Racial and ethnic inequality is evident in the modern society as people from one society or community tend to see people from other communities in a negative way. In order to understand the causes, effects of possible solutions to these social problems, there is a need of understanding the meaning of race and ethnicity and the manner in which they are applied in the society. According to Broman, (2017) race refers to a particular category of people with similar inherited physical characteristics, facial features or skin color. A race is more of biological traits than social construction because people have little control of traits such as skin color. The social construction of race comes into play when people from multiracial backgrounds are placed in one racial group because they are likely to experience discrimination.
Ethnicity refers to a group of people with similar cultural, social, and historical experiences thus creating an ethnic group of people with distinctive features from other people in a society. When individuals refer to people with shared cultural and historical experiences, they tend to use ethnicity group rather than racial. In this case, people belonging to a particular ethnic group may have similar cultural values but experience relatively different beliefs, behaviors, and values exclusively shared by members of that particular group (Matthews et al., 2016). People tend to use ethnic groups when referring to people with shared traits to avoid the biological aspects of defining people in a particular group. From a sociological view, ethnicity is essential to every member of a society because it gives people a sense of belonging and recognition based on cultural experiences. In most cases, the behavior depicted by an individual reflects the behavior of all members of that ethnic group.
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Prejudice, Discrimination, and Stereotyping
Human society is characterized by various forms of racial and ethnicity differentiation. As a result, prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping are inevitably used in social interactions when referring to people belonging to a different group (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2015). Though these three terms are applied in the same context, they differ depending on the manner in which they are used. Stereotyping refers to the situation where individuals oversimplify the characteristics of a particular group based on ethnicity, race, sex, gender, or age. From this view, stereotyping can use any form of characteristic to give a positive or negative description to a particular person or group. For example, masculine may exercise stereotyping by saying that women are generally lazy. In most cases, stereotyping is not created, but it continuously arises from subordinate groups that have been assimilated in the society.
Prejudice refers to the feelings, attitudes, or thoughts that an individual or a particular group may have against people from another society. In most cases, prejudice does not originate from experience, but it consists more of prejudgment made by people about people in different ethnic or racial groups. According to Dovidio & Gaertner, (2015) prejudice is practiced by people from a group that is considered to be superior usually practiced against inferior minorities. Prejudice can take the form of colorism or institutional racism. Colorism arises in a situation where a particular group sees one form of skin color as superior or inferior to others. For example, dark-skinned Americans experienced high prejudice than the light-skinned African Americans. Discrimination is an advancement of prejudice because it puts the aspects of prejudice based on thinking into practice (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2015). In this case, people from different ethnic groups are not treated with equality in institutions such as workplaces or the justice system. For example, most patriarchal societies exercise discrimination against women reflected through an unequal representation of men and women in workplaces.
Causes, Consequences, and solutions to racism
According to Lawler, (2015) functionalist theorists believe that racism originates from the fact that a society is comprised of people from different cultures. Each of the ethnic groups contributes to the stability and balance experienced in the community. When race and ethnicity arises, there is a likelihood that the stability experienced in the institution is disturbed resulting in instability. In order to maintain the balance experienced in society, functionalists believe that racism can be reduced through the assimilation process. As a result, the minority group should become economically, culturally, and socially integrated into the system of the superior group by giving up some of their practices in favor of the majority practices.
Symbolic Interactionism argues that race and ethnicity are socially constructed when people come together. In circumstances where people come from different groups, there is a possibility that they will develop prejudice forcing them to engage aspects of discrimination (Lawler, 2015). Consequently, people develop hostility against each leading to conflict. However, contact theory can be a viable mechanism of reducing racism and ethnicity because when people from different ethnic groups interact there will be a reduction of levels of hostility against each other. Racism arising from the prejudgments that people tend to display towards other people in the society or experience of a particular culture. However, under continued interaction people will get used to each other’s behavior and reduce negative perceptions about the minority group.
Conflict theorists believe cases of ethnicity and racisms originate from the nature of a society. Every community is structured in a way such that people are differentiated by social status, class, or gender which contributes to social inequality. Consequently, people from different classes always have a negative perception of each other. From this view, the nature of every society is in a way that it embraces inequality thus making conflict inevitable. As a result, such behaviors lead to social disorder thus creating social problems such as conflict for resources. Conflict theorists believe that this problem can be reduced by restructuring the society such that issues of class and gender differentiation are eliminated.
The issue of racisms in America
Though voters of the United States of America elected the first president of color, this does not mean that racism is moot in America. Basically, the election of the president of color meant that most of his voters were not obvious racists and maybe they did not have a sense of feeling that they had negative attitudes towards the minority groups in the society. Based on this argument, it is evident that racisms have significantly reduced in the United States. Even though many supporters voted for Obama, the presidents experienced all sorts of criticism from most of the Americans during his term (Tesler & Sears, 2010). Many of the posts in the social media criticized his activities, but Obama gave it a psychological cover which presented America as a free racisms society. In this case, the reality is that the president gave such people a psychological cover because he failed to react to their racism behavior.
The truth about racism in the United States avails in a situation where a majority of Obama voters switched to support Trump. The driving motive towards this behavior was the feeling that the African American president had incorporated so much culture thus acted against the will of white Americans (Tesler & Sears, 2010). In this case, the whites had started to fear for the fall of their culture in favor of the way of life exercised by the minority group. In this case, the reactions show that white American see the way of life practiced by African Americans as inferior and one that cannot prevail in the US. The silence shown by the white Americans were fueled by Donald Trump causing some of Obama voters to change their perception about his achievements. Prejudice resulted from the argument that most of the white Americans did not expect African Americans and Latinos to achieve much like they had done. From this perception, racisms still exist in America but it is in its declining stages.
References
Broman, C. L. (2017). Race and Ethnicity. The Wiley ‐ Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory , 1-9.
Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (1986). Prejudice, discrimination, and racism . Academic Press
Lawler, S. (2015). Identity: sociological perspectives . John Wiley & Sons.
Matthews, T. L., Bartkowski, J. P., & Chase, T. (2016). Race and Ethnicity. In Handbook of Religion and Society (pp. 421-442). Springer, Cham.
Tesler, M., & Sears, D. O. (2010). Obama's race: The 2008 election and the dream of a post-racial America . University of Chicago Press.
