Race

How do race/ethnicity and gender impact our day-to-day assumptions about others?

A long-enduring value in the United States is the belief that “all men are created equal”. These famous words from the American Declaration of Independence do not mean that all people are equal in wealth or status but rather all (including women nowadays) are supposed to be equal before the law. Equality before the law is the ideal. But the ideal is not always the actuality. Some people have advantages in legal treatment, and they generally also tend to have advantages of other kinds, including economic advantages. (Cultural Anthropology 2007 pg. 125). “Race” has been the cause of more misunderstanding and human suffering than anything else that can be associated with a single word in any language.

In fact, “race is a social construct derived mainly from perceptions conditioned by the events of recorded history, and it has no basic biological reality. It is not found in the literature of classical antiquity, absent in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, not found in earlier writings from the Nile valley. Race is used to divide species (us) into groups that share traits. Without exception, recent and modern industrial and postindustrial societies such as our own are socially stratified-that is they contain social groups such as families, classes, or ethnic groups that have unequal access to important advantages such as economic resources, power, and prestige. (Cultural Anthropology 2007 pg. 125). Hasn’t such inequality always existed? This topic is anthropologically important, Anthropologists, based in firsthand observations of recent societies, would say not. Ethnocentrism interferes with understanding differences between people of different cultures, races, and or ethnicities, and gender.

To be sure, even the simplest societies for example the Amish, (in the technological sense) have some differences in advantages based on age, ability, or gender, adults have higher status than children the skilled more than the unskilled, men more than woman. Anthropologist agrue that egalitarian societies exist where social groups have more or less the same access to rights or advantages, I draw my conclusion. Substantial inequality appears only with permanent communities, centralized political systems, egalitarian societies have disappeared because of two processes, the global spread of commercial or market exchange and the voluntary or involuntary incorporation of many diverse people into large, centralized political systems. (Cultural Anthropology 2007 pg. 125, 126). Slaves are persons who do not own their own labor and as such they represent a class, this has existed in every part of the world in the past. Change has occurred, legal barriers and segregation has been broken down, traditional barriers in the United States have been lifted, but the “color line” has not disappeared. African Americans are found in all social classes, but remain underrepresented in the wealthiest group and overrepresented at the bottom. Discrimination for blacks with jobs and housing is still present. African Americans may work with others but they usually go home to African American neighborhoods. Few African Americans can completely avoid the anguish of racism.