Race As A Social Construct
Order ID 53563633773 Type Essay Writer Level Masters Style APA Sources/References 4 Perfect Number of Pages to Order 5-10 Pages Description/Paper Instructions
Race As A Social Construct
Assignment 1 Questions:
What is race? What is gender? How do race and gender intersect in the formation of identities? Is there a way to get out of dominant racial and gender roles or will they always persist? Use only the readings and class materials from Weeks 1, 2, and 3 to develop your arguments in relation to all of these questions.
3 pages (Max. 5), double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12-point font, standard margin assignments. Do not go over the page limit. This Assignment will be written as a formal essay. Additionally, include a works cited page. Make sure to number all pages. The works cited page does not count in the page length, but you can number it in sequence. Make sure to cite all material that you use. Please do not include any identifying information in your essay. There is no title page needed.
Please see the attached rubric for full details of how this assignment will be evaluated.
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Week 1
Introduction
The “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” image that showed up in the New Yorker magazine on July 5, 1993 marked a watershed moment for the Internet as we know it. Up until this point Internet use had mostly been confined to the military, government engineers, and various academic circles. The fact that the Internet was now the subject of a cartoon in a general interest magazine showed that it had entered the mainstream (at least in North America).
Not only did the cartoon mark the point when the masses began to use this technology, but it also defined a myth of anonymity that is still evident in Internet-speak today.
The cartoon implied that when the Internet was first introduced to consumers, it opened up a free space where issues of political identity and social discrimination – race and gender, in particular – could be left behind. On the Internet, it was thought, no one knows (or supposedly cares) what your race or your gender is.
The key questions we will be asking ourselves are:
- How do race and gender shape digital technologies?
- How do digital technologies represent race and gender?
- What gets revealed when we ask questions about race and gender in relation to digital technologies?
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Week 2
Race as Privilege
Ever thought about the origin of the word stereotype?
The stereotype, also known as a cliché, was part of a manual printing process invented by William Ged in 1725. It was a solid plate of type-metal used to reproduce multiple copies of the same document. The related term cliché comes from the sound made during the creation of the stereotype, as the molten metal hit the original mould.
Stereotype printing became common in England in the 18th century, and printing plates for The Bible were first stereotyped in North America in 1814.
The origins of the term stereotype, and its relation to the term cliché, suggest powerfully, indeed in black and white, the highly mechanical nature of stereotyping as a social phenomenon.
In the social sciences, when we refer to a stereotype, what we mean is a widely held, fixed, and oversimplified image or idea of a particular “type” of person or thing. The stereotype is an idea of a type of person reproduced in our culture with the thoughtless invariability of a machine. For example, the stereotype of women as care-givers and nurturers has long been stamping away in the consciousness of many human societies.
Racism and sexism are essentially sets of stereotypes. When we use stereotypes, we treat those who belong to a race or a gender as though they have all been stamped by the same machine, as identical as copies of a single edition of The Bible. Most of us are aware that individual human beings are actually unique, but we tend to reach for the convenient stampers that let us treat people as though all men are the same, all women are the same, all members of a given race are identical. We try to stamp people with our stereotypical conceptions because it is simpler and easier than understanding every person on an individual basis.
RACE AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT
Another way of talking about “stereotyping” is to say that concepts like racial difference are not God-given or defined by our genes, but rather that race is a social construct. We attempt to simplify things and make them uniform by (consciously or unconsciously) constructing stereotypes based on race.
Race is a supposedly natural division of humankind, based mainly on distinct shared physical characteristics. Often race is confused in people’s minds with ethnicity. Ethnicity is the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has common national or cultural traditions, beliefs, and mores. The term “ethno-racial identity” is sometimes used to encompass the overlap of race and ethnicity that many people simply call race.
Technically there is only one race, the human race. Biologically, we all belong to the same species. So how did we move from the scientific reality of the human race to a world in which many “races” co-exist? The answer to this question emphasizes how race is actually socially constructed, and becomes confused with the non-biological category of ethnicity.
“Racism” is loosely used to describe attitudes where people assume shared character traits among those who appear to share biologically specific physical traits, as well as cultural values, languages, religions, and so forth. For instance, you might hear someone say “He is racist against Arabs.” Technically, “Arab” is not a race, though it could perhaps broadly be conceived as an ethnicity. Racists tend to confuse physical similarity, shared language, outward appearance (physical characteristics, dress, etc.), shared cultural values, and so forth and to imagine there is a scientific or biological “race” to which an individual belongs.
