Silver-Backing Mirrors: Racial Identity and Cultural Definition in Citizen

One of my favorite lines in Citizens, for me, projects a clear idea of how people should combat racism, while also exploring how racism came to be in the first place. The line is as follows:

¨It is the White Man who creates the black man. But it is the black man who creates.¨ (128)

The first half of this line accurately represents how many of the figureheads of convential racism were engineered by white people, for white people. It was used to prove genetic superiority by many early European scientists, despite many of them not holding scientific degrees, and justify the use of slavery in plantation colonies for the profits of the already wealthy. That is to say, white men effectively insinuated the elements of modern racism for their own idealogical and economic gain. However, what is undermined in this analysis is the self-definition of black people despite white efforts to portray them in ways to somehow benefit themselves. Going back to the idea of dominant and recessive members of relationships that my class and I explored earlier in the year, modern racist idealogy can be traced back to the binary engineered by whites to supress the black identity and artificially increase the value of the white identity.

However, in modern times, the second half of this quote seems to hold more power than the first does. With racism a much weaker social force than it was in centuries prior, people nowadays push more to undermine the fundamentals of racism while also avoiding the skewed goal of a raceless society. Today´s mindset encourages people to craft their own identities outside of their racial identities, which is reflected by the revolution for many African American women to care less about their hair, which has become a social stigma for them. Ultimately, this quote represents the direction that the black identity has taken over the years and will most likely take in the future.