CAN I DECIDE MY RACE?

Philosophy of race is something I am completely new to but find all the more interesting as I read further into. I want to make the comment however, that race can be a delicate subject so I hope not to offend any readers that may take this in such a way.

For the average person we may say that we can decide or distinguish someones race by phyiscal appearance; for example the colour of their skin, aswell as other factors such as genealogy (their ancestry), and the origin of this line of isolated ancestors. Others believe that the concept of race is not biological, but a social construct, but a major problem of race is that we cannot decide the sufficient conditions for a group being a 'race'.

What I want to ask today, is can we decide our own race? Is race something that we can ascribe to ourselves like gender. If I believe that although I was born female I am actually male, today's society will accept my change in gender and will allow me to ascribe myself the male gender.

So is race something like this? I think not.

I think that as a society we are so wrapped up in phenotypes, (physical factors) that differ in people from race to race, ie. skin colour again, that we will refuse to accept that a 'black' person may ascribe themselves the race of caucasian or 'white' and vice versa.

Lets look at this thought experiment: a white woman believes that she is black. She is as utterly convinced and sure that she belongs to this race, regardless of her phsyical features typically associated with that of a white race. In the same way that a woman may believe she is in the wrong body and is actually a man, this woman believes that she is black. I believe that without a doubt our society would reject this, and perhaps even charge the woman with 'cultural appropriation'.

However when an indiviudal born to black parents, or mixed parents (one descended from a line of black relatives and the other side white), the rules seem to change. When someone looks 'white' or looks 'black' but isn't solely of that individual race, it seems to make it perfectly acceptable for a black or 'mixed race' person to associate themselves as white. To make this clearer, I am saying that if a child was born to two black parents but had phsyical features typical of a white person, they would happily be accepted as of the white race, and again vice versa.

To continue, even if a person with physical features associated typically with the Asian race was born to two white parents but on one side of the family a few generations up, lets say her great great grandfather was Asian, she would probably still be classed by society as Asian, even though her immediate relatives (her parents) and grandparents were white. If she ticked the 'White British' box on the census it seems to me that society would have some problem with this, and this is because of her physical appearance.

But this raises another question; at what point would it be right to call this person 'white' and to no longer say she is 'Asian'? How many generations does it take to rid a race and to call yourself another one? Should the person in this example be given the choice to decide what race she associates herself too? I definately think that in cases of mixed race in particular, one has the right to decide what race they belong too, regardless of the physical features that the individual may or may not have.

The implications that this creates however, is that it seems that individual physical traits shared by races are no longer important or relevant to the concept of race, for even when this person in my example may 'look Asian', she associates herself as white, and so consequently it would be wrong to assume her race by the way that she looks.

What are your thoughts? Can we decide what race we are?