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Is race a social construct or biological
Is race a social construct or biological
Is race a social construct or biological
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There is a difference between the biological and social view of race. According to the Race, Power of an Illusion (part one) video, varying race from a biological perspective is due to the various locations in which different cultures lived. For example, the skin color of people in the Tropics is darker than the skin color of people in Norway. Melanin is responsible for pigmentation in the body. Darker skin tones produce more melanin than lighter skin tones. The social view of race incorporates personalities, mental capacities, stereotypes, and prejudice into biological differences between individuals and is constructed by the dominate race. For example, the African American race was considered inferior to whites because of high mortality rates and seen as being less intelligent to whites because of conformation of these biological traits in studies conducted by whites. When it comes to genetics and biology there is very few differences between people of different races. There is not race at a biological level. Besides race, geographical differences can explain why some people might be more susceptible than others to disease. For example, people who lived in countries where malaria was …show more content…
For example, in America you can be classified part of the African American race if you have typically African American features and of the Asian race if you have typically Asian features. You cannot however classify someone ancestry because almost impossible to see someone's linage just by looking at them. In the Race, Power of an Illusion (part one) video, the girl with sickle cell anemia has the disease because her ancestors lived in areas where malaria was present. The disease is a genetic mutation that defends against malaria. Having sickle cell anemia has nothing to do with the color of one's skin or their culture, it is an ancestral thing it is not
For at least three decades race, gender and biopower have all been linked together. The three terms used, are frameworks installed by governments to manage the population by categorizing, regulating and controlling its subjects. Race, gender and biopower are intertwined to illuminate the treatment of the minority for centuries. The mistreatment, discrimination and suffering experienced by the minorities throughout history is evident in the texts provided.
According to the authors, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is no longer new, but it continues to thrive. It has expanded from a subspecialty of jurisprudence to the use in department of education, cultural studies, English, sociology, comparative literature, political science, history, and anthropology. CRT treats race as central to the law and policy of the United States. CRT also looks beyond the belief that getting rid of racism means simply alleviating ignorance, or encouraging everyone to get along. CRT looks at many faucets of racism. Microagression are small acts of racism consciously or unconsciously perpetrated; these are absorbed from the assumption about racial matters most of us absorb from the cultural heritage in which we come of age in the United States. The CRT movement is a collection of activist and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. CRT questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.
Racism is often considered a thing of the past, with its manifestation rarely being acknowledged in the United States today. Race: The Power of an Illusion, is a documentary that addresses the legacy of racism through its significance in the past, and its presence in society today. To understand racism, it is vital to understand the concept of race. Race is a social invention, not a biological truth. This can be observed through the varying classifications of race in different cultures and time periods. For instance, in the United States, race has long been distinguished by skin color. In nineteenth century China, however, race was determined by the amount of body hair an individual had. Someone with a large amount of facial hair, for example,
Race: The Power of an Illusion was an interesting 3 part film. After watching this, it made me questioned if race was really an illusion or not. It is absolutely taboo to think that the one thing that separates people the most may be a myth in itself. “We can 't find any genetic markers that are in everybody of a particular race and in nobody of some other race. We can 't find any genetic markers that define race.” (Adelman and Herbes Sommers 2003). Racism is something created in the U.S made to create supremacy for the creator. Racism is not just the way someone thinks, it is something that has is manifested in our society to separate us and can be traced to our everyday activities.
How we are seen and how we see others often affects different aspects of our lives, and the lives of others. The entire social structure that we live in is affected by at least one construction of race. However, I would like to examine the concept of race first. There is no gene that is common to all black or white people; it is not biological. If race was “real”, then racial classifications would be constant all around the world, but someone considered black in the United States might be considered white in Brazil. In addition, racial categorizations in census forms vary widely between countries and across time in the same country. It is important to note that, in 2003, as part of the Human Genome Project, researchers concluded that “3 billion base pairs of genetic letters in humans were 99.9 percent identical in every person”. Which leads me to say that race is a social construct. It is important to explore this further to better understand the capacity race has to affect other parts of life. Race is a social construction because the existence of race requires that people collectively agree and accept that it does exist. It typically works through race indicators which are used to indicate which race you are, and consequently what sort of status you have in society. The Thomas Theorem is a theory that states “If men (and women) define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”,
Race has no biological meaning. There is only one human race; there are no subspecies, no single defining characteristic, traits, or even gene, separates one “race” from another. Instead of being a biological concept, race is a social construct, and a relatively modern one at that. It was created to give light-skinned Europeans an advantage by making the white race superior and all others inferior. Throughout its history, the concept of race has served this purpose well.
