It's Impossible To Lie About Your Race Summary

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Recommended: Social construction of race not biological

Not too long ago, the former head of the NAACP’s Spokane chapter, Rachel Dolezal received a lot of media attention for lying about her race. She could be seen on any news station defending herself against the onslaught of angry/disappointed followers that looked to her for leadership. A great multitude of black America felt betrayed, however Ann Morning saws the situation differently.
In her article “It’s Impossible to Lie About Your Race”, her main discrepancy with the issue is that race doesn’t exist as an objective truth. So if race doesn’t exist, how can it be lied about? There is a traditional view of racial conceptualization [race is biological in nature] that causes many limitations in how a person can identify himself or herself, concerning multi-racial identity and change over time, which is what social science tries to account for through its studies. The comments following the article reflect differing views of …show more content…

Chapter seven typically acts a summary of racial conceptualization outside of the formal setting of the classroom. Morning summarizes that scientists aren't sure what race is unlike many scholars' expectations, which would lead on to think that there would definitely be confusion among the common folk. Many people lean toward constructivism when they are asked and it is "more strongly associated with anti-racism" (Morning, 2011, p235), but when they've tried to explain it, their explanation tends to be essentialist in nature. The comments are full of strong assertions about what race is and should be conceptualized as, featuring the main topics: race as biology and race as a social construct.
There are three main comments made by Dan Pool, Lalita Amos, and Penny Dianna. Both Amos and Dianna’s explanations veer on the constructivist side, while Pool’s comment is purely essentialist. Pool

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