Racial Discrimination Essay - 465 Words

Racial Discrimination When we look at physical characteristics such as skin color from the social definition perspective, there is no clear meaning, but these characteristics do have what is referred to as social meaning. Pierre van den Berghe defined a racial group as a human group that defines itself and/or is defined by other groups as different from other groups by virtue of innate and immutable physical characteristics (8). Racial group distinctions are based upon ideological racism, which links physical qualities to the lesser or greater cultural and intellectual characteristics. Originating more than one hundred years ago, people with only one-eighth African ancestry, but even without any physical characteristics normally†¦show more content†¦If this were true for all races, then how come someone who is only one-eighth white isnt considered white by society? Probably because society considers African Americans as the minority, so this became a cultural universal on how to judge if someo ne should be considered black or white. Ethnicity comes from the Greek word Ethnos, which means nation. Its earliest English usage referred to countries or nations that werent Jewish or Christian. There are two different definitions of ethnicity, one broad and one narrow. The broad definition refers to an ethnic group as being a social group distinguished by race, religion, or national origin. If we look closer, we will see that these characteristics are both physical and cultural, thats why this is referred to as the broad definition. The narrow definition refers to groups that are distinguished primarily on the basis of cultural or national-origin characteristics. The cultural characteristics being language, and the national-original characteristics being the country from which a person or his/her ancestors came. Today, the narrower definition is more preferred by social scientists because it matches up more precisely with the original Greek meaning of nationality. Ethnoce ntrism should also be mentioned here because this is a big cause of racism today. Ethnocentrism is the belief that your group or country believes that they are better than all the other groups and countries in the world.Show MoreRelatedOvert Racial Discrimination and Institutional Racial Discrimination635 Words   |  3 PagesPrior to the 1960s, discrimination was viewed as a creature of prejudice (Feagin Feagin, 1988). What this means is that the problem of discrimination was viewed as one motivated primarily by individuals (or groups of individuals) on the basis of prejudice or hatred. Implicit in this prejudice-causes-discrimination-model (Feagin Feagin, p. XX) was the assumption that the solution to discrimination was one of simply eliminating prejudice. 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