Social reality of race simply refers to the fact that people still believed that races are based on physical traits such as skin color or hair texture to judge others. However, what they are doing is stereotyping which lead to discrimination and racism. Also, their actions denied the fact race is culturally constructed, meaning people have different customs, religions, and values from culture to culture. The patterns of biological variation among humans are extremely complex and constantly changing. All of us could be classified into a number of different "races", depending on what genetic traits are emphasized. For example, if you divide people up on the basis of stature or blood types, the geographic groupings are clearly different from those defined on the basis of skin color. Focusing on such deceptive distinguishing traits as skin color, body shape, and hair texture causes us to magnify differences and ignore similarities between people.
Social Construction Race Race has been one of the most outstanding events in the United States all the way from the 1500s up until now. The concept of race has been socially constructed in a way that is broad and difficult to understand. Social construction can be defined as the set of rules determined by society’s urges and trends. The rules created by society play a huge role in racialization, as the U.S. creates laws to separate the English or whites from the nonwhites. Europeans, Indigenous People, and Africans were all racialized and victimized for various reasons.
...lieve that races are distinct biological categories created by differences in genes that people inherit from their ancestors. Genes vary, but not in the popular notion of black, white, yellow, red and brown races. Many biologist and anthropologists have concluded that race is a social, cultural and political concept based largely on superficial appearances. (4)
There is a difference between a biological and a social view of race. Biologically, race is seen as genetic, unchanging, and distinct categories of people; this includes physiological differences within different races. A social view of race is not simply scientific, but also includes the societies where people live, how race affects social hierarchy as well as psychographic and geographic traits.
The concept of race is an ancient construction through which a single society models all of mankind around the ideal man. This idealism evolved from prejudice and ignorance of another culture and the inability to view another human as equal. The establishment of race and racism can be seen from as early as the Middle Ages through the present. The social construction of racism and the feeling of superiority to people of other ethnicities, have been distinguishably present in European societies as well as America throughout the last several centuries.
The two terms are often misconstrued as if they have identical meaning. The term ‘race’ is based on the thought of biological and physical differences. According to Robb, “the concept of ‘race’ included any… groups of people which held them to display inherent, heritable, persistent or predictive characteristics, and which thus had a biological or quasi-biological basis” (1995:1). In the study of race, particularly during the late part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, groups of people were classified on the basis of different phenotypical characteristics determined by physical attributes such as skin pigmentation, cranial capacity and hair type or colour (Miles, 1993:59). Hannaford (1996) refutes the idea that race is a biological concept, “We assume that the racial and ethnic diversity we see all around us has always existed as a historical, social, and biological fact that needs no further interrogation” (p3).
Critical Race theory was developed in law school during the 1980s. The central explanatory variable for conflict theory went from class to race. The focus of race was used to understand crime and the criminal justice response in a capitalistic society. This led to concern over differential reactions to racial/ethnic groups by the law and criminal justice system. The biggest assumption is that racism is a predominant feature of American society.
Race is a term that references on differences such as, facial characteristics, skin color, and other related characteristics. Race is not in reference to genetic make up. A feature of race as a social construct is that it down plays the extent to which sectors of population may form a discrete ethnic group. Based on specific characteristics race makes up a person and differs within groups. In other words race is a large group of people distinguished from others on the basic of a common heritage or physical trait.
A large problem in America has always been racial issues and still continues to be prevalent in our society today. The United States likes to boast its reputation as a “melting-pot” as many cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds are mixed together, yet the country still continues to isolate individuals based on race. In the constitution, it says that everyone is supposed to have equal rights and liberties, yet after over 200 years, many minorities still struggle to obtain the same respect and equality that their white counterparts have always have. Laws should be created to enforce equality and justice for racial groups.