Does Race Change?

“Viola’s mother, Gwendolin Irene Davis, was the daughter of a Baptist minister who had come to Halifax from New Haven, Connecticut. Gwendolin Davis’s mother, Susan Smith, was born in Connecticut and identified herself as white. Gwendolin’s father, Henry Walter Johnson, was ‘seven-eighths white’ and although he is described as being ‘of mixed race’, Gwendolin Davis seems to have been generally regarded as white” (233).

Phenotypical traits do not constitute someone to be a particular race. People have and do change their races for many reasons. “Every social formation is created by and creates discourses that function as the “truth”, being regimes of truth”. The way we define and produce who and how we categorize people as a certain race is based on a social discourse, and this social discourse comes from what we know about the world and how we see the world. The way Viola’s mother perceives her race has been based on the rules and practices that had constrained and opened up the ideas of her race and what race she constitutes herself. The discourse that taught Viola’s mother that she was white helped produce an understanding that race is not specifically designated through skin colour, but through many other traits, including, dress, socio-economic status, where you live or grew up, cultural values, etc. With that saying, anyone can change their race based on those examples. Racial knowledge is the “production of social knowledge about the racialized Other, then, establishes a library or archive of information, a set of guiding ideas and principles about Otherness” (Foucault 150). 

Backhouse, Constance. 1999. Colour-Coded, A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.