Summary: The Social Construction Of Difference

Out of all the articles, the one that stood out to me the most was the last one where it discussed the privileges that people have in the article “The Social Construction of Difference.” I found this article interesting because it provided examples of privileges, which is usually seen as a difficult task. Personally I believe it is primarily due to the fact that we don’t like to think we have an advantage over someone else solely based on race, gender, class, and etc. But, I find it refreshing that there are some honest examples of privileges for all sorts of different type of privilege. In addition to the different types of privilege, these example lists show the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, and disability status because …show more content…
Of course, Asians are not considered White, but I see the connection where affirmative action can be used to move one set of group up the social stratification to create the inequality between groups that are not seen as White. From this article, it made me question who got to decided what it meant to be White, what characteristics constitutes being White and who decide who gets to be White and not? These questions came up because originally, Jews and other European immigrants were not seen as White and over time they become White. This lead me to the article, “How White People Became White” and how race vocabulary keeps changing and reflect more on “material conditions and power relation” than having an agency of its own. These changes in race vocabulary only contributes to the overarching idea of race being socially constructed and not …show more content…
First, I am not completely shocked, but am more so conflicted with the idea that racial formation stemmed from “challenged then existing conceptions of the origins of human species and raised disturbing questions of whether all could be consider in the same ‘family of man’.” I don’t know if I can grasp my head around this because are we so focused on differences that we cannot see the similarities, especially when we are dealing with the human species. Besides survival tactics and differences in appearances and language, the functions and biological components of our bodies are the same. But this can also lead us to the question of what does it mean to be a human being? What is a human being? But that is another topic. At the end of the article, they included two paragraphs that I really liked because I agree with them about it. I agree that we have to recognize the different racial dimension that are present in our institutions, social practice and identity in order to be better equipped to understanding racial formations. In addition, I believe this can be linked and connected to the “La Guera” article in This Bridge Called My Back because she talks about how we have to be aware of our own oppression to be able to see the oppression of someone