Distinguish between ethnicity and “race.” What does it mean
Instructions; Distinguish between ethnicity and “race.” What does it mean to say that “race” is a social construction? Race is not biological. It is a social construct. There is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites.
Topic: Distinguish between ethnicity and “race.” What does it mean to say that “race” is a social construction?
Distinguish between ethnicity and “race.” What does it mean to say that “race” is a social construction?
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Race is not biological. It is a social construct. There is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites.
Were race “real” in the genetic sense, racial classifications for individuals would remain constant across boundaries.
Yet, a person who could be categorized as black in the United States might be considered white in Brazil or colored in South Africa.
Like race, racial identity can be fluid.
How one perceives her racial identity can shift with experience and time, and not simply for those who are multiracial.
These shifts in racial identity can end in categories that our society, which insists on the rigidity of race, has not even yet defined.
As I explain in my book “According to Our Hearts,” whites in interracial black-white marriages
or relationships frequently experience a shift in how they personally understand their individual racial identity.
In a society where being white (regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages)
means living a life with white skin privileges
such as being presumed safe, competent and noncriminal
whites who begin to experience discrimination because of their intimate connection with someone of another race,
or who regularly see their loved ones fall prey to racial discrimination, may begin to no longer feel white.
After all, their lived reality does not align with the social meaning of their whiteness.
That all said, unlike race and racial identity, the social, political and economic meanings of race,
or rather belonging to particular racial groups, have not been fluid. Racial meanings for non-European groups have remained stagnant.
For no group has this reality been truer than African-Americans.
What many view as the promising results of the Pew Research Center’s data on multiracial Americans,
with details of a growing multiracial population and an increasing number of interracial marriages,
does not foreshadow as promising a future for individuals of African descent as it does for other groups of color.