In “Race, intelligence, and the limits of science” (2011), Tim Wise shows how there is little biological foundation for the concept of race. (As you will see next week, gender is not really a biological concept either!) Wise explains that:
- Race is asocialconstruct. Race is a term created by human beings to organize and categorize people by specific traits.
- Whatever biological differences do exist between so-called racial groups are so minimal as to be essentially trivial. The way we often speak about races emphasizes the differences; but we actually share much more in common than some of us would like to think.
- Â Differences in academic performance, and/or observed “intelligence” that are said to exist between different so-called racial groups are the result of environmentalfactors, not genes. For example, cultural bias in standardized testing or privileging the written word over oral history in the mainstream education system have led to skewed views that have their origins in the cultural(not racial) biases of those doing the evaluation.
PRIVILEGE
Racism is the belief that all members of a “race” possess characteristics, including abilities and disabilities, specific to that race. These shared attributes allow racists to argue that some races are “superior” in various ways, and others are “inferior.” Tim Wise points out that over the years the notion of racism has evolved around the idea of privilege.
WHAT IS PRIVILEGE?
Did you have to think about how you would physically access a building this morning? Did you think how you would physically get on the bus or train? Did you think about whether you could see while you were driving to work? Did you worry about where you were going to sleep? Did you have to worry about having the opportunity to go to school?
If most or all of these questions are not things you need to worry about, you could be said to enjoy certain privileges in our society. Privilege is a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available to a particular person or group of people. Wise proposes that privilege revolves around
- Not having to worryabout certain things.
- Not having to be aware of what reality is like for those who are not privileged.
- The freedom to ignore other people’s issues and concerns.
- Benefitting from inequality in society; starting out with a certain “leg-up” in society
The metaphor of a “leg up” itself reveals a rarely noticed example of privilege: those with two functional legs don’t have to think or worry about the same accessibility issues that a person in a wheelchair does. As Wise highlights in his video, in Canada and the United States, being a member of the “white race” has traditionally carried with it all sorts of privilege (and the forms of unconsciousness that go with such privilege), cloaking at least for white people the continued existence of racism in our societies. Whiteness is (often unconsciously) taken as the default category to which all other races are compared, as though white is the original or ideal racial identity. The majority of white people are virtually unaware of their whiteness, taking it as the “default,” and making the privilege that has attached itself to that whiteness largely invisible to those who possess it.
A prime example of white privilege is the existence of “Black History Month.” As Wise points out, in North America there is no need for a “White History Month”:
When your stuff is the stuff against which everyone else’s stuff is compared and found lacking, you don’t have to name it. It’s just the norm. That’s why for those who are still confused that we don’t have white history month … we have several, they go by the tricky names of June, July, August, and September. Pretty much any month that we have not designated as someone else’s month, that’s white history month. But we take it for granted because we don’t have to know other folks’ reality. That’s a privilege. That’s an advantage. That’s a head-start.
The blindness of privilege frequently leads to the denial of racism and other forms of inequality. By calling attention to privilege, we are able to uncover some of the more subtle and covert ways in which we ignore or, in the worst cases, deny the experiences of non-privileged people at the societal, institutional, and individual level. What we do in this course is call attention to unequal representations, both in culture and among individuals, revealing that race still operates, sometimes unconsciously, in our supposedly democratic and “multi-cultural” society.
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Week 3
SEX AND GENDER
As Jhally reminds us in The Codes of Gender, sex refers to the biological traits that a person is born with, while gender is used for a specific cultural definition of sex roles. Most humans can be clearly designated as one sex or the other (though the number of exceptions to these rules, combinations, and grey areas is actually larger than you might imagine).
Gender, on the other hand, is a an imaginary cultural construction of the social and cultural meaning of sexual differences. In the same way that we saw how race is not so much a biological category as a somewhat confused and adjustable set of cultural stereotypes, gender (as opposed to sex) is nothing “natural,” God-given, or “in our genes.” Gender, like race, is a social construction, and to some extent what we choose to focus on in determining gender definitions (strength, lack of emotion, care-giving, long hair, wearing pants) is even more arbitrary than what we use to divide humans up into races (skin colour, eye shape, etc).
