Race as a Historico-Spatial Construct: The Hermeneutical Challenge to Institutional Racism

Abstract

Although lip service is widely given to institutional racism, it tends to be marginalized with more attention being given to individual racist acts. Furthermore, institutional racism is reduced to a knowledge of the rates of death, disease, poverty, and so on, among racial minorities as compared with Whites, and this knowledge is often divorced from any kind of real understanding on the part of Whites of the lives of those reflected in the statistics. To combat this lack of understanding, which is in large part a product of the distance that separates the races, one must break free of analytic reasoning. The problem begins with the way racial categories are often interpreted as the products of a false biology, whereas they were initially thought of as geographical. When, as a result of migration and race mixing, these spatial divisions no longer held in their original form, attempts were made to recreate them through segregation. Learning to read the way racism reproduces itself within a given society is a hermeneutical task. By understanding race as a border concept, a particular kind of historico-spatial construct, institutional racism becomes more legible.