Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Essay on race and ethnicity

Essay on race and ethnicity

essay on race and ethnicity

Apr 16,  · It might sound strange, but race, ethnicity, and nationality are key concepts in IB Geography, too. We have tons of resources for IB Geography students, including the best free IB Geography study guides, every IB Geography past paper, and a complete IB Extended Essay Apr 26,  · College completion rates vary widely along racial and ethnic lines, with black and Hispanic students earning credentials at a much lower rate than white and Asian students do, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.. The center evaluated data from students nationwide who entered a college or May 28,  · The concept of race has historically signified the division of humanity into a small number of groups based upon five criteria: (1) Races reflect some type of biological foundation, be it Aristotelian essences or modern genes; (2) This biological foundation generates discrete racial groupings, such that all and only all members of one race share a set of biological



Essays about race and ethnicity



This historical concept of race has faced substantial scientific and philosophical challenge, with some important thinkers denying both the logical coherence of the concept and the very existence of races.


Others defend the concept of race, albeit with substantial changes to the foundations of racial identity, which they depict as either socially constructed or, if biologically grounded, neither discrete nor essentialist, as the historical concept would have it. Both in the past and today, determining the boundaries of discrete races has proven to be most vexing and has led to great variations in the number of human races believed to be in existence.


Thus, some thinkers categorized humans into only four distinct races typically white or Caucasian, Black or African, yellow or Asian, and essay on race and ethnicity or Native Americanand downplayed any biological or phenotypical distinctions within racial groups such as those between Scandinavians and Spaniards within the white or Caucasian race.


The ambiguities and confusion associated with determining the boundaries of racial categories have provoked a widespread scholarly consensus that discrete or essentialist races are socially constructed, not biologically real.


However, significant scholarly debate persists regarding whether reproductive isolation, either during human evolution or through modern practices barring miscegenation, may have generated sufficient genetic isolation as to justify using the term race to signify the existence of non-discrete human groups that share not only physical phenotypes but also clusters of genetic material.


In addition, scholarly debate exists concerning the formation and character of socially constructed, discrete racial categories. For instance, some scholars suggest that race is inconceivable without racialized social hierarchies, while others argue that egalitarian race relations are possible.


Finally, substantial controversy surrounds the moral status of racial identity and solidarity and the justice and legitimacy of policies or institutions aimed at undermining racial inequality. This entry focuses primarily on contemporary scholarship regarding the conceptual, essay on race and ethnicity, ontological, epistemological, and normative questions pertaining to race, with an introductory section on the history of the concept of race in the West and in Western philosophy.


Aside from some discussion in Section 5, it does not focus in depth on authors such as Frederick Douglass, W. DuBois, essay on race and ethnicity, or Frantz Fanon, or movements, such as Négritude, Critical Race Theory, Black Identity, Philosophy of Liberation, or Feminist Perspectives on Race.


Interested readers should consult the relevant entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for insight into these and other topics important to the study of race in philosophy. In Section 1, we trace the historical origins and development of the concept of race. Section 2 covers contemporary philosophical debates over whether races actually exist.


Thereafter, in Section 3 we examine the differences between race and ethnicity. Section 4 surveys debates among moral, political and legal philosophers over the validity of racial identity, racial solidarity, and race-specific policies such as affirmative action and race-based representation.


Section 5 outlines engagement with the concept of race within Continental philosophy. The dominant scholarly position is that the concept of race is a modern phenomenon, at least in Europe and the Americas. However, there is less agreement regarding whether racismeven absent a developed race concept, may have existed in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The influential work of classicist Frank Snowden ;who emphasized the lack of antiblack prejudice in the ancient world, led many scholars of race to conclude that racism did not exist in that epoch.


Benjamin Isaac and Denise McCoskey contend that the ancient Greeks and Romans did hold proto-racist views that applied to other groups which today might be considered white.


More importantly, essay on race and ethnicity, both Isaac and McCoskey contend that ancient proto-racism influenced the development of modern racism. Perhaps the first, unconscious stirrings of the concept of race arose within essay on race and ethnicity Iberian Peninsula. Following the Moorish conquest of Andalusia in the eighth century C.


