SOC GEN 105B Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Evolutionism, Folk Classification
14 Sep 2016
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Week 1, reading #1 race in north america: origin & evolution of a worldview. In order to understand race, one must be able to distinguish naturally occurring physical diversity in the human species from culturally-based perceptions and interpretations of this diversity. Ethnocentric portrayals of other peoples in the written literature has denigrated the alien others. If aliens were physically different, this sometimes led to negative and derogatory statements about those physical features. Race can be conceived as a composite of elements, each of which had certain distinct functions or cultural meanings in earlier times like the idea of human inequality. Race is the way americans have been conditioned to view other humans. Expansion, conquest, exploitation, and enslavement characterized much of human history but none of these events resulted in the development of ideologies or social systems based on race as prior to the modern era nothing was described as racist. This challenges the claim that race ideologies are universal.
