What do u think about race/ethnicity? Whatever you have learnt,was it direct experiences or indirect messages?

Question

What were you taught about your place in the society as compared to other races? How were you taught this? In other words, what individuals (parents, teachers, friends,etc) and institutions (schools, media) have played a major role in shaping your current perceptions of race?

Answer 1

i was lucky. though i grew up in a milieu where caste was a dominant factor, my parents never bothered. i did not know what my caste was until i grew up enough to not bother about it. my family reinforced my revolt against any caste aspersions that i had to suffer from. i even once quarrelled with my class teacher for having made a slighting reference to a low caste class mate. So, you could say that i was TAUGHT not to bother about caste.

Race and ethnicity - again, fortunately, i had access to books on the subject from the time i got interested in the issue. i discovered that biology and not sociology determines polymorphism.

in my working life, i looked at persons as individuals, and not from a caste or race point of view. in fact "race" was something i was skeptical about throughout. i could see no evidence of single races or unique racial characteristics in any human i came across.

So, you could say that my parents rather than teachers, friends, etc., shaped my mental make up into which i could matrix my perceptions of race, ethnicity and human diversity.

Answer 2

There is only one race.  The human race.  The differences that emerged resulting in variations of skin color, cultural development, religious creation, increased ability to understand their environment, the development of language, writing, survival skills largely resulted because of the specialization required for survival.  I was raised on a large farm in Southern Illinois.  My father always said we, no one, had a choice of their parents.  As well, he always believed that if everyone had equal opportunity, ethnic hostility would not exist.  He says we all bleed blood, that intellectual ability was equal.  So, a part of our social group included several ethnic families.  I went to school in a one room school house with one teacher that taught all 8 grades.  My high school graduating class had 34 members.  Color differences were never an issue.  And I cannot understand how so many of our global population discriminate against those different from them.

Answer 3

Interesting question.

Race is usually used to classify animals, flora, etc.

But socially speaking, race is used to divide and classify various groups of people. Race has a more geographical and physical-connotation.

Humans all belong to the same race. So biologically speaking, as far as people go there is only one race- the human race.

Ethnicity is different from race. Ethnicity factors in geographic locations (of various groups), language, history, physical appearance, religion, style of dress, etc. Ethnicity is more socially based than race.

The words race and ethnicity are interchangeably used, but the word race as in "the African race", etc. have been used for centuries.

In ancient Egypt, the Ancient Egyptian sacred text called Book of Gates identifies four categories that are now conventionally labeled "Egyptians", "Asiatics", "Libyans", and "Nubians", but such distinctions tended to conflate differences as defined by physical features such as skin tone, with tribal and national identity. Classical civilizations from Rome to China tended to invest much more importance in familial or tribal affiliation than with one's physical appearance (Dikötter 1992; Goldenberg 2003). Ancient Greek and Roman authors also attempted to explain and categorize visible biological differences among peoples known to them. Such categories often also included fantastical human-like beings that were supposed to exist in far-away lands. Some Roman writers adhered to an environmental determinism in which climate could affect the appearance and character of groups (Isaac 2004). In many ancient civilizations, individuals with widely varying physical appearances became full members of a society by growing up within that society or by adopting that society's cultural norms (Snowden 1983; Lewis 1990).

Race was also used , by Europeans during the era of Imperialism, Colonialism,  and the age of exploration.

The rise of the Atlantic slave trade, which gradually displaced an earlier trade in slaves from throughout the world, created a further incentive to categorize human groups in order to justify the subordination of African slaves. (Meltzer 1993) Drawing on Classical sources and upon their own internal interactions — for example, the hostility between the English and Irish was a powerful influence on early thinking about the differences between people (Takaki 1993) — Europeans began to sort themselves and others into groups associated with physical appearance and with deeply ingrained behaviors and capacities. A set of folk beliefs took hold that linked inherited physical differences between groups to inherited intellectual, behavioral, and moral qualities. Although similar ideas can be found in other cultures , they appear not to have had as much influence upon their social structures as was found in Europe and the parts of the world colonized by Europeans.

The 19th century saw attempts to change race from a taxonomic to a biological concept. In the 19th century a number of natural scientists wrote on race: Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Francis Galton, James Cowles Pritchard, Louis Agassiz, Charles Pickering, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. As the science of anthropology took shape in the 19th century, European and American scientists increasingly sought explanations for the behavioral and cultural differences they attributed to groups (Stanton 1960). For example, using anthropometrics, invented by Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon, they measured the shapes and sizes of skulls and related the results to group differences in intelligence or other attributes (Lieberman 2001).

These scientists made three claims about race: first, that races are objective, naturally occurring divisions of humanity; second, that there is a strong relationship between biological races and other human phenomena (such as forms of activity and interpersonal relations and culture, and by extension the relative material success of cultures), thus biologizing the notion of "race", as Foucault demonstrated in his historical analysis; third, that race is therefore a valid scientific category that can be used to explain and predict individual and group behavior. Races were distinguished by skin color, facial type, cranial profile and size, texture and color of hair. Moreover, races were almost universally considered to reflect group differences in moral character and intelligence.

The eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, inspired by Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855) and Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology", asserted as self-evident the biological inferiority of particular groups (Kevles 1985). In many parts of the world, the idea of race became a way of rigidly dividing groups by culture as well as by physical appearances (Hannaford 1996). Campaigns of oppression and genocide were often motivated by supposed racial differences (Horowitz 2001).

In Charles Darwin's most controversial book, The Descent of Man, he made strong suggestions of racial differences and European superiority. In Darwin's view, stronger tribes of humans always replaced weaker tribes. As savage tribes came in conflict with civilized nations, such as England, the less advanced people were destroyed.[13] Nevertheless, he also noted the great difficulty naturalists had in trying to decide how many "races" there actually were (Darwin was himself a monogenist on the question of race, believing that all humans were of the same species and finding "race" to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction among some groups.

Onto a more modern note, here is a map, that shows race and geography.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:800px...

Normally, I do not like to use wikipedia as a source for anything. But, this article was exceptionally written, and it had alot of sources.

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But to answer your question, I was taught about race and ethnicity simply by looking at other people and seeing that they were different from myself.  Difference simply means that something is different, I am not implying superiority or inferiority complexes. My parents (my father was a Neuroscientist and Anthropologist, and my mother was a historian) taught me that even though we all came from Africa, when people spread away from Ethiopian-everyone changed. The original people who lived there, remained the same, and continued to intermarry with their own people.

The few tribes who left went out and populated the rest of Africa, and all non African lands.

The differences in people's physical appearance is all based on climate and diet.

The similarities that people share, are because we are all human. We all have a head, a face, etc.

And everyone has  religion, a culture, familial systems, and social institutions.

As for liking the people you meet and making friends,  for me, that is based on personality.  And yet, I identify with people of my own cultural background and I have pride in my Ethiopian heritage. As do most Ethiopians and Habesha people.

Other people have pride in where they come from and their heritage.

Race as a social construct is very complicated. If you are simply saying " I see myself as [fill in blank". then there is nothing wrong with that. But when prejudice, genocide, hate crimes,  oppression,etc. arise over issues of racial superiority or inferiority then that is terrible.

Or simply pulling a Justin Timberlake / Britney Spears(stealing something and saying that it is  not yours --like Michael Jackson's and Prince's music style, and some of British singer Albarn's stuff) and ripping off other culture's histories and claiming them as your  is ridiculous and pathetic.