In the video, Jhally shows how the Western world tries to confine gender to two opposing categories – masculine and feminine – although he highlights some attempts that are made to challenge this rigid binary opposition. On the whole cultural attitudes and pre-dispositions socialize us into a particular gender category. While some people are uncomfortable having to choose one or the other gender to identify with, most of us silently assume that gender is something natural and inevitable, rather than something man-made and changeable across time and cultural boundaries.
Dealing with gender is about reading the “codes” (signals/indicators) of others and sending out codes (signals/indicators) of your own. These “codes” are the conventions that make up a shorthand language we generally share in our culture, and this language acts as a set of rules, a code of behaviour.
Various forms of media present the masculine as strong, rational, and competitive, and the feminine as dependant, emotional, and empathetic. This doesn’t mean that there are no strong, intelligent women on television (or in the world), but rather, as Jhally shows, that these women are thought of as more “masculine” than other women. Jhally shows us how deeply and invisibly embedded such notions are in our society by asking us to imagine men is women’s postures and vice-versa.
In order to function “normally” in our society we must generally produce the appropriate markers and perform the expected gestures assigned to our biological sexes (or at least to one or the other of the two main gender roles). This is what is known among sociologists as gender display, a process whereby we perform the role expected of us by social conventions.
For example, think about how important life choices such as getting married or having children reveal the process of gender display. Parents in North America may choose to dress their newborn daughters in pink and their sons in blue to display their gender. The very idea that there are “gender-neutral” colours, such as yellow or green, actually does more to reinforce the male/female binary than to show how artificial it actually is. There aren’t any gender-neutral colours in nature precisely because there aren’t any gendered colours there. The gendering of colour is a human (imaginary, cultural) construct, not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Yet think how most people will still react if they see a newborn son’s room painted pink. If you don’t know what sex your child will be, you are unlikely to choose either pink or blue for the new nursery.
The categories of masculine and feminine tend to be mutually exclusive, and thus we choose to downplay the similarities between the sexes in favour of highlighting both real and imaginary differences. Additionally the simplistic male/female binary downplays the range of variation within each sex, making sure that wherever possible there is only one way to display being feminine and only one way to display being masculine, and no way of confusing the two.
Displays, codes, performance – all reveal that gender is something that you do. Each of us continually constructs gender by engaging in activities and displays that are accepted by others as masculine or feminine. We are accountable to others for our gendered-based behaviour.
DOING GENDER
We’ve been trying to recognize that gender is not so much something that you have, as something that you do. The way you walk, your gestures, your occupation in life, the products that you use (was it really necessary to come out with Nivea “for Men”?) and your relationship to technology and media (Pinterest vs. Pinterest “for Men”), among other things, are all examples of how you do gender.
But because gender is something that you do, you also have the power to “undo” dominant gender conventions. Think about men who take up stereotypical “female” occupations or women who take up stereotypical “male” ones. If gender is something that is done then people just need to “do” different things to break out of the gender system.
Unfortunately, though, it isn’t quite that easy.
- You can undo gender roles
- You can reinforce gender roles.
But there is strong social pressure to reinforce rather than undo the roles.
STAY-AT-HOME FATHERS AND BREADWINNING MOTHERS
One particular form of gender display that was very prevalent in North America during the 19th- and 20th centuries was the idea that men go to work and earn the livelihood of the family and women stay at home and look after the children. Although this model is not as timeless as many people assume and it was beginning to break down significantly at the end of the last century, even today – when in fact many men and women both work and leave their children in the care of a third-party caregiver – these roles are familiar and we often find couples “doing” them.
Noelle Chesley, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Wilwaukee, interviewed 21 couples that at one time or another had had the experience of the woman being the primary breadwinner and the man being the primary caregiver. In this study, the men “undid” gender by staying at home, and the women undid gender by being the primary breadwinner. The study reveals how even in the most progressive of families dominant gender roles still haunt the actions of those trying to undo them. There were significant differences when men stayed home from how the women thought of their staying at home, and similarly when the women became the primary breadwinner instead of the men:
- The reasons for staying at home were typically different for the men than for the women. While the majority of at-home mothers reported taking care of the home/family as their main motivation for staying at home, the majority of at-home fathers reported illness or disability as their main reason for not working.
