Race And Social Race

Humans define race by how they conceive and categorize different social realities. Thus, race is often referred to as a social construct. The differences in skin color and facial characteristics have led most of society to classify humans into groups instead of individuals. These constructs affect us all, and they often result in situations where majority racial groups cause undue suffering to those that are part of the minority. The understanding of race as a social construct is best illustrated by the examination of racial issues within our own culture, specifically those that have plagued the history of the United States.

When we hear the word "race" we're more than likely inclined to automatically think of the color of someone's skin. Though this isn't entirely inappropriate, there is so much more to race than that. Sociologists say that race is a social construction created in society, meaning it's basically a set of "stories" we tell ourselves and hear overtime to make sense of the world. Since we hear these stories over and over again, we act on them, ultimately making them true. This can be said of many aspects of culture and society, however, it seems to happen with race without our realization.

In The Social Construction of Race, Ian F. Haney Lopez defines race as a social construct that is constantly changing its meaning due to the fickle nature of society. Lopez believes that this fickleness stems from a social climate formed by a variety of factors such as human economic interest, current events, and ideology. There are certain racial definitions however, that have remained mostly the same despite efforts to bring attention to the offensiveness and immorality of such discriminatory thinking. These stereotypes are oftentimes negative and apply to members of minority races, which end up perpetuating themselves into various cultural outlets of society including the media and film. Through the use of such popular forms of entertainment, the definitions of a race remain largely unchanged as future generations remain exposed to these racial classifications.

Race is a social construct that was developed to classify people into vast different groups through ethnic, anatomical, cultural, genetic, historical, linguistic, geographical, and social attachment. Initially, race referred to people using a common language to identify national affiliations, but with time observable physical traits were used to denote race. The idea of race means that humans are divisible into biologically distinct and exclusive groups in terms of physical and cultural features. The ideology of race is also associated with the beliefs of the superiority of white people. These beliefs were concretized during the Scientific Revolution and American colonization that established political relations between Europeans and people with different cultural and political backgrounds. Therefore, race is a social construction, the idea that people have perceived through their daily interaction. Race does not have any significance in taxonomy because all humans belong to the same species, Homo sapiens. Assertions from various scholars

1. Describe the difference between race and ethnicity. What roles do race and social class continue to play in the United States?

All through history, the label that is associate with Black people have become a prevailing discourse that explicitly racialized black people, even today. There are specific characteristics that are related with being black and are disseminate to the public and are represented as truth. Williams Rose (2002) argues, “As the color white is associated with everything good … so Blacks has, through the ages, carried associations with all that is bad and low… the Negro is believed to be stupid immoral, diseased, lazy, incompetent, and dangerous to the white man’s virtue and social order “(p.181). Blackness have become objectified in public spaces, they are view as a threat on the street of Toronto, surrounding areas and even in the criminal

Race, a term people choose to blandly deny but affect our everyday lives. Whether or not we choose to be consciously aware of it or not, race has an astronomical effect on our society. A persons’ race affects what school that they attend, their form of employment and ultimately how they are perceived. Race is defined as “groupings of people believed to share common descent, based on perceived innate physical similarities”. Smith Lecture notes. Essentially, one can categorize or identify the race of an individual based on physical characteristics such as eye shape, nose, hair color, hair texture, and body structure.

The phrase ”Race is a social and cultural construct” means that race classification is socially and culturally defined and influenced, like race or ethnicity, that classifies or describes an individual based on physical characteristics like skin color or hair texture, ancestry and cultural history. Race can be constructed differently in different cultures. An example of this can be how we view sex and gender. Sex is biological and gender is what society believes we should behave or what roles we have in society.

Race is not biological but rather a term that has been socially constructed. Race has been socially constructed as a way to put individuals into racial classifications that are made up of groups thought to share particular distinctive physical characteristics, such as skin color and facial features. Race is not in any way connected to our genetic genes so it cannot be traced back biologically. Race is a term that has changed over time and does not have a fixed definition. However, through our readings, we know that race has been determined by social and political entities. Race has been created and made to be physically different as a way to fuel beliefs of superiority and inferiority.

To begin, race is defined as the physical characteristics of someone, such as their skin color, their hair color, their eye color, and their height. In other words, it is similar to the phenotype of a specimen in scientific terms. Race is a social construct because it is not built into your genes. It can change depending on where in the world a person is located. For example, according to the reading titled “Testimony” by Sonny Signh, he was walking down the hall at a school and was laughed at and joked about just because he looked Iraqi. His skin and beard showed others that he was a Muslim, so the students immediately thought that he was a terrorist. At this point, he was used to this kind of criticism because he had been in the US for so long. However, when he first got to the US he would

Before people were calling their self-one race and did not have people going around saying or claiming different races but as of the 2000 national census marked an important change in how we measure race in the United States. Race classification is the social problem that is discussed in this passage. A lot of people in the article stated that they were black and white, white and Asian, as well as white and Indian. But overall the social problems have something to do with the United States categorizing people into races. Race is a socially constructed concept, social construction concerns the significance, perception, or meaning placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by the inhabitants of that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event.

Socioligists argue that race is a social construct because of the argument that their is no real biological basis to race. One particular race does not contain certain genetic materials that is not common to the entire human population. While it serves little purpose from a biological perspective, race is still very relevant as a cultural, or social categorizer. It's construction has and will continue to assist in the studying of racial differences with respect to inequality and discrimination to name a few.

When one says race is a social construction, it means that society created race because it is not based on genetic. It is based on our environment, where we live, where we work and the kind of school we attend (ect). All these environmental factors play a role in the skills and traits we acquire.

Omi and Winant’s discussion from “Racial Formations” are generally about race being a social construct and is also demonstrated in the viewing of Race - The power of an illusion. Omi and Winant have both agreed that race is socially constructed in society. Ultimately this means that race is seen differently in different societies and different cultures. Media, politics, school, economy and family helps alter society’s structure of race. In the viewing , also media as well as history seemed to create race by showing how social norms have evolved in different racial groups.

In the article, “Racism is real, race is not,” the author Adam Hochman argues that while racism is a very real and terrible system within our global society, the concept of race is not real and cannot be proven as such either biologically or socially speaking. Hochman states that though racism has emerged from the categorization of populations based upon physical attributes, race itself does not truly exist. Furthermore, he purports that race has no biological foundation; though most people believe race is biological in nature, the truth remains that biological differences among humans are too small to be of any real significance. Socially, Hochman argues, the idea of race is merely a construct created by man’s erroneous notion that