"Mixed Blood” In this article the author intends to demonstrate that the idea of race is only a social/cultural development and a myth. The idea that individuals divided into particular race based on their "biological differences" is a fantasy it’s a myth, everything is just in our heads we have just created it as a community/society, race is not a thing that was always here, it’s only been here since humans have. And the author does a very good job explaining this with good scientific and historical facts that no one can disagree too. This article helped me realize the author’s message (of race just being in our heads), this is not something that I would have really thought about ever if it wasn’t for this article.…
He shows through his book that race is a ‘recent social and political construction” (Graves Jr. 1). He wants to show the reader that there is no scientific support to separate humans into races. I agree with him that people are not born to view race. It is something learned through the social atmosphere and practiced through generations.…
According to Omi and Winant and supported by Bambara, racial categories primarily serve to facilitate a system of oppression in the United States, and as a result, minorities have internalized the teachings of the system as their true racial identity. The system of oppression in the United States began with a racial dictatorship, and its agenda was perpetuated by hegemony. As cited by Omi and Winant, “Hegemony was always constituted by a combination of coercion and consent.”. (67).…
Marc Aronson wrote Race: A History Beyond Black And White. Marc Aronson published this novel in 2007. “Marc Aronson is an author; professor; speaker; editor and publisher who believes that young people, especially pre-teens and teenagers, are smart, passionate, and capable of engaging with interesting ideas in interesting ways”(Marc Aronson, n. d.). “Marc Aronson is currently engaged in a long-term project to figure out how to best understand and share a full history of the human world”(Mar Aronson, n. d.). In the book Race: A History Beyond Black…
In Omi and Winant’s “Racial Formation,” the authors argue that racial formation is the “sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (DOC Reader, 21) and that there are two components of racial formation: social structure and cultural representation. Social structure includes state activity and policies about race, like the economy, segregation, the criminal justice system, citizenship, or anything considered official. Cultural representation is how race is understood or expressed in society, including stereotypes, media representation, news outlets, and more. Throughout the 19th century, an increase of Chinese immigrants arrived in America after hearing about the “Gam Saan, ‘Gold Mountain,’”…
She reminds us that we must consider that science is always practiced within historical contexts; still today science can potentially be damaging and/or exclusionary to certain groups of people. Before reading this article, I did not know about race science in the 19th century. Whether Rusert intended this or not, I took this as a reminder of the importance of knowing one’s culture and not underestimating the knowledge of aggrieved communities. Rusert organizes the essay well and uses subheadings to great effect; without these, it would be easy for a reader to get overwhelmed by all the different types of knowledge they are being exposed…
In this episode we’ll be exploring the work of Falguni Sheth and learning about race, racialization, and political philosophy. In part 2 we’ll be looking at a case study and discuss the racialization of Muslims in so-called Western liberal societies. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today. So, I’m gonna jump right in. There’s this big debate over whether race is a series of biological categories or whether it’s just a social construct.…
Before the civil rights cases that included Hernandez, Brown, and Al-Khazraji; it was a more homogenous country. The binary approach to race was feasible because within its smaller population, individuals within the United States were typically of a subset of Caucasian or African descent. With the ideal of a melting pot, the ideology of the American continent has been altered where a dichotomy of black and white is no longer feasible. Moreover, the distinct claim that one can label an individual’s ancestry is becoming more ambiguous as the United States and the continent intermingle to create many mixtures of what we as a society term race. The relevance of cases such as Hernandez and contemporary civil rights highlights that at one time the…
Is the race concept biological or is it socially constructed? All of these questions will have been answered by the end of this paper. In this paper, I will explore how anthropologists in different fields of anthropology view and define race. Most racial studies have been done my biological or physical anthropologists. They study race as a concept; how to define it, how to classify it,…
Saperstein and Penner’s article, “Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States,” highlights the processes that make race a product of expectations, versus an unchangeable essential constant, how it was perceived as for so long in history. Race, they argue, is defined by expectations in which people are judged in everyday interactions. Because of these these expectations (“stereotypes”) of how people should act, which is especially dependent on their fluctuating social status, black stigmatization and white privilege are able to survive and flourish. In their research they discovered that people tended to be classified (and identify themselves) as “more white” or “more black” based on the fluctuating positive and negative attributes to…
In the article, The Destructive Nature of the Term Race: Growing Beyond a False Paradigm by Susan Chavez Cameron & Susan Macias Wycoff, argue that race is a social construction to justify inhumane acts against those who are seen inferior based on their phenotype such as the color of their skin, stature, etc.... The views about race inequality are explained in the article and unfortunately supported by mental health professionals. Notably, some mental health professionals have preserve race classifications in our society through unethical practices. As both authors discuss at the end of their argument to disprove the notion that race exists, anthropologist and geneticists agree that race has no scientific value in our world. Therefore, it is…
Indeed, even inside social backgrounds there were differences. The way that there exists difference, regardless of whether amongst Whites and Blacks, or inside Whites and Blacks, drives home the purpose of this paper: race is a social development with no obvious or outright natural premise. On the off chance that we can differ about whether somebody is of Race A or B, and if there are consensual…
The formation of social constructions through the dismal synthesis of race and color is defined by the ever-changing social hierarchy and the fixed behavior performed by distinct races. Because the notion of race acts upon a color continuum, there are set categories that are built from the complete subjection of blacks upwards to the dominance of whites. Within this continuum lie definite subcategories of ‘black’ and ‘white’. The paradox of the permanent yet ephemeral idea of race and color is further complicated with the static, yet changeable perception of one’s racial identity through behavior and social accomplishments. Anthropologist L. Kaifa Roland defines this process as whitening, or blanqueamiento, where anyone can advance up the…
This narrow view of gender and race only allowed women, and those of color, to be seen as animalistic and were excluded from many discussions. Lugones explains that race can be understood as gendered and gender as raced because it is utilized as means to differentiate Europeans and the colonized, therefore, race and gender are powerful fictions (2007, 2202). A way comprehend this term of powerful fictions is to view race and gender as socially made concepts that reinforce the Eurocentric views that now…
Storey makes the claim that “…there is just one ‘race’, the human race” (175). Regardless of skin tone, country of origin, or preferred language, we are all equally and irrevocably…