“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the Us Page: 55
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involved mistaking members of one group for members of another. I had always assumed
although racial profiling was a racist practice; its parameters were always clearly defined.
But once again race turned out not to be something that seemed as easily perceived
according to skin color or physical appearance. There were a lot of people of a variety of
backgrounds who could not be placed in a single racial category according to visual cues. I
realized that an important way to fight racism was continually to question race and racialization.
Even when I was fully engaged in my journalistic career, I had always planned to have more than
one career over the course of my working life. I wanted to be a university professor sometime
after my journalism career and sociology is the field which allows me to use both previously
developed skills and new ones to continue to play a small part in exposing fallacies of race in
different environments. That race is socially constructed made sense to me because it allowed
room for interrogating racialization and racism and beginning to understand that race was a
dynamic social phenomenon. Trying to understand how race was socially constructed gave me
some tools to begin to show how a racialized system was basically unfair and impermanent. If
race was in a constant process of social construction, then more groups could find ways take part
in simultaneously destroying it as a repressive force and molding it to conform to their own
interests and perceptions of their own identities.55
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Smith, Starita. “What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the Us, dissertation, May 2012; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc115163/m1/62/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .