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.…
Michael Omi’s excerpt on “Racial Formation” addresses how race developed over time, in terms of its concept, meaning, and our understanding of it in the context of society and politics. Throughout the text Omi expands on the true complexity of racial formation and challenges how we think about race in what it seems like every way possible. He makes us realize there is complexity to how people constructed racial identity. He also showed us how this has evolved to create social structures that represent inequality and injustice based on race. The author’s excerpt addresses many strong arguments to support his theory, like racial projects and the connection race has to society and politics, but some of his suggestions lead me to question or even…
The concept of race has historically been flawed at best. This type of human categorization, which draws no basis of biological evidence, has been used for centuries to successfully subjugate large groups of people, paving the way for white supremacists to gain even more emotional, and ergo economic, control over the American working class. Patrick Appel is not the first to delve into the myth of “race”, but he does offer a well-rounded, professionally composed vindication that responds to several misinterpretations of scientific research in the field of genetics. Appel presents this through his 2014 article, “Why ‘Race’ Isn’t Biological.” Biologically, races are defined as “genetically distinct populations within the same species” (Live…
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,’”…
In the wake of Kevin Rudd’s Apology in 2008, the Australian Indigenous educational landscape has remained in a state of upheaval, with countless initiatives, strategies, and cross-curricular priorities aimed at closing the gap in educational outcomes apparent between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. One of the major by-products of this tumultuous climate was the resurrection of the theoretical framework introduced by Ladson-Billings (2000), who links the concepts of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Whiteness to education. She describes CRT as being a critique of the modern-day social order, arguing that the ‘social reality’ of minorities construed by the presiding white majority is both misinformed and inherently racist, which is reflected…
In the article “The Dynamics of Racial Fluidity and Inequality” by Saperstein and Penner (2012), supports on the notion that race is a “flexible” tendency that changes throughout the years and across backgrounds, rather than being a characteristic that is attributed at “birth” and “fixed” (as cited in Grusky & Weisshar, 2014 p.692). In order to better understand how racial classification plays an important role over the life course of an individual this paper will analyze the article of Saperstein and Penner (2012), discuss two major concepts that are affecting social inequality, and point out two strengths/weaknesses that helped or hurt the article. Article The study by Saperstein and Penner (2012) focused on how race is typically treated…
Desmond and Emirbayer’s article attempts to elucidate the configuration of race and racial dominance through the lenses of recent theoretical innovations. As oppose to the then predominant perspective on race that portraits it as a natural phenomenon, these authors describe race as a dynamic, and symbolic social construct that evolves and changes historically. These transformation to be understood must be informed by the influence of other social constructs such as ethnicity and nationhood. This summary is a detailed account of the article that bring at the end in support example from Lopez and Alba in their respective articles. The article started by presenting a clear and comprehensive definition of race which makes racial domination…
This aspect of race can be explained by Fields concept of race as an “ideology,” where race has been maintained through laws, customs, and daily practices to address practical needs. Fields coins the term “ideology” as the “daily methods through which people make sense of the social reality they create” (Fields). Essentially, race became an everyday habit that the people used in order to justify what was going on in the world around them. Consequences of social construction is exclusion. In lecture, Professor Smith used a quote from Robert Miles stating “All instances where a specific group is shown to be in unequal receipt of resources and services, or to be unequally represented in the hierarchy of class relations.”…
It was shown that when scientists and anthropologists of the time were studying this topic it was shown that they were rejecting three fundamental premises of a very old racial ideology: “1) The archaic sub species concept, two parentheses the divisibility of contemporary humans into scientifically valid biological groupings and 3) The link between racial traits and social, cultural, and political status.” Mukhopadhyay & Henze also discussed the United States racial categories that are used on the Census. They believed that race as biology was being inconsistently used and that the terms used on the census are partially valid because “the biological attributes used to define races and create racial classifications rely on only a few visible, superficial, genetic traits – such as skin color and hair texture – and ignore the remaining pre-ponderings of human variation.”…
The idea of race is as old as recorded history. Race can be defined as “Human constructed categories that assume great social importance. Those categories are typically based on observable traits and geographic origins believed to distinguish one race from another (Ferrante 214).” Along with physical characteristics, skin color being the most common, social characteristics and stereotypes are associated with a race which often go unquestioned or are considered to be obvious, Ferrante refers to this idea as racial common sense (215).…
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,…
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…
Writing Assignment 2: Explaining and Applying a Key Concept in Your Own Words Racial formation, as presented by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, is the process through which a society assigns racial categories to the groups of people living within it, with the notion of “race” being constructed through both cultural representation and social structure. Racial formation involves the creation and destruction of stereotypes throughout a period of time, and is connected to hegemony, which is the way that a certain society is organized and ruled (Omi, Winant 21). An artificial racial hierarchy is often created from these stereotypes, which is then spread throughout society according to the interests of the ruling class and legitimated through social…
A social construct whose most significant use through history has been to degrade groups of people and justify inequality based on superficial characteristics. Despite the fact that harmful racial stereotypes prevail today, the collection of racial information has the potential to benefit millions of United States’ citizens. Today, the definition of race has evolved from its 19th century interpretation. Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer, professors of sociology at Harvard University, define race as “a symbolic category, based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to specific social and historical contexts, that is misrecognized as a natural category” (Desmond and Emirbayer). Now, race is a category based not only physical characteristics, but the social history of…
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…