Proposal: Illusion and existence of race.

I aim to address the following two questions with my final paper:
1) Does race physically exist?

2) If race is purely a historical, social construction, how do we re-evaluate its significance and all the discourses around it?

I have long been wondering about the first question. Before I came to US, I never (or rarely) thought of myself as Asian. For me, born and raised in South Korea, Chinese and Japanese people were just as foreign as Americans. I spoke almost fluent English but I knew nothing about Japanese or Chinese language. I grew up listening to N'Sync and Britney Spears, but I did not know a single Chinese popular song (and I still don't know any). Then I came to America, at age 19, and I was all of sudden categorized as Asian and was expected to feel close to certain types of "foreigners" (from my viewpoint) just for looking similar. And strangely, I did find myself transforming from Korean to Asian -- maybe race is a self-fulfilling prophecy from this perspective.

I think I can take three steps/approaches to tackle these questions.

1) Gilroy, apparently, would be an ideal starting point for this project. His claim on non-existence of race on DNA-level could nicely introduce my argument. If the essence of race is just an illusion, and if people could realize this, the crisis of race and raciology would be a natural and necessary consequence.

2) Despite the illusionary nature of race (or at least as I argue), raciology exists so tangibly. And the human society, or at least American society, has been built around it and it is still building around the rigid yet illusionary racial divisions. I can analyze further on this paradox of race from one or more of following perspectives:

- construction of desire around racial division (Asian plastic surgery articles)

- economic power and "rights to consume"(Hale)

- race as political tool/technology (Coleman)

3) How do we deal with this paradoxical situation? I find Kara Keeling can speak very nicely of such paradox as social common sense. The unnatural race that doesn't exist in our body has become something so natural to our bodily reaction. Keeling-Fanon way of explosion, in this sense, could be a key strategy for Gilroy's dream of much-needed new humanism.