Race & Biology: 2,500 Yr Old Prejudices Still Persist - Essay Sample

Introduction

Humans tend to classify themselves according to their race integrated into biology. Over 2,500 years ago, the Greek physician Hippocrates classified dark-skinned men as cowards and light-skinned men as brave (Dixon and Telles 2017). The Chinese, in turn, regarded the Europeans as repulsive, as did the Hindus, who saw them as lacking the most fundamental values (Kaul and Guiden 2018). In a matter of milliseconds, the brain realizes if a photo belongs to one's ethnic group or not. If it belongs, it associates it with something positive, and if not, with something negative manifested in discrimination. However, the concept of race should be understood as a social construction and thus overcome as a tool to understand human genetic diversity.

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

Save 25%

According to Schaefer (2016), the highly disputed and confused use of the biological concept of race in human genetic research is problematic at best and harmful at worst. The American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois began to argue a century ago that distinctions between black and white health in the United States did not stem from biological but from social differences, and that those differences could not be used to explain distinctions without having their basis in culture (Smith 2017). Still, race continues to be used as a tool to segregate others considered different, mostly immigrants from having access to the wellbeing and economic opportunities available in the United States. This paper argues from the perspective of the social construction of race that more immigration should be allowed into the USA.

Race as a Social Construction

Racial discrimination by origin can be reported since antiquity when Greek and Latin peoples classified foreigners as barbarians (Dixon and Telles 2017). Scientists have, in the past, questioned some well-established assumptions about race differences. In the 19th century, with the positivist impulse on the sciences, racist scientific theories emerged to try to hierarchize the races and prove the superiority of the pure white race. French philosopher, diplomat, and writer Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) is one of those who stood out in this scenario with his publication on the Inequality of Human Races (Arthur 2019). A study based on anthropology, physiology, and psychology called craniometry or craniology also appeared in the 19th century. Such a study consisted of taking measurements of individuals' skulls and comparing the measurements with data such as propensity to violence and intelligence coefficients (Goodrum 2016). Today, however, serious studies with both a sociological, psychological, and genetic basis no longer give credit to racist theories of the last century. Notwithstanding, organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and the Nazi German used and continue to use these outdated racial theories to justify the supremacy of the white race.

Mexican Immigration into the United States of America

One of the demographic responses to impoverishment is emigration. Peripheral economies are unable to grow, create jobs, secure decent wages, and opportunities for personal advancement, while receiving economies open up a range of possibilities (Abrajano and Hajnal 2017). Thus, these economies with high growth and relatively democratic regimes become magnets for the workforce, which leads to new situations; for example, the United States receives over four hundred thousand undocumented Mexicans a year (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2017).

The issue of immigration has been addressed with strong ideological overtones and much confusion in the US, which has worsened the climate of confrontation and paved the way for the growth of intolerant forces that seek to extend the isolation of individuals from other nations. Although Mexican immigrants represent multiple advantages for the United States, from new productivity, freshness in relation to the workforce, and solution for low birth rates, it has been considered as a security issue and instead has been associated with drug trafficking and terrorism. One consequence is the formulation and implementation of repressive policies - police and military - to face a socioeconomic problem. The loss for the country of origin is not considered, much less the personal, social, or cultural cost of the immigrant.

Ineffective Immigration Policy

The issue of undocumented immigration has acquired dimensions of human suffering: there is a very high flow in times of war that leads daily to human tragedies and the exploitation of people by trafficking mafias. Although disasters and internal conflict facing immigrants reach the media, the information, instead of sensitizing society and the government about the need for a new policy has had the opposite effect; it has helped to feed fears, raise the stances that fight against immigration and justify the creation of police agencies to stop migrants. However, policies to address the problem of undocumented immigration have failed, as the flows have not been canceled despite the creation of walls, fences, and military deployments. On the contrary, the measures adopted increasingly claim more lives, powerful mafias have emerged that handle human-trafficking, increase in the economic and social costs of the families left behind and, not least, expressions of xenophobia and social hatred develop in the receiving countries.

The United Nations Millennium Declaration establishes that one of the key objectives of development is to improve the wellbeing of the person (MacKay 2016). It is precisely this search for prosperity that explains a large part of the migratory movements that take place in the 21st century. From this perspective, the deep inequality gap that characterizes the contemporary world acts as a catalyst for those movements of millions of people in search of the desired level of wellbeing, elevated to the category of humanity's ethical imperative.

