Page 224 - Contribution To Phenomenology

ETHNIC STUDIES AS MULTI-DISCIPLINE 111

to doubt the efficacy of integration, and deplore their lack of civil rights
inside the United States. The year 1896 provides a classic instance. In
reaction to the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson ^ which
established the "separate but equal" doctrine, Bishop Henry McNeal
Turner (1834-1915), Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal church,
and a staunch integrationist, a leader who was, in effect, the Martin
Luther King, Jr. of his day, began to be attracted to "Ethiopianism," took
up its motto, "Africa for the Africans," and became active in a
back-to-Africa movement.^ With respect to absorption in American society
and cultures. Blacks constitute a swing group. The main thrust of Black
programs, life and letters has been toward assimilation, here meaning the
acquisition of what W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963) called every "jot and
tittle" of civil rights; nevertheless, their experience in the United States
and throughout the Occident has raised serious geo-political, cultural, and
indentificational questions in their hearts and minds.
What is the standard view of what race and ethnicity are? Race seems
fairly clear at first but can become obscure. The phrase you habitually use
is 'Race and Ethnicity/ What does the whole phrase mean?
Here again there is both an historical and a conceptual answer. The
historical answer is that up through the early years of the 20th Century,
and all through the 19th Century, the word "race" was used rather
loosely to encompass what today we would call racial, national and ethnic
groups. The word "race," conceived as a term in physical anthropology,
refers to phenotypical groups that possess at least one hereditary trait, or
a cluster of traits, that is used as a characteristic sign of a race. The
term has lost much of its value to science, but survives in social,
personal, and pohtical Ufe. A trait is—and here arises the social aspect
of it—a visible one—e.g., skin color, hair texture, eye shape. There have
been occasions when students of human biology and endocrinology were
able to show that peoples differed in a patterned and hereditary way in
gland secretions, but these distinctions were . . . Socially invisible? Yes,
they were socially invisible. Essentially, and for all practical purposes,
racial traits have been conceived to exist in skin color, hair texture, and
eye shape and in the other features of human anatomy that the ordinary
person can readily observe. "Races" are social constructions used to
distinguish human types.

^ Stephan Ward Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African-American
Religion in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 198-252.