Racial Identification

Race, a modern phenomenon where people assume it has stemmed from biological, physiological and genetic differences and in today’s society would describe race as something we are born into the world with , however things are not always what they seem and by examining and reading the readings by Omi and Winant, Buechler, McDonald, Montagu and watching the films ‘Skin’ and ‘Jane Elliot’s social experiment documentary’, we are able to see and analyse that race is a pre-eminently sociohistorical concept that has been socially constructed with no scientific reliability over time.

Race can be interpreted and understood in many different ways, based on the society surrounding you and the influences in your life you will be able to grasp a concept

Race was brought into the world when “European Explorers in the new world ‘discovered’ people who looked different to themselves”. This is when the term “black” was developed due to the colonization happening around the world and was used as a way to differentiate the enslaved “Africans”, “Natives” and “Europeans”. “White” is seen to be “pure” and “Non-white” is seen to be “impure”, this classification lead to people being able to identify with something and others and gave them a sense of belonging. This is where we begin to see social construction of race emerge as people start to use race as a way to classify and stereo-type people and gives us a way to legitimize our inequalities around the world. The first thing that one will notice about someone else other than their gender is their race, so racial identification became a way for us to determine how other people are different from us as well as how we will encounter with other people. Racial identity becomes a social norm where our physical features and emotional behaviours are already prescribed to us giving us the “preconceived notion of what each specific racial group looks like”. Race becomes a way for us to understand ourselves and others and how we all should think and act as it is seen as the “norm”. (Omi and Winant, 1994:172) . When we cannot

The experiment took place over two days where she divided the class into the “blue-eyed group” and into the “brown-eyed group” (as eye colour is just like skin colour where it is only a cultural marker of race) and on the first day the “blue-eyed group” were the superior group and got privileges (that the brown-eyed children were not allowed) such as, five minutes extra break, they were allowed to go back for seconds at lunch, they could drink out of the water fountain, they could play on the equipment at break and throughout the day she would state how the “blue-eyed” children were better, smarter and more talented than the “brown-eyed” children and the next day it was visa-versa with the “brown-eyes being the better ones”. This experiment showed how the discrimination impacted the way the children would look, think and act and it would impact their daily tasks and motivation to work. This experiment showed that people will just believe whatever a person in an authoritative position says and how based on the social construction, rules and stereo-types that are created we just follow and accept what is said about race and completely disregard the biological and genetic make-up of each human being. (The