During and after their reconquista reconquest of the Muslim principalities in the peninsula, the Essay on race and ethnicity Monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand sought to establish a uniformly Christian state by expelling first the Jews in and then the Muslims in But because large numbers of both groups converted to Christianity to avoid expulsion and before this to avoid persecutionthe monarchs distrusted the authenticity of these Jewish and Muslim conversos converts.


Only those who could demonstrate their ancestry to those Christians who resisted the Moorish invasion were secure in their status in the realm. Thus, the idea of purity of blood was born limpieza de sangrenot fully the biological concept of race but perhaps the first occidental use of blood heritage as a category of religio-political membership Bernasconi and Lottvii; Hannafordessay on race and ethnicity, —; Frederickson31— The Iberian Peninsula may also have witnessed the first stirrings of antiblack and anti-Native-American racism.


Since this region was the first in Europe to utilize African slavery while gradually rejecting the enslavement of fellow European Christians, Iberian Christians may have come to associate Black people as physically and mentally suitable only for menial labor. In this they were influenced by Arab slave merchants, who assigned the worst tasks to their dark-skinned slaves while assigning more complex labor essay on race and ethnicity light or tawny-skinned slaves Frederickson This resulted in the heated debate in Valladolid in between Bartolomé Las Casas and Gines de Sepúlveda over whether the Indians were by nature inferior and thus worthy of enslavement and conquest.


Indeed, arguably it was the conflict between the Enlightenment ideals of universal freedom and equality versus the fact of the European enslavement of Africans and indigenous Americans that fostered the development of the idea of race Blum—; Hannaford— While events in the Iberian Peninsula may have provided the initial stirrings of modern racial sentiments, the concept of essay on race and ethnicity, with its close links to ideas of deterministic biology, emerged with the rise of modern natural philosophy and its concern with taxonomy Smith First were the peoples inhabiting most of Europe and North Africa, extending eastward through Persia, northern and central India, and right up to parts of contemporary Indonesia.


Despite their differing skin tones, these peoples nevertheless shared common physical characteristics, such as hair texture and bone structure. The second race was constituted by the people of Africa south of the Sahara Desert, who notably possessed smooth Black skin, thick noses and lips, thin beards, and wooly hair. Bernier considered whether the indigenous peoples of the Americas were a fifth race, but he ultimately assigned them to the first Bernasconi and Lott2—3.


Central to a scientific concept of race would be a resolution of the question of monogenesis versus polygenesis. Monogenesis adhered to the Biblical creation story in asserting that all humans descended from a common ancestor, perhaps Adam of the Book of Genesis; polygenesis, on essay on race and ethnicity other hand, asserted that different human races descended from different ancestral roots.


Thus, the former position contended that all races are nevertheless members of a common human species, whereas the latter saw races as distinct species. Richard Popkin and Naomi Zack13—18 contend that the version of the essay assumes, without demonstration, an original, polygenetic difference between white and non-white races.


Andrew Vallsdenies that either version of the footnote espouses polygenesis. Once essay on race and ethnicity discrete racial groups were developed over many generations, further climatic changes will not alter racial phenotypes Bernasconi and Lott8— As evidence, he adduced the fact that individuals from different races were able to breed together, and their offspring tended to exhibit blended physical traits inherited from both parents. Not only did blending indicate that the parents were part of a common species; it also indicated that they are of distinct races.


For the physical traits of parents of the same race are not blended but often passed on exclusively: a blond white man and a brunette white woman may have four blond children, without any blending of this physical trait; whereas a Black man and a white woman will bear children who blend white and Black traits Bernasconi and Lott9— Such inter-racial mixtures accounted for the existence of liminal individuals, whose physical traits seem to lie between the discrete boundaries of one of the four races; peoples who do not fit neatly into one or another race are explained away as groups whose seeds have not been fully triggered by the appropriate environmental stimuli Bernasconi and Lott This term reflected his claim that this variety originated in the Caucuses mountains, in Georgia, justifying this etiology through reference to the superior beauty of the Georgians.


