Is race and Ethnicity still a problem in
today’s world?
Race is a socially constructed category of people who share
biologically transmitted traits that members of a society consider important.
Although, today in 2014 we no longer have separation of different races from
back when slavery was going on, people still take things to a certain degree.
Racial diversity occurred when our human ancestors lived in different
geographic regions of the world. People classified race and ethnicity all in to
different groups all around the world. Although we think race in terms of
biological elements, race is a socially constructed concept. I feel that today
people don’t look beyond people and get to know also about their ethnicity or
their lifestyle after seeing the color of their skin. Everyone can say today
that race is still an on going problem in society and still occurs because
people just look at the color and not exactly what their race or ethnicity is
or even means. A recent event that just occurred for example that shows that
racism is still an on going problem is with the LA clippers owner Donald
Sterling was speaking on his phone to one of his girl friends and mentioned
“Don’t bring black people to my games” yet he has black people who work for
him, and his basketball players are black also. He is now banned from the NBA
and has to pay 2.5 million dollars. Many generations throughout the Americas
have been mixed. Many “black” people have a significant Caucasoid ancestry,
just as many “white” people have some Negroid genes. The problem we have today
in our world is so many people are willing to define themselves as multiracial.
Ethnicity comes into play with this because it is a shared cultural heritage.
Like race the concept of ethnicity is socially constructed, becoming important
only because society defines it that way. If society never saw race in two
different colors and ethnicity in a million different cultures and not defining
everyone together our society would be highly different. On an individual
level, people play up or play down cultural traits on whether they want to fit
in or stand apart from the surrounding society. If people in our society
stopped worrying so much about what people thought and how they have to
classify one another everything would be so different and not based off of one
anothers opinions. Always keep in mind that race is constructed from biological
traits and ethnicity is constructed from cultural traits, but the two of them
still go hand in hand together.
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