Someone’s race isn’t necessarily the first thing we notice about a person because so many races are similar. The concept of someone’s race is their distinguishing characteristics (color, height, weight, etc) that set them apart from different people (1). It’s important to note that race is not a biological classification, and that trying to use biological foundation to purport the idea of a “pure” or superior race is absurd – human characteristics are extremely homogenous and rarely differ except at the most minute subunits of the genome (2). It is this reason that race becomes a sociological classification instead of a biological one.
While race does not change the biological makeup of someone, it does change what someone looks like. Think about how different words can be printed in two separate books – and how, while they look different in appearance, they’re both still books. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a “set number of races” in the world, because neither anthropologists nor biologists can agree on just how many races our human race is comprised of (3).
Despite only affecting what our eyes can see and hands can feel, race is a huge factor in deciding who will be the scapegoat for economic and emotional troubles in our society. To make matters worse, people tend to discriminate and be racist even when they have never met or seen someone of a particular race (4). Learning racism from association seems to be the primary factor in prejudice and discrimination, as it is highly unlikely that every single person who is racist has had a bad encounter with someone of the race they blame for their problems!
Since there is no cookie-cutter of colors and characteristics in life, some races are often confused with others. For example, do you think you could tell the difference between a Punjabi Afghani and someone from the Urdu tribe? Do you think you could tell a Laotian from a Vietnamese citizen? While these people can easily identify differences between one another, outsiders may not have the advantage of living so close with vaguely different races.
I think the United States uses race to stratify its people because of the religious history of nationalists who reside in predominantly white states. In fact, the United States still to this day classifies Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, and Pilipino Americans into the broad category of “Asian American” (5). From the early colonists who saw the Native Americans as inferior and the slave traders who saw African Americans as inferior; from the Industrial revolutionaries who treated Chinese immigrants as inferior to the overt Islamaphobia existing in our society today, one this is readily clear: America’s ostensibly xenophobic rejection of miscegenation and multiculturalism has, does, and most likely will continue to encourage racial stratification.
References
1. Henslin, James M. (2010) Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach. (9th edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon, p. 330.
2. Ibid., p. 330.
3. Ibid., p. 332.
4. Ibid., p. 337.
5. Ibid., p. 357.