The Immigration Debate

The immigration debate has changed over the years, from its eugenic background that defined immigrants in medical terms at the beginning of the 20th century to the socioeconomic elements that are currently involved. In the 90s, the debate was based primarily on socioeconomic criteria. It was argued that immigrants and especially Mexicans abused the social security system, the health system, and the school system because they did not pay taxes. Being low-skilled, they stripped Americans of their jobs by throwing them into unemployment insurance, creating strong pressures on public finances. Mexicans, according to this argument, refused to integrate into American society and, being reluctant to acculturate, weakened American culture. Because they were poor and poorly educated, they adjusted to a criminal profile and raise crime rates. However, evidence has shown that immigration in the United States does not increase crime rates. Instead, the argument is racially motivated to justify the exclusion of minorities and immigrants from access to wellbeing as envisioned in the American Dream.

US President Donald Trump, as well as several Conservative Party figures, have been fighting for intensified border control, claiming that illegal immigration is a significant cause for the rise in crime in the country. However, various studies now contradict this assumption. A study published by the journalistic organization Marshall Project revealed that areas with the highest illegal immigration appear to have the biggest drop in crime rates, possibly due to fear of deportation by immigrants (Flagg 2019). A team of investigators, led by journalist Anna Flagg, concluded that most areas surveyed experienced a decline in crime between 2006 and 2017, regardless of the presence of illegal immigrants. To make the report, the Marshall Project crossed data from illegal immigrants registered at the Pew Research center with data on crimes registered with the Federal Investigative Police - FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation).

In analyzing in more depth the connection between the flow of undocumented population residing in various metropolitan areas of the United States with the different types of crimes, the experts also failed to establish a relationship. The results of the Marshall Project study are similar to those found in other studies on the relationship between illegal immigration and crime. For example, two reports released in 2017 by the Cato Institute concluded that illegal immigrants in Texas committed fewer crimes than the general population of that State and found that undocumented people are less likely to be arrested (Nowrasteh 2019).

White Supremacy Demonizes Immigration

In 2007, the United States registered 888 hate groups according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (2008) that used the Barack Obama campaign to intensify their actions. A decade later, in August 2017, a march of protesters in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, in the United States sparked outrage around the world after hundreds of people walked at night carrying and shouting slogans against racial minorities including blacks, immigrants, Jews and LGBTQ (Hurst 2020). Most of the white supremacists also wore military gear and carried weapons. With the promise of "Uniting the Right", the act was organized by nationalist and extreme right groups in the USA, such as the Ku Klux Klan. The protesters shouted slogans like "White lives matter" and "You will not replace us", referring to immigrants. There were also demonstrations of Nazi pride, with symbols of Adolf Hitler's swastika.

Most professional and social environments in the US are dominated by whites. Consequently, Mexican immigrants, black Americans, and other racial minorities become the target of racist comments and attitudes, which makes their assimilation in those cultures extremely difficult. In general, the immigrants grew up without much contact with other cultures, except the legacy of their ancestors with strong European colonization and subliminal message that everything in Europe is better. This social construction perpetuates Eurocentric standards of beauty, for example, creating stereotypes and demonizing the other considered different. This racial discrimination has caused the spread of xenophobia and social prejudice in the country (Obinna 2018; Schaefer 2016).

Xenophobia, in general, is directly related to racism, prejudice against people because of their physical characteristics, mainly the color of their skin (Reny and Newman 2018). This is noticeable when people from different backgrounds receive different treatment because of their appearance. In itself, the word xenophobia came from the combination of two words in the Greek language: Xenos (foreign, strange) and phóbos (fear). It, therefore, means "fear of the different" or "fear of the foreigner". In the classic sense of the word, its meaning was widely used to portray the aversion that people may feel towards a foreign group. Still, it can also be used for hostility against people from the same country, but who are considered outsiders.

The hatred and disgust that characterize xenophobia are generally related to historical, social, economic, cultural, and religious differences. Xenophobia is always the result of ignorance of the other and is accompanied by stereotypes that reinforce the prejudice against a particular group. This prejudice can also be accompanied by ethnocentrism, the notion that culture itself is superior to another. Because it is a prejudice, xenophobia is directly related to violent and discriminatory attitudes and behaviors. Thus, xenophobic people usually practice attitudes that segregate or exclude those considered foreigners.

According to US Data and Statistics 2016, self-declared blacks or browns were still the majority in the illiteracy and unemployment rates...