Black, Hispanic, Jewish Korean American

By Jason Lim

I grew up in the Bronx, which means that I grew up with more black and Hispanic kids than many African Americans that I know and work with today. I also went to school with largely Jewish kids, having attended more Bar Mitzvahs that I can remember. Also, I spent two-and-a-half years of my childhood in Asuncion, Paraguay, playing soccer with the indigenous Guarani Indian kids and shouting with the best of them in bastardized Spanish.

Does that make me a Black, Hispanic, Jewish Korean American?

Writing about Rachel Dolezal ― the white woman who passed for black while serving as the president of the local Spokane chapter of NAACP ― in The New York Times, Allyson Hobbs states that race "is a fiction, a social construct based in culture, not biology. It must be made from what people believe and do. Race is performative. It is the memories that bind us, the stories passed down to us, the experiences we share, the social forces that surround us."

But if race is entirely a social construct, then shouldn't it be more plastic than it has been shown to be by the Rachel Dolezal case? Why shouldn't Dolezal, who is married to a black man, raising two black children, and working for a black cause, be allowed to self-declare her race to be black, regardless of her biological skin color and freckles? Not just self-declare, but be accepted by society?

And not just Dolezal. Shouldn't anyone who shares the black American historical and sociocultural narrative be allowed to self-declare her racial identity? After all, race is a sociocultural construct. Why can't someone then "construct" a racial identity that fits them and be accepted as such by society at large.

Because they won't be.

It doesn't matter what my sociocultural upbringing might be or to which racial narrative I identify with. If I go out in the middle of the street today and loudly proclaim that I am heretofore an African-American, I would most likely be considered crazy. If I tell people that I am actually Jewish-American, then people think that I am making a joke. I might have more exposure and nexus to the inner-city, black narrative than my black colleague who grew up in an affluent Detroit suburb to upper-middle class parents, but I can never be as "black" as he is. Same goes for my Hispanicity and Jewishness.

That's because race is all about how you look. And this has to do with our biology.

When we talk about sociocultural construct, we can't ignore the fact that these "constructs" have been influenced by biological imperatives that have evolved through millennia to ensure the survival of the humans species. I am not saying that everything about human society is based on biology. However, certain human behavior and sociocultural institutions that have codified such behavior are certainly heavily influenced by the biological imperatives that exert largely subconscious influence over how we view the world and interact with others.

This is especially the case for our need to classify fellow human beings according to how they look. We all know that human beings are very visual. Some proclaim that up to 90 percent of the transmitted information in the human brain is visual. Research at 3M Corp. concluded that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

This visual acuity did not develop in human beings by accident. It must have imparted some competitive survival advantage to our ancestors. Especially, when encountering strangers, it's not difficult to imagine that pre-modern humans relied on their enhanced visual capacity to determine who was friend or foe in a split second.

As such, this visual capacity also was an easy and effective means to impose some type of an order on the dangerous world that early human beings encountered. The more the stranger looked like you, the more likely that he or she was likely to be a friend, a part of the tribe. There was no time to ascertain a stranger's good or bad intentions by engaging in an in-depth interview to determine what tribal narrative he or she identified with. How you looked was a good proxy metric to determine whether you were a threat or not.

This carries on to our need to classify the world according to how we look. Does race itself have any genetic basis? No. Is race a sociocultural construct? Sure. However, our need to use "race" as a visually organizing methodology does have an evolutionary biological basis. This is why I can never be accepted as white, black, Hispanic, or Jewish by others. I don't look like them.

However, it's important to note that what white, black, Hispanic, and Jewish "look like" is a sociocultural norm that will evolve with the times. We have seen this already in the U.S. with the evolving and expanding visual definition of what being "white" means during the last century. But we will always categorize and prejudge people according to how they look. It's a part of our survival instinct.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes and @jasonlim2012.

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