The version also included the terms Mongolian to describe the non-Caucasian peoples of Asia, essay on race and ethnicity, Ethiopian to signify Black Africans, American to denote the indigenous peoples of the New World, and Malay to identify the South Pacific Islanders Bernasconi and Lott27—33; Hannaford While noting differences in skin tone, he based his varieties upon the structures of the cranium, which supposedly gave his distinctions a stronger scientific foundation than the more superficial characteristic of color Hannaford In addition, he strongly denied polygenetic accounts of racial difference, noting the ability of members of different varieties to breed with each other, something that humans were incapable of doing with other species.


Indeed, he took great pains to dismiss as spurious accounts of Africans mating with apes or of monstrous creatures formed through the union of humans with other animals Hannaford— Agassiz was born in Switzerland, received an M.


in Munich and later studied zoology, geology, and paleontology in various German universities under the influence of Essay on race and ethnicity scientific theories. His orthodox Christian background initially imbued him with a strong monogenist commitment, but upon visiting America and seeing an African American for the first time, Agassiz experienced a type of conversion experience, which led him to question whether these remarkably different people could share the same blood as Europeans.


Eventually staying on and making his career in America, and continually struck by the physical character of African Americans, Agassiz officially announced his turn to polygenesis at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science AAAS in Charleston, South Carolina.


Although the Catholic Gobineau initially espoused monogenesis, he later leaned towards polygenesis and ended up ambivalent on this issue Hannaford— Nevertheless, Gobineau lent credence to the white racial supremacy that Nott supported Braceessay on race and ethnicity, — Gobineau posited two impulses among humans, that of attraction and repulsion. Civilization emerges when humans obey the law of attraction and intermingle with peoples of different racial stocks.


According the Gobineau, the white race was created through such intermingling, which allowed it alone to generate civilization, unlike the other races, which were governed only essay on race and ethnicity the law of repulsion.


Once civilization is established, however, further race mixing leads to the degeneration of the race through a decline in the quality of its blood. Consequently, when the white race conquers other Black or yellow races, any further intermingling will lead it to decline.


Thus, Gobineau claimed that the white race would never die so long as its blood remains composed of its initial mixture of peoples. The rest of the essay entertained both sides of the debate regarding whether or not different races essay on race and ethnicity different species or sub-species of humans. Although Darwin did not explicitly take sides in this debate, the preponderance of his argument gives little support to the idea of races being different species.


For instance, he noted that couples from different races produce fertile offspring, and that individuals from different races essay on race and ethnicity to share many mental similarities. That said, while Darwinian evolution may have killed essay on race and ethnicity polygenesis and the related idea that the essay on race and ethnicity constituted distinct species, it hardly killed off race itself.


Darwin himself did not think natural selection would by itself generate racial distinctions, since the physical traits associated with racial differences did not seem sufficiently beneficial to favor their retention; he did, however, leave open a role for sexual selection in the creation of races, through repeated mating among individuals with similar traits Bernasconi and Lott77— Consequently, later race thinkers would replace polygenesis with natural selection and sexual selection as scientific mechanisms whereby racial differentiation could slowly, unintentionally, but nevertheless inevitably proceed Hannaford While positive eugenics, or the enforced breeding of higher types, never became law, negative eugenics, or the sterilization of the feebleminded or infirm, did become public policy enforced by a number of American states and upheld by the United States Supreme Court in an eight-to-one decision in Buck v.


Bell U, essay on race and ethnicity. The apogee of post-Darwinian race-thinking was arguably reached in the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain —the son-in-law of German opera composer Richard Wagner.


Chamberlain argued in the evolutionary terms of sexual selection that distinct races emerged through geographical and historical conditions which create inbreeding among certain individuals with similar traits Hannaford Moving from this initial specification, Chamberlain then argued that the key strands of western civilization—Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy and art—emerged from the Aryan race.


Jesus, for instance, was held to be of Aryan stock, despite his Jewish religion, since the territory of Galilee was populated by peoples descended from Aryan Phonecians as well as by Semitic Jews. These Greek and Christian strands became united in Europe, particularly during the Reformation, which allowed the highest, Teutonic strain of the Aryan race to be freed from constraining Roman Catholic cultural fetters.