- The study found that when it came to intensive nurturing, the breadwinning mothers still end up feeling a higher level of responsibility for, and psychological involvement with, their children than the fathers. As Chesley paraphrases the typical breadwinning mother: “He puts all that time in, while she has to wonder if she is spending enough time” with her children (Chesley 2011, 653-654). The notion of “mommy guilt” still runs rampant through breadwinning mothers, while “daddy guilt” doesn’t seem to exist.
There is often an unspoken assumption that the man staying at home is a temporary stopgap measure, and that he will get back to work at some point, whereas no one is surprised when a stay-at-home mom stays at home forever. The perception of family and friends that the man should be out providing for his family tends to seep into the home life of the couple who are trying to work outside of those conventions. With all the social and cultural pressures for men and women to “do their genders,” it is difficult for those who try to undo them not to end up taking back on board the gender biases of the community at large: “Melissa, whose husband Richard stayed at home for a year after a layoff, describes how she was eventually uncomfortable having her husband at home, despite being enthusiastic initially, because of her growing feeling that he should be working” (655).
Chesley’s findings reveal the double-edged sword of doing gender. On the one hand the families were able to call attention to and challenge existing roles by un-doing them, but on the other hand they continued to experience and reinforce dominant gender roles and expectations even as they were trying to go beyond them. Like a couple who decides to paint their newborn son’s room pink, there is in the very challenge a silent reinforcement of the cultural fantasy that blue and pink mean something and that going pink means something too.
Despite these challenges, Chesley stresses that “undoing gender” by swapping roles can have real potential for transforming understanding and equality between the sexes:
Some changes experienced by fathers who stayed at home
- A significant number of men find they are able to partake in a wider range of parenting styles and become comfortable with a wider range of behaviour – they get to know their children more like a traditional mother does (they learn communication skills and how to cope with tantrums, for instance)
- Since women rarely relinquish involvement with their children, couples often experience a greater convergence of perspective and greater empathy; a sense that parenting responsibilities are more equally shared, and a shared sense of the meaningfulness of parenting and understanding of their children
- When men return to work they are more open to discussing family and home life in the workplace and are more sensitive to family needs of co-workers and employees.
Some changes for the women who become the breadwinners
- As breadwinners, some women came to appreciate the stressfulness of being responsible for the whole family and the feeling that it was impossible to leave a job even if it was awful. Some of the women interviewed clearly gained insight into the lives of their fathers or other men, as the financial burden fell on their shoulders. This aspect of women’s experiences creates opportunities for shared understandings across gender that have the potential to reduce the difference. The women can “relate” to conventional male dilemmas, and find that things like workaholism, performance anxiety, and so forth are not “masculine” traits, but rather something that anyone can fall into given the right set of circumstances.
- Some women were able to expand their understanding of “good mothering” to include so-called “masculine” things such as providing food, safety, shelter, and economic opportunity, and not only the more traditional “feminine” things such as love and nurturing.
In other words, trading places in many cases increased empathy between the sexes, and led many men to be able to understand and feel more like many women do and vice-versa.
This is a single sociological study, of course, and it starts from a noticeably heterosexual bias. It would be interesting to see how same-sex couples view child-rearing and breadwinning. Would the notion of parenting transform altogether or would one parent adopt traditional “masculine” roles and the
other adopt more of the “feminine”?
This week, we have looked at how sociologists consider gender to be no more “natural” a category than race. Gender is a social construction. Gender is something that is done. We do gender by performing the roles expected of us because of our social conventions. Doing gender also opens up the opportunity to undo gender. Undoing gender is a double-edged sword that enables us to call attention to and challenge dominant gender roles, while we risk reinforcing the same gender roles by “un-doing” them.
