17 May 2016 "Steven Biko and Racial Understanding"

In his work I write what I like, Steve Biko describes race, or, specifically, blackness, as more than simply a biological identification. In his words, being black is “a reflection of a mental attitude”.[1] In other words, race can be examined as more of a social construction or an individual understanding more than a matter of pigmentation. There are many ways to understand race, and these are not limited simply to the realms of biology and sociology. However, there are two key understandings of race that simplify much of the way it has been understood. These are a biological construction and a cultural-political construction of race.

            To understand race as a biological construction is to label it as something that is determined by birth. It is to claim that racial difference certainly is determined by nature, but it also lays claim to certain stereotypes surrounding race being determined by strictly biological factors. To subscribe to a biological construction of race would be to subscribe to the idea that. perhaps, the jobs black people find themselves in more often than white people are due to certain external, biological factors. For example, a black man is suited more toward manual labour because his genetics lend him greater physical prowess than mental prowess; alternately a white man thrives in a mental environment simply because biology has gifted him with a stronger brain.

            A cultural-political construction of race would lay claim to the idea that race is not determined by biology, but instead is constructed by social and political norms of any certain time period. In the same example as above, a cultural-political construction of race would explain that a black man finds himself more often in an instance of manual labour not because he is naturally more suited to it, but because it is the job which society has pushed more readily upon him. In an area such as post-apartheid South Africa, a black man might find himself unable to easily get work outside of the manual labour market, and a cultural-political construction of race would claim that this is due to factors such as apartheid in South Africa, and not to the natural mental inferiority of the black man to the white man.

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[1] Biko, S. 1978. Some African Cultural Concepts. In I write what I like.  Johannesburg: Picadr Africa. 44-57.