Karen Brodkin’s essay on the differences between different ethnic groups is both striking and personal. The author is not just writing about something she observed. Brodkin is writing about something that he experienced. This adds to the impact of this piece. For a foreign student, the fact that people made such a big fuss over differences between different groups of Europeans in past decades seems surprising, because everyone looks so similar.
The author demonstrates, however, that perception of these differences did affect which groups of immigrants succeeded faster than others (Brodkin 26-52). Since we were taught in our reading from Guest on race that race is a constructed idea, not based on science, the barriers that people put up to keep other people out seem even sillier (Guest 196). Nonetheless, prejudice at every level of society in the USA did prevent certain groups from getting the housing, jobs, and education they wanted (Brodkin passim).
Ishtla Singh’s chapter on ethnicity is powerful because the author discusses his own experience of ethnic confusion and prejudice as a child of Indian immigrants to Trinidad. This background has caused others to make incorrect and insulting assumptions about the language he speaks, his athletic achievements, and many other characteristics that actually probably have very little to do with genetics (Wareing, Singh and Peccei 18).
As with his chapter on language, Singh makes clear that ethnicity is a complex issue (Wareing, Singh and Peccei 18). Just looking at someone cannot tell you very much about them. For a foreign student, the section on governments forcing people to speak one language or another has relevance because in my home country that has been a policy in some areas (Wareing, Singh and Peccei 104-109). Ethnicity, like race, seems to be a made up definition of a person or a group, because it is too complex to reduce to one or two adjectives.
Jane Hill’s essay on language and racism explains how people use words from Spanish in ways that are racist (Hill 681). This shows how easy it is for almost anything to be used as a way to insult people from another race or language group. Singh spoke of this in his chapter on language (Wareing, Singh and Peccei 18). He referred to this in his chapter on ethnicity as well (Wareing, Singh and Peccei 98-103).
For a speaker of English as a second language, figuring out which parts of slang are from another languafge and might be offensive and which are ok to use is challenging. However, this article certainly is a warning about how to listen to the way people use language, and perhaps ask questions about specific words and phrases.
Peggy Macintosh describes all the thought provoking ways that she sees that her being white has given her advantages over people who are not white. She acknowledges that these are often invisible (Macintosh n.pag.). The functional theory to explain human behavior that was introduced by Salzmann suggests that there must be functional reasons why this system goes on (Salzman 30). Macintosh suggests that the reason is to keep power (Macintosh n.pag.).
Judith Lorber, in her essay on the ways that people identify themselves and others by gender, shows how early the process begins and how gender affects every aspect of life (Lorber 112-114). The chapter by Guest on Gender showed just how complicated it is to define gender (Guest 270). The behaviors and characteristics that people say and think go with each gender seem to defined more by people and not by genetics (Guest 270).
Works Cited
Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Print.
Guest, Kenneth. Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print.
Hill, Jane. “Language, Race and White Public Space.” Haviland, William A, Robert J Gordon and Luis Antonio Vivanco. Talking About People: Readings in Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 100. McGraw-Hill, 1998. Web.
Lorber, Judith. ““Night to his Day”: The Social Construction of Gender.” The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality: Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality. Ed. Tracy E. Ore. McGraw-Hill, 2011. Web.
Macintosh, Peggy. White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack: Working Paper 189. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies. Winter 1998. Web.
Salzman, Phillip Carl. Understanding Culture: An Introduction To Anthropological Theory. Prospect Heights: Waveland, 2001.. Print.
Wareing, Shân, Ishtla Singh and Jean Stilwell Peccei. Language, society and power: an introduction. Ed. Ishtla Singh and Jean Stilwell Peccei. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2004. Print.