Race-thinking surrounds our lives in a way which we cannot escape. I will try to summarize Paul C. Taylor’s analysis on the topic and apply it to my personal examples.
Taylor presents race-talk as a means to assign political meanings to individuals and within any given population. One’s internal stream of thoughts regarding the matter is what Taylor calls race-thinking, which could be based on two components: body and bloodlines.
Taylor provides a loose definition of a body. He emphasizes the physical aspect of the human body and how it interacts with senses. Essentially, he regards it as the vessel that houses a person’s soul within. This ship (body) could be accompanied by sails (clothes) of different shapes, sizes, colors tailored to the liking of its captain. Taylor encourages not to fixate on the visual image of this vessel because there are other modes to identify the captain.
Next on his list of definitions is bloodlines: the lineage or ancestry. Taylor suggests that bloodlines allow individuals to chart their family tree which in turn, provides them with useful information such as genetic diseases.
Finally, Taylor combines information about a body and its bloodlines to reach to a general conclusion. Taylor calls this “racialization” or an “assigning of meanings,” which are broad enough to apply to group of people and not just an individual. Conventionally, the possession of certain physical traits by an individual or their ancestors would lead others to a general assumption about the individual. I will share my personal examples of race-thinking that is similar to Taylor’s example.
Hotel Quarantine
I checked into a 5-star hotel last year for a mandatory hotel quarantine. The very first meal that I received that day happened to include an Indian dish. I thought it was just a coincidence. I checked the hotel’s dinner menu so I would know what to expect for my next meal. The menu had two options: Indian or Italian cuisine. I was hoping to receive the latter but once again, I was served boxes of Indian food.
I had a realization when I received Indian food again for lunch the next day: the hotel management assumed that I would prefer Indian cuisine over any of their other culinary offerings. This generalization could be the result of my appearance (body) and the details of my background (bloodlines) obtained from my passport. Consequently, race-thinking came into play because of the involvement of the body and its ancestry.
If the hotel had alternated between cuisines from around the world before sending Indian food, I would have regarded it as a coincidence and not an active form of race-thinking. Limiting my diet to South Asian food during my short period of stay was an outcome which was most likely influenced by race-thinking.
To be fair, quite a few brown travelers from South Asian countries leave bad online reviews due to a lack of Indian cuisine at quarantine hotels. Race-thinking allows the hotel to counter that while simplifying the decision-making process for meals, especially at a time when hundreds of guests with certain appearance and heritage are checking in and out every day.
Grocery Shopping
Another example of race-thinking that comes to mind would be my retail experience. Whenever I go grocery shopping, I make sure to get a kilogram of tomatoes, Roma Tomatoes to be specific. These plum tomatoes cost nearly four times the price of the local tomatoes, which are cheap to begin with. Before you think I am wasting money, let me explain myself. The plum tomatoes in Qatar, usually imported from Netherlands, are the closest thing I can find to Pakistani tomatoes.
The vast majority of food I cook are Pakistani dishes prepared using my mother’s recipes. Cooking allows me to free myself from the problems of my vicinity as it transports me back to my home in Pakistan. My mom can confirm this but out of her three children, I would usually accompany her at the kitchen most nights. In part, it was a way to catch up with her after her nine-to-seven job. The rest of it was fueled my hunger and anticipation for dinner as she effortlessly prepared it. I was very impatient, but the end result was always worth the wait.
I will never be as good as my mom, but I can settle for anything half as good. The only way to emulate my mother’s cooking is to get the right ingredients. I tried tomatoes of all shapes and sizes before I resorted to Tomato Roma. I cook every other weekend, so I don’t mind the slightly pricy produce. In fact, as I am typing this, I realized that tomatoes are the most expensive vegetable in Pakistan too.
Back to the grocery store: during one of my visits, I handed the vegetable bags to the staff in order to weigh and label them. It usually takes a few seconds before I am off to the checkout counter. This time, however, the person notified me about the price of tomatoes as they held the sticker away from the bag. I nodded without giving it a thought, but the person asked me again if I wanted the same tomatoes. That’s when I realized what was happening.
The country is home to millions of migrant workers who might come from South Asian countries. I myself have a limited budget so I can understand why some of these workers would pick local tomatoes for everyday meals. Now, because I am a South Asian and I look like one doesn’t have to mean that I am better off with cheaper tomatoes. However, I do believe the store employee utilized race-thinking before they warned me about the price tag.
I took it as a gesture of goodwill, thinking that the person might have saved me from making an otherwise expensive purchase if I was not making an informed decision in the first place. But since I picked my vegetables with a specific purpose in mind, I am not sure why I was questioned. Customers with different appearances were not prompted about the pricing. Enter race-thinking: because of the way I look and the country I may belong to, it may have led the staff to inform me about the price.
