Essay Sample on Race: Social Construct or Observed Reality?

The term race can adequately be described as a group of people with the same observable intrinsic features such as the skin color and ancestral origin and the society frequently uses these characteristics as well as the associated racial stereotypes to determine whether they are safe or not while around a person of a particular race. However, from a social perspective, the race is primarily applied to determine the superiority and inferiority, whereas the inferior races are always categorized for the preservation of the superior race. Concerning this, in the article Race as Class, Herbert focuses on explaining that race is inconsistent, wrong, and random mainly because it has been defined differently over the years by multiple scholars and arbitrary individuals. He argues that when a lot of people interpret race in their different opinions, the actual description ultimately becomes unreliable and unrealistic (Gans, 2005). For instance, various people in the society use race to determine if or not outsiders are dangerous or aggressive while for others, race can be associated with all forms of body variations rather than just the originality of a person.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The author also argues that the skin color, as well as the different facial features of various races, are significantly used to form a country's class and status hierarchy (Gans, 2005). Thus, when arranged hierarchically, the whites are placed on top of the socioeconomic status as they are considered superior while the nonwhites are placed below them concerning both the socioeconomic position and status (Gans, 2005). In emphasizing on this, Herbert notes that there is an exception of the African Americans in the contemporary society and as a result of this exceptionalism they are negatively impacted in their career and jobs (Gans, 2012). Typically, the author attempts to explain that although the worst days of racial discrimination are over, the minority are still less violently and silently being mistreated.

I agree with the author's claim regarding the relationship between class and status because, in the contemporary society, both race and class are increasingly important as individuals across the globe are often classified to belong to a particular group based on the similarities of the physical and viewable characteristics they have. However, phenotype has played an effective role in maintaining race and class structure since individuals can easily be grouped to belong to a specific race according to their phenotypic features such as color, biochemical properties, and behavior.

References

Gans, H. J. (2005). Race as a class. Contexts, 4(4), 17-21. https://doi.org/10.1525/ctx.2005.4.4.17

Gans, H. J. (2012). "Whitening" and the changing American racial hierarchy. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 9(2), 267-279. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X12000288