But while Roman institutions and practices may have constrained the Teutonic Germans, their diametric opposite was the Jew, the highest manifestation of the Semitic Race. The European religious tensions between Christian and Jew were thus transformed into racial conflicts, for which conversion or ecumenical tolerance would have no healing effect.


Rejecting political or educational means of ameliorating the destitution of the subordinate racial groups in America, Grant instead advocated strict segregation and the prohibition of miscegenation, or the interbreeding of members of different races Hannaford Like Galton, Grant had similar success in influencing American public policy, both through the imposition of racist restrictions on immigration at the federal level and through the enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws in thirty states, until such prohibitions were finally overturned by the United States Supreme Court in Loving v.


Virginia U, essay on race and ethnicity. If the apogee of biological race was reached in the early twentieth century, its decline began at about the same time. While writers such as Chamberlain and Grant popularized and politicized biological conceptions of race hierarchy, academic anthropologists since Blumenbach gave the concept of race its scientific validity.


But academic anthropology also essay on race and ethnicity the first challenge to biological race in the person of Columbia University professor Franz Boas —a German-born Jewish immigrant to the United States. Boas challenged the fixed character of racial groups by taking on one of the key fundaments to racial typology, cranium size. From this he concluded that claims about racially differential mental capacities could similarly be reduced to such environmental factors.


In so doing, Boas undermined one measure of racial distinction, and although he did not go so far as to reject entirely the concept of biological race itself, he strongly influenced anthropologists to shift their focus from putatively fixed biological characteristics to apparently mutable cultural factors in order to understand differences among human groups Bernasconi and Lott84—88; Brace—; Cornell and Hartmann42— A stronger anthropological rejection of the biological conception of race was leveled by Ashley Montagu — Drawing on insights from modern, essay on race and ethnicity, experimental genetics, Montagu forcefully argued that the anthropological conception of race relied on grouping together various perceptible physical characteristics, whereas the real building blocks of evolution were genes, which dictated biological changes among populations at a much finer level.


The morphological traits associated with race, thus, were gross aggregates of a variety of genetic changes, some of which resulted in physically perceptible characteristics, many others of which resulted in imperceptible changes. Moreover, since genetic evolution can occur through both the mixture of different genes and the mutation of the same gene over generations, the traits associated with races cannot be attributed to discrete lines of genetic descent, since the dark skin and curly hair of one individual may result from genetic mixture while the same traits in another individual may result from genetic mutation Bernasconi and Lottessay on race and ethnicity, — Ron Mallon, provides a nice sketch of the contemporary philosophical terrain regarding the status of essay on race and ethnicity concept of race, dividing it into three valid competing schools of thought regarding the ontological status of race, along with the discarded biological conception, essay on race and ethnicity.


While philosophers and scientists have reached the consensus against racial naturalism, philosophers nevertheless disagree on the possible ontological status of a different conception of race.


Mallon divides such disagreements into three metaphysical camps racial skepticismracial constructivismand racial population naturalism and two normative camps eliminativism and conservationism. Racial skepticism holds that because racial naturalism is false, races of any type do not exist. Racial skeptics, such as Anthony Appiahand Naomi Zackcontend that the term race cannot refer to anything real in the world, essay on race and ethnicity, since the one thing in the world to which the term could uniquely refer—discrete, essentialist, biological races—have been proven not to exist.




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essay on race and ethnicity

Apr 26,  · College completion rates vary widely along racial and ethnic lines, with black and Hispanic students earning credentials at a much lower rate than white and Asian students do, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.. The center evaluated data from students nationwide who entered a college or May 28,  · The concept of race has historically signified the division of humanity into a small number of groups based upon five criteria: (1) Races reflect some type of biological foundation, be it Aristotelian essences or modern genes; (2) This biological foundation generates discrete racial groupings, such that all and only all members of one race share a set of biological The Brazilian population was formed by the influx of Portuguese settlers and African slaves, mostly Bantu and West African populations (such as the Yoruba, Ewe, and Fanti-Ashanti), into a territory inhabited by various indigenous South American tribal populations, mainly Tupi, Guarani and Ge. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in what is known as Great Immigration, new

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