are not "Cherokee enough" to qualify for the award, if you don't have that card. But that is just a loose example.
The concept of race does tend to fall apart in the middle: if one has a European mother and a Lakota father, is one white or Lakota? That's up to you to decide for yourself, but generally not for you to decide for someone else. If your ancestry, like Tiger's, encompasses several races, you might find others identifying you racially in ways you don't accept.
Why do we still identify ourselves and others according to race? Old habits die hard. In the sense of essential qualities, race has little meaning. What difference does it make if you are black and he is white and she is Asian? That depends on context. For instance, in one of my Mass Communications classes, we learned that newspaper editors still tend to be white, middle-class males. That black editors of either gender comprise only 3% of all editors in America, total, is cause for some concern. At least, it should be.
Okay, I'm really hungry now, and really tired. I'll come back to this later, and I promise to read what's come before, first.
