Dear Professor and Classmates, The concept of race is a topic that has not changed much over the many years human have been on this earth. Race by definition is a group of people who share a set of characteristics not always physical characteristics, also it is said that these groups of people share and common bloodline (Conley, 2015). Many sociologists argue that race is a social construction.…
Passing Nella Larsen’s novel, Passing, is her second work of literature and sets the scene in the 1920s. Throughout the pages, the reader is gradually faced with several conflicts such as race and identity as narrated by the main character of the novella, Irene Redfield, a married black woman with two children for whom these conflicts arise when she re-encounters an old acquaintance, Clare Kendry. Clare is presented as the antagonist and as the opposite of Irene, and the more Clare is around, the more Irene struggles with these inner conflicts. Once Irene reaches her breaking point, she realizes that in order to maintain her lifestyle, get rid of any potential threat and protect her family she must kill Clare before her persona does any more…
My dad lost his job in 2010. This year everything spiraled out of control. My brother lost himself in drugs and alcohol. My sister and I never spoke and my mom’s depression took more of a toll than usual.…
It makes sense that different races would be given descriptive names according to where most of them originated. If race truly is a social construct does…
Lopez in the reading “The social construction of race” argues that race is socially rather than biological constructed. The importance, content and meaning of racial categories are shaped by social, economic and political processes not by fundamental genetic differences or biological markers. The manner in which we describe, understand and recognize racial categories is connected to larger societal structures and the way in which society is organized. Racial “differences” are significant not because of variations in biology but because of the social meanings subscribed to them at both the micro (between individuals) and macro (involving large scale social systems and institutions) level. Earlier dominant ideology viewed race as being essential,…
Along the lines of Critical Race Theory Lewis-McCoy also offers us a race-based explanation for the inequality found in the results of minority students. He observed that black children grow up seeing the race-related barriers that black adults have faced. these barriers then signal to the children that the traditional opportunity system is not open to blacks. Black youths then increase their sense of racial allegiance and solidarity. They often become disengaged from school, because they recognize school as a vehicle of mobility, but one that is exclusive to whites and not for blacks (Lewis-McCoy, 2014).…
A social construct is an idea or that appears to be natural and obvious to the people who accept it, but may or may not represent reality. This means that it remains largely as an invention of any given society. In our world today many people see race as a social construct but it was once considered a biological process but we know that this is untrue. Through research it has been shown that there is no gene common to all blacks or all whites. If race were to be identified in a genetic way, specific racial classifications for individuals would remain constant across boundaries.…
In the United States, there is a constant battle on the social structure and cultural embodiment in the classrooms and on the exams. We have read in the course two specific theories, that I believe support each-others claim. In Towards a Critical Race Theory of Education by Ladson-Billings and Tate, it demonstrates the lack of racial conversation of marginalized communities that have been neglected. In addition to this theory, in A Threat in the Air, Steel reveals the domain identification focus on the negative effect of stereotypes on academic performance and identity through experiments. Ladson-Billings and Tate’s theory display detriments weakness of his article and more subjective examples compared to Steele’s theory who hold an overall…
Social construction is not as definitive as actual objects and is defined by culture which changes as time goes on, more specifically defined by society’s dominant group. With this definition the basis of race continually changes. When the Africans were first brought to the United States as indentured servants they were considered objects, this definition then changed as they were later considered “free man” as slavery was abolished although his still gave a stigma to the race. As time moved on the African American race was based upon skin color and heritage and less upon the social status. “First, race is a social construct contingent on collective acceptance, agreement, and imposition.…
Race is defined as a group of people that share a set of characteristics, typically but not always physical ones, and are said to share a common bloodline. Sociologists often say that race is a social construction. Social construction is a debate about what is real versus fake and more of an explanation of how we give meaning to things or ideas through social interaction. According to sociologist, Dalton Conley, to speak of the myth of race is to say it is a social construction. Race is based on stories we tell ourselves in effort to organize society rather than natural realities.…
Some sociologists believe that race is more of a social construction than a biological construction because are race is the result of our social location. Many classify race by the physical appearance. In all actuality, the way people classify another person is based on their location and social placement. Race and ethnicity are often confused, race is used for biological characteristics and ethnicity is used for cultural characteristics. Based on this there isn’t really race because as the mini-lecture stated, race has no genetic basis.…
In the following years five more family members died while I was in high school. My two great grandmothers passed away within weeks of each other, my Papa (cousin’s grandfather) passed a few months later, my father passed away in June of 2014, and my Papa (father’s father) died in August of 2015. My father’s death at the end of tenth grade was sudden but, not completely unexpected because of his history of alcohol abuse. Despite the many mixed emotions that I was going through, I still went to school the day after he passed away because I knew that studying, and preparing for my finals was important to being successful in my life. Even with everything that happened I still managed to do very well in all of my classes, finals and even in my…
My grandmother passed away last year and the center of my “perfect” world fell apart. I was stuck in a funk for the months that came after and then my dad became unemployed. Through this difficult part of my life with biggest person of my childhood was gone, I realized that I had some growing up to do. I had to balance, helping my dad apply to jobs, school work, and my own grief over one of the most important school year.…
Many aspects of our lives are socially constructed. Our Society builds many things that people begin to render as true. One of these social construction is the development of race. Race is socially constructed not biological. Race is a socially constructed category of people who share biologically transmitted traits that member of society consider important.…
From early on in my childhood, I have been a member of a military family which left me without my father for long periods of time. While my father was away at war, I found compassion from my grandfather and under his wing, came a desire for reading and a longing to someday become a writer. As my life progressed into my adult years, so had painful experiences that shaped me into the person that I am today. Those painful experiences gave me the ability to find true sorrow…