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Impact of stereotypes
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Race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, shape the experience of all people. These characteristics are issues that will always be brought up in people’s lives. Throughout history, race, gender, class, and sexual orientation has been known to disapprove certain groups. Also, different people of color receive different experiences from this. People with a low-class income may obtain false and damaging statements, or teased them for not having common goods. As for gender, females are still seen as inferior and males have higher power and intelligence over females. Sexual orientation may impact someone’s health due to discrimination. No matter what, throughout a person's life, these characteristics, especially race, affect how someone creates decisions, and comes with a different result. Race, class, …show more content…
I recently interviewed ten different people. Each individually discussed race, class, gender, sexual orientation and how it affects them on a daily basis. Each of them having different and similar answers to them. Learning that even though these characteristics were a massive problem in the past, in today’s society these issues still occur every day.
Race is what cause every human being unique. Having different skin color, hair, facial features, and stature. Even though race makes human beings unique, race can lead to prejudice and maybe to discrimination. Even though discriminating on how someone looks was a tremendous problem back then it is still a problem today. According, to one of my interviewee, named Jane, she is Salvadorian, but she looks white. A great amount of people think
The meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries. Historical race concepts have varied across time and cultures, creating scientific, social, and political controversy. Of course, today’s definition varies from the scientific racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that justified slavery and later, Jim Crow laws in the early twentieth. It is also different from the genetic inferiority argument that was present at the wake of the civil rights movement. However, despite the constantly shifting concepts, there seems to be one constant that has provided a foundation for ideas towards race: race is a matter of visually observable attributes such as skin color, facial features, and other self-evident visual cues.
Race can be sternly characterized as the distinction in individuals based on physical features like the
These type of studies aim to provide information on how different identities such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation are connected to one another. With this understanding, it can be acknowledged that one can be an oppressor at one point in time but be oppressed at another. These roles are constantly changing, based on a variety of factors. Integrative anti-racism allows a better understanding of these social oppressions.
In learning about different ways that we as a society categorize and divide people, it is essential to understand what about people it is that we feel the need to label and differentiate between. When a person is born into this world, there are certain statuses that they automatically obtain, called ascribed statuses (Henslin 98). These statuses determine each person’s social location in society. This includes gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and ability. Each person has their own unique social location, and is affected in a different way than the next person may be. As a white, queer, cisgender, middle class, female, in relatively good health, I have always been relatively privileged.
How we are seen and how we see others often affects different aspects of our lives, and the lives of others. The entire social structure that we live in is affected by at least one construction of race. However, I would like to examine the concept of race first. There is no gene that is common to all black or white people; it is not biological. If race was “real”, then racial classifications would be constant all around the world, but someone considered black in the United States might be considered white in Brazil. In addition, racial categorizations in census forms vary widely between countries and across time in the same country. It is important to note that, in 2003, as part of the Human Genome Project, researchers concluded that “3 billion base pairs of genetic letters in humans were 99.9 percent identical in every person”. Which leads me to say that race is a social construct. It is important to explore this further to better understand the capacity race has to affect other parts of life. Race is a social construction because the existence of race requires that people collectively agree and accept that it does exist. It typically works through race indicators which are used to indicate which race you are, and consequently what sort of status you have in society. The Thomas Theorem is a theory that states “If men (and women) define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”,
...lieve that races are distinct biological categories created by differences in genes that people inherit from their ancestors. Genes vary, but not in the popular notion of black, white, yellow, red and brown races. Many biologist and anthropologists have concluded that race is a social, cultural and political concept based largely on superficial appearances. (4)
All over the world, race is used by others to assign meaning to the way you look; people will use physical characteristics like: nose shape, eye shape, hair texture and most infamously, skin color to categorize race. Race isn’t a tangible concept, Social Construction Theory determines it’s more of a social idea created by institutions in society, meaning that it is created by society and is constantly changed. The notion of race is perpetuated and conserved, and therefore, must be changed by adjusting society’s preconceptions about race, institution’s structure and laws that are negatively based on race, and how education and awareness about race can create positive change.
Through the selected readings it becomes clear that race is not only a social construct but also a value that changes depending on the region in which one inhabits. Despite the lack of scientific support for race as a biological phenomenon, race still results in misfortune for many minorities. This present throughout everyday life in terms of job opportunities, education, and life experiences.
The concept of race is an ancient construction through which a single society models all of mankind around the ideal man. This idealism evolved from prejudice and ignorance of another culture and the inability to view another human as equal. The establishment of race and racism can be seen from as early as the Middle Ages through the present. The social construction of racism and the feeling of superiority to people of other ethnicities, have been distinguishably present in European societies as well as America throughout the last several centuries.
The two terms are often misconstrued as if they have identical meaning. The term ‘race’ is based on the thought of biological and physical differences. According to Robb, “the concept of ‘race’ included any… groups of people which held them to display inherent, heritable, persistent or predictive characteristics, and which thus had a biological or quasi-biological basis” (1995:1). In the study of race, particularly during the late part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, groups of people were classified on the basis of different phenotypical characteristics determined by physical attributes such as skin pigmentation, cranial capacity and hair type or colour (Miles, 1993:59). Hannaford (1996) refutes the idea that race is a biological concept, “We assume that the racial and ethnic diversity we see all around us has always existed as a historical, social, and biological fact that needs no further interrogation” (p3).
Coming into this course, I had little to no familiarity with the social construction theory and its relation to race, gender, and sexuality. Over the past eight weeks, my mind has opened up in many different ways. Now looking at race, gender, and sexuality as social constructions I have a great understanding as to how much society plays a role in shaping the lives of countless individuals. Looking back, I believe that my life has been heavily impacted by social construction, both within my family and also my peers. However, looking at things from a new perspective, I am confident that I now have more control over what societal factors I choose to let influence my life. If there is one thing that I have learned throughout this course, it is to be skeptical; don’t always “go with the flow”, it’s natural to question things. In the end, society always influences people as much as they allow it
Everyone in this world now has an identity marker known as race. The race of a particular person refers to a relation to a specific group of people who tend to share similar physical and cultural characteristics. This creates an idea of a physical and cultural divide between different types of people. Race focuses on the division of people based on social standpoints and not biological ones, even though race itself is defined as both cultural and physical components. Race has been used to validate inhuman behavior in many historical periods such as slavery and genocide (Golash-Boza 2015, p.6-7).
Race is a term that references on differences such as, facial characteristics, skin color, and other related characteristics. Race is not in reference to genetic make up. A feature of race as a social construct is that it down plays the extent to which sectors of population may form a discrete ethnic group. Based on specific characteristics race makes up a person and differs within groups. In other words race is a large group of people distinguished from others on the basic of a common heritage or physical trait.
This refection paper focus on my own experiences related to gender, race, and sexual orientation development during my college years. My reflection will be grounded on three theories: Josselson’s theory of women id development, Ferdman and Gallegos Latino/Latina identity development, and Worthington et al.’s model of heterosexual identity development.
Race is explained as “A group of people identified as distinct from other groups because of supposed physical or genetic traits shared by the group. Most biologists and anthropologists do not recognize race as a biologically valid classification, in part because there is more genetic variation within groups than between them”.