Eric Thai
April 29 2009
ANT 1001 / TV24A
Mixed Blood
Race is a social construct developed to divide people with similar physical features into categories. As a way to categorize people by physical characteristics it creates some false stereotypes used to generalize the all the people in each group. Jeffery M. Fish's ethnography discusses the term race as a myth, as a bad form of classification of human beings.
What I found most interesting in this ethnography was the way we humans classify everything in two opposites. Black or white, hot or cold, and lanky or rounded are just a few examples of the categories we form. In forming theses categories we then place things in one of the opposites without creating new categories for then one in between. This is much like the American term blood which we believe is passed down from our parents. If a child is a mix of two groups he or she is categories in the lower of the two groups. I understand it is within our culture to divide people into races but it is unfortunate how we have no control over what race we fall into. Even if someone is one millionth percent black, in our culture they are considered black.
Ever since I toke my first breath theses categories have been created. Male or female, black or white, there is no gray area in our culture. America has been enculturated in believing in the social construct of race, and this brings forth the ideas of racism and superiority. It may be difficult but maybe someday hopefully we can break free of the
Fish, Jeffery M. "Mixed Blood." In Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, 12 ed. Spraley and McCurdy. Allyn & Bacon. 2006. 84-94 .
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I like that.. "ever since i took my first breathe these categories have been created"
ReplyDeleteBe careful how you assign a judgment that Fish did not use "bad form of ..." It is not necessarily bad. It may not be useful in many contexts. When I say "I love black (or Asian) people" that is not bad, is it? It's just describing people in recognizable ways. Race should NOT be collapsed with racism. One is a system of categories. The latter involves negative bias, prejudice and discrimination. The former need not though it may overlap.
ReplyDeleteThere are essentially no "BAD" classifications. There are poor classification systems, ineffective, but not bad. That's like more of the same--judging something by its cover. It's how we make it mean things about each other that is culturally or socially constructed that is the discriminatory part.
Be careful when you overgeneralize with "the way we humans classify everything in two opposites". This is not true of sex (transgender). It is not true of multi-racial folks. Would be more accurate, you want to be rigorous with your language now, to say "Americans (not we humans) have a tendency to classify in binary opposites regarding race." Brazilians do not have binary thinking in this way.
By the way, who said "we have no control over what race we fall into"? Is that the truth? Why then do people choose the "other" box on the census?
Note: the sentence Tati rewrote for you. You did not spell check your essay before posting as instructed. This little wrinkle in the writing distracts from your communication. It matters. You must make this a work habit in college.
All cultures, Japan, Korea, Australia, Samoa, Phillippines, Bosnia, Sudan, South Africa...all countries not just the U.S. have socially constructed views of race or ethnicity. This thing about superiority is in every culture. Sometimes it is by religion rather than race. Sometimes both.
You are a good writer but you need a little more rigor about your uses of ideas. Be rigorous!