RUBRIC
QUALITY OF RESPONSE NO RESPONSE POOR / UNSATISFACTORY SATISFACTORY GOOD EXCELLENT Content (worth a maximum of 50% of the total points) Zero points: Student failed to submit the final paper. 20 points out of 50: The essay illustrates poor understanding of the relevant material by failing to address or incorrectly addressing the relevant content; failing to identify or inaccurately explaining/defining key concepts/ideas; ignoring or incorrectly explaining key points/claims and the reasoning behind them; and/or incorrectly or inappropriately using terminology; and elements of the response are lacking. 30 points out of 50: The essay illustrates a rudimentary understanding of the relevant material by mentioning but not full explaining the relevant content; identifying some of the key concepts/ideas though failing to fully or accurately explain many of them; using terminology, though sometimes inaccurately or inappropriately; and/or incorporating some key claims/points but failing to explain the reasoning behind them or doing so inaccurately. Elements of the required response may also be lacking. 40 points out of 50: The essay illustrates solid understanding of the relevant material by correctly addressing most of the relevant content; identifying and explaining most of the key concepts/ideas; using correct terminology; explaining the reasoning behind most of the key points/claims; and/or where necessary or useful, substantiating some points with accurate examples. The answer is complete. 50 points: The essay illustrates exemplary understanding of the relevant material by thoroughly and correctly addressing the relevant content; identifying and explaining all of the key concepts/ideas; using correct terminology explaining the reasoning behind key points/claims and substantiating, as necessary/useful, points with several accurate and illuminating examples. No aspects of the required answer are missing. Use of Sources (worth a maximum of 20% of the total points). Zero points: Student failed to include citations and/or references. Or the student failed to submit a final paper. 5 out 20 points: Sources are seldom cited to support statements and/or format of citations are not recognizable as APA 6th Edition format. There are major errors in the formation of the references and citations. And/or there is a major reliance on highly questionable. The Student fails to provide an adequate synthesis of research collected for the paper. 10 out 20 points: References to scholarly sources are occasionally given; many statements seem unsubstantiated. Frequent errors in APA 6th Edition format, leaving the reader confused about the source of the information. There are significant errors of the formation in the references and citations. And/or there is a significant use of highly questionable sources. 15 out 20 points: Credible Scholarly sources are used effectively support claims and are, for the most part, clear and fairly represented. APA 6th Edition is used with only a few minor errors. There are minor errors in reference and/or citations. And/or there is some use of questionable sources. 20 points: Credible scholarly sources are used to give compelling evidence to support claims and are clearly and fairly represented. APA 6th Edition format is used accurately and consistently. The student uses above the maximum required references in the development of the assignment. Grammar (worth maximum of 20% of total points) Zero points: Student failed to submit the final paper. 5 points out of 20: The paper does not communicate ideas/points clearly due to inappropriate use of terminology and vague language; thoughts and sentences are disjointed or incomprehensible; organization lacking; and/or numerous grammatical, spelling/punctuation errors 10 points out 20: The paper is often unclear and difficult to follow due to some inappropriate terminology and/or vague language; ideas may be fragmented, wandering and/or repetitive; poor organization; and/or some grammatical, spelling, punctuation errors 15 points out of 20: The paper is mostly clear as a result of appropriate use of terminology and minimal vagueness; no tangents and no repetition; fairly good organization; almost perfect grammar, spelling, punctuation, and word usage. 20 points: The paper is clear, concise, and a pleasure to read as a result of appropriate and precise use of terminology; total coherence of thoughts and presentation and logical organization; and the essay is error free. Structure of the Paper (worth 10% of total points) Zero points: Student failed to submit the final paper. 3 points out of 10: Student needs to develop better formatting skills. The paper omits significant structural elements required for and APA 6th edition paper. Formatting of the paper has major flaws. The paper does not conform to APA 6th edition requirements whatsoever. 5 points out of 10: Appearance of final paper demonstrates the student’s limited ability to format the paper. There are significant errors in formatting and/or the total omission of major components of an APA 6th edition paper. They can include the omission of the cover page, abstract, and page numbers. Additionally the page has major formatting issues with spacing or paragraph formation. Font size might not conform to size requirements. The student also significantly writes too large or too short of and paper 7 points out of 10: Research paper presents an above-average use of formatting skills. The paper has slight errors within the paper. This can include small errors or omissions with the cover page, abstract, page number, and headers. There could be also slight formatting issues with the document spacing or the font Additionally the paper might slightly exceed or undershoot the specific number of required written pages for the assignment. 10 points: Student provides a high-caliber, formatted paper. This includes an APA 6th edition cover page, abstract, page number, headers and is double spaced in 12’ Times Roman Font. Additionally, the paper conforms to the specific number of required written pages and neither goes over or under the specified length of the paper. GET THIS PROJECT NOW BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK TO PLACE THE ORDER
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