Ryan Fleming Post #2

After reading the Omi and Winant article I thought it was very interesting how they addressed the fact that we as humans seek to identify the race of a person in order to understand them. That if we are unable to identify someones race it makes us uncomfortable. At first I thought that seemed like such a racist thing to do, and it seemed like an awful way to judge someone, but then as thought about it more I realized how true it is for most people including myself. The very fact that all of us were so frustrated that we could not indentify the race of the two women in the Toni Morrison story was proof enough that as humans we have a tendency to want to use race as an identifier for who a person is. Once I began to realize this, I started to notice how often people, myself included, constantly use race as a way to figure out who a person is, where they come from and what you can expect from them. It really was an eye opener more than anything else for me to see how often we use race to identify who a person is without even realizing we do it.