Racism

Social Construction of Racism

Racial discrimination is often based on supposedly scientific taxonomic differences between different groups of people. Race itself is merely the classification of humans into distinct populations or groups based on indicators such as geographic origins and phenotypic characteristics. The term phenotypic characteristics refers to a person's observable traits, such as behavior, biochemical properties, development, physiological assets, and products of behavior. Morphology often plays a large role in the construction of race, dealing as it does with a person's outward appearance, including such variables as shape, color, structure, and pattern. Conceptions of race, however, are admittedly influenced by and correlated with other socially constructed traits, such as appearance, culture, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. During the early 20th century, at the height of the eugenics movement, great efforts were made to establish biological differences between various races, to the extent that skeletal remains of individuals were examined to ascertain measurable differences, a process that is still used to some extent by anthropologists, biomedical researchers, and forensic scientists. Racism is the practice of treating individuals or groups differently based on these perceived differences.

The social construct of race is by no means universally accepted. While there are those who argue that inherent differences exist between different races, others maintain that such constructs are artificial and that allegations of such cultural, nonpersonal, and social distinctions are utilized only to justify different treatments of different groups. Racism, a term first used during the 1930s, refers to using race to justify disparate treatment of individuals or groups based on their race. Racism generally implies race-based discrimination, dislike, oppression, prejudice, or violence by one group or individual against another. Some prefer the term racial discrimination, which implies distinctions, exclusions, preferences, and restrictions based on race, to the term racism.[Page 300]This preference is based on the way that “racial discrimination” more clearly delineates behaviors, whereas “racism” indicates attitudes that are harder to confirm or identify. Complicating matters further is the tendency of terms such as race, racism, and racial discrimination to change over time and to be used differently in different places. These differences influence media representations of racism and shape how certain groups or individuals are treated.

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