Essay Question: Rethinking the color line. Social Sciences Essay

Essay Question: Rethinking the color lineNameInstitutionDate Introduction People are still judged by their racial backgrounds, and even the media frames some news stories in a way that has racial tones especially when reporting on crime, violence and mass murder.  Popular culture and scholarly studies used different terms to identify people with specific racial groups.  As such, racial ethnicities are social constructions as people to choose to identify with certain races and ancestries.  Gallagher (2012: 114) associates Whiteness with racial hierarchy and the privileges of belonging to the dominant group and multiracial people and other groups who identify as white are deracialized. Color-blindness represents the notion the country is race neutral and everyone has equal opportunities regardless of their background.  The formation of racial identity has partly been influenced by competing views on all-inclusive American values, the social construction of race and color-blindness.America as a Post-Racial Society, Racial Stratification and Real American values      America is often seen egalitarian society and this concept means that people have equal opportunity and are treated equally in a post-racial society but racial hierarchy still persists. There has been progress in race relations over time, while there is injustice and discrimination based on race. Furthermore, people are placed in racial categories, where there is racial hierarchy with whites at the top and sometimes this influences social relations between races. There are divergent views on affirmative action and whether such policies represent American core values and fairness and there are competing versions about American race relations (Gallagher, 2012: 35). The U S is not a post-racial society and is even socially stratified more than ever before, with a battle of ideas on what it means to be an American.Racial stratification in the USA has mostly been divided between whites and non-whites, and class status remains one of the markers of stratification. The American values of hard work and self-reliance are among the most prominent, but when non white groups especially blacks are poor they are as lazy welfare dependent and prone to criminality.  As such, race is still an important factor in how people relate with each other, while postracialism obscures discussions on racism while ignoring the presence of race hierarchy.   For instance, the context of racial stratification, there has been growing white backlash among some sections of the white community, where there is belief that the success of non-whites has been possible through white sacrifice, which further worsens race relations. There is preference for lighter-skin tone even among people within the same racial group, which has been associated with intraracial discrimination.  Race as a Biological Fact and the Social Construction of Race  Race is biologically determined, but people attach meaning to race as reflected by the presence of a racialized system in a society and divergent positions on race relations.  The idea of race as a social construction is that people attach social meanings to race, and social interactions reinforce knowledge and understanding on race.  Socialization influences perceptions as people learn and internalize, while have been classified based on their races and physical characteristics (Gallagher, 2012: 38).  The non- Hispanic Whites is the majority population, but in the USA whites were grouped together and other Hispanics/ Latinos are grouped separately.  Socially significant meanings influence how people chose to identify and make judgments about people who are like or different from them. Race is biologically based and the social context influences how people attach meaning to race.  People of different racial backgrounds are more than 99.9% genet...