Race as Social Construct

Pre- Reading Exercise

I. Think about the vocabulary articles on “ discrimination”,“ racism” and “prejudice” found in Macmillan Dictionary. Match the definitions with the terms.

Arcticle 1

Arcticle 2

Arcticle 3

II. Look at the headline of the text given below. Predict what the following text could be about.

III. Practice the pronunciation of the following words:

Profoundly, prejudice, brutality, equality, stimuli, treatment, intentionally, minorities, illegal, occurs, unconscious, racism, concrete, inferior, referred, separate, equal, advanced.

Text 1

Racial Discrimination: Definition & Examples

IV. Read the text. Five sentences have been removed from the text. Chose from the

sentences A-E the one which fits each gap:

Racial discrimination has been practiced for centuries and has had a profoundly negative impact on the lives of many people.

What is Racial Discrimination?

In recent years, the issue of race and prejudice has dominated the news with reports of police brutality, struggles for civil rights, and demands for equality. ……. (1)

Discrimination, according to Merriam Webster's dictionary, is the process by which two stimuli differing in some aspect are responded to differently.^[1] This term is used to highlight the difference of treatment between members of different groups when one group is intentionally singled out and treated worse, or not given the same opportunities. As attitudes towards minorities started to change the term discrimination came to be used to talk about the issue. ……… (2).[6]

In simple terms, racial discrimination is the practice of treating someone differently, or poorly, because of the color of his skin. ……….(3)

The previous example might sound unfair or illegal (it's generally both), but it occurs a lot more than you might think. In some cases, people don't mean to do it and it's just an unconscious reaction, whereas at other times people intentionally discriminate. Regardless of whether it's conscious or unconscious, the best way to combat such an unfair practice is to know what it looks like and understand how it works.

Race as Social Construct

Race and racism are far too complex to adequately explain in a single text, but the most important thing for you to know is that what we call 'race' (variations in skin color) is not a concrete thing, but a concept. In technical terms, it's one of many social constructs, which are ideas or theories that people create to give certain things meaning. In this case, the color of a person's skin means absolutely nothing in a social or cultural context, so people have created the concept of race to explain why one person is a different color than another.

The reason it's important to understand this is because the social construct of race is the foundation of racial discrimination. For instance, when white Europeans arrived in what is now the United States, they often justified the taking of land from Native peoples by promoting the idea that because the Indians weren't white, they were inferior and weren't as deserving of the land as the white people. In fact, there are many examples from American history in which race has been used to justify the poor treatment of non-white people and each one will demonstrate the complex and erroneous nature of racial discrimination.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 916