Race and Ethnicity: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives Essay

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Although people are subject to suffering and discrimination based on differences in race and ethnicity, these concepts have colossal differences. It was precisely based on racial strife that the countries waged wars all the time and sought to subjugate the peoples, showing the ambitions of hegemons. Race is a set of phenotypic traits (eye shape, skin, and hair color), which later turn into a precise stereotype setting and serve as a judgment marker. Ethnicity is a set of cultural, religious, every day, and linguistic norms and habits, which includes the intangible gods of each people. The boundaries of an ethnic group, unlike a race, are blurred, and it is harder to fix them. Ethnos is a set of norms that can be passed down from different people to their relatives (generational continuity); that is, they are subject to continuity in space and time. Racial traits are not transmitted in any way except genetically, which makes them the object of scientific study. The transition from one ethnic group to another is a historical difference, not a conceptual one, and many examples exist.

Racial signs have often shifted in history towards ethnic ones, forcing people to perceive minorities exclusively the wrong way. Scholars believe that “Jefferson was the first American to speculate and write publicly about the character of the “Negro,” whom he knew only in the role of slaves on his plantations page” (Smedley and Smedley, 2005: 21). He transferred the topic of race into the context of public discussion and condemnation without sufficient grounds for this. Knowing about the Negroid race only that its representatives worked on his plantations, Thomas Jefferson considered this significant to start building hostile and dismissive mythology around these people. New research postulates: “Racialized science, with its emphasis on identifying immutable differences between racial groups, can be expected only to maintain and reinforce existing racial inequality” (Smedley and Smedley, 2005: 24). These differences are indisputable, but society needs to emphasize similarities more, as this can make people relate.

Reference

Smedley, Audrey and Brian Smedley. 2005. “Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real: Anthropological and historical perspectives on the social construction of race”. American Psychologist, 60:16–26.

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