Essay On Race Stereotypes

In the United States of America many will find people of different color, people who are tan (Native American, Hispanic and Arabic), porcelain white (Irish, English, and French), olive (Italian and Greek), black (Jamaican, African and Arabic) and many more. But where do these colors of people come from, why do these people stay together in groups, and why is it called acting out of the norm when one would see one color mixing with the other? This is the result of the problem of the stereotype that comes along with the color of one’s own skin. Each so called “race” has a stereotype, people associated with the tan skin have a stereotype of being hard workers, the porcelain white people have the stereotype of wanting everything to be their way, the black colored people are stereotyped to be oppressed and looked down upon. But why do we have stereotypes attached to people of different color? Why is race so misunderstood? America today has a problem educating many of its own people on what race is, there is a misunderstanding that race has only to do with color skin, but it turns out that there is more to race then what is known. What is race? According to Dictionary.com race is “a socially constructed category of identification based on physical characteristics, ancestry, historical affiliation, or shared culture”. Race in America is misunderstood. It is thought that race is just whatever your skin color is and that’s what race one would belong to. But what about those who don’t look like their native land’s typical person, like Melissa Algranati. This woman at first, is guessed to be placed in the Italian race, but many are wrong. She is a Puerto Rican, Egyptian Jew, and proud of it. Melissa explains throughout her article, Being an Other, that all her life people thought she was of a different race than by the ones she naturally belongs to and is therefore treated differently than those who fall into the same race. Like her second family and how they treat other Hispanics. She shares that it is all …show more content…
As humans being a part of a group or tribe comes very natural and when one person leaves their own tribe to venture out they are considered to be acting like another person from a different tribe, this is very similar to the notion of acting white. According to Stuart Buck many people see blacks or Hispanics out of their natural grouping of being with those of the same race that they are acting white. When this idea started it started in the minds of those white people who were offended to easily and felt like they were being insulted when a race of non-similarity of their own moved into the same area. Nowadays people on the opposite spectrum use the phrase acting white. Many students of color with their GPA’s above a 3.0 are considered to be acting white and going against their own race. How is this the fault of say the whites? Many do understand that the white people initiated the thought of this but they also stopped over the course of time. So why do they still get blamed? Because some people don’t like to stand up for the wrongs they associate with that has gone on throughout their life and want to blame it on