Diversity Perspectives for Social Work Practice Book

Paul Taylor's Race is a work of philosophy but unbelievably practical. The book gives a fair hearing to all the possible issues although Taylor is not afraid to tell you his opinion and give you reasons for him. Taylor argues, for example, that even if we take race to be a social construct and not biologically real, given the way people mark other people off by race it is helpful to take talk of race seriously. If we don't take the discourse seriously we run the risk of further marginalizing the people who are labeled by race.

We all know that people use the word "race" to mark off a group of people based on appearance, typically skin color. We also know that people have used this distinction based on appearance to justify a whole host of prejudices in order to exclude certain groups of people. This is where we come into the dialogue. You don't have to believe in this way of carving out reality according to race to understand the discourse here.

It does follow, though, that if you think race is a social construct that any other supposedly innate characteristics that are supposed to be attached to the construct have nothing to do with the construct. There is no necessary connection between a person's skin color and, say, the way someone makes a living. Now, it might be the case that black people in the U.S., for example, are disproportionately poorer than white people but this has nothing to do with biological or genetic factors. This has to do with other social, cultural, and political factors that arise from the exclusion of certain groups of people according to race.

The book was very enlightening for me, and maybe it will be for you too, Dear Reader.