SOCA01H3 Lecture : Race and Ethnicity Lecture Notes
Document Summary
Sociology of race and ethnic relations deals with power and resources. Power and resources are distributed along racial and ethnic lines. Social construction of race: perceptions of race are socially constructed and often arbitrary. Racism today is used to represent prejudice and discrimination. Racism is not synonymous to prejudice and discrimination. Some represent race as religion, nationality but is not what race really is. Race is a category of people that have been singled out as superior or inferior due to skin colour, eye colour, etc. and results in social superiority/inferiority. Problems with race and biological racism are if identified by skin colour, there is a great deal of variations amongst each category (white/ black). The system of classification was created during the age of expansion and discovery, not it is outdated. Much racial mixing is going on, racial purity doesn"t exist anymore. Biology says that for the most part, people are genetically mixed.
