WHAT IS MEANT BY "RACE" IN AMERICA?

Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2011) ("Race . . . has multiple, and at times contradictory, uses in contemporary American discourse. While, in the most basic sense, race is the categorization of humans into groups based on heritable traits, many Americans have a limited notion of heritable traits as only referring to skin color (black, white, brown, etc.), facial features (lips, noses, eye shape/size, etc.), and hair type (straight, curly, kinky, etc.). Based on these traits, many would identify the races as white/Caucasian, black/African, and Asian. At times Hispanic/Latino/Chicano and Native American/American Indian are identified as races, and at other times they are identified as ethnicities. When Americans use the word race, it is often difficult to discern what they include in the term and what they exclude. If this is not muddled enough, there are times when race is also used to signify a set of cultural practices, such as specific ways of speaking, cooking, eating, and socializing and the historical narratives created that relate to these cultural practices. And there are also time when race is used to denote only nonwhite people, as if white Americans have no race. [] Part of the tension that arises when one discusses Shakespeare and race together is that one must interrogate which definitions are being employed, and which are being elided, at any particular moment." Id. at at 4.).