Research Assignment and Paper on People’s Attitudes About Race

Name: Instructor: Course: Date: Understanding People’s Attitudes About Race: A Cultural Anthropology Perspective Introduction Race has been controversial and misunderstood for a very long time. Yes and no, as many people, including scientists, anthropologists, and scholars, state that race has long been and remains a socially constructed concept even though it is not a biological reality, yet race is still existent and influential in social, political, and economic contexts across the globe. This research paper explores people's attitudes and conceptions of race by developing a qualitative research study questionnaire in which 20 participants are asked questions about their perception of the types of race. When working on the patterns of the responses presented, cultural backgrounds, gender, and age were identified as the major aspects that people still retain racist thoughts unconsciously. Moreover, the findings will be compared to anthropological perspectives on race, as outlined in Brown et al.'s “An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.” Patterns Based on Culture and Socioeconomic Background As found in the survey, a trend that captured the researcher's attention was noted among respondents from a similar cultural endowment. These respondents from the minority group, the Asians and the Latinos, offered a more refined number of races out of the 20 respondents. For instance, Subject 9 responded that Filipino is a separate race from even more general categories such as white, black, or Asian. Likewise, the Persian-identified Subject 7 chose Persian as another race. For example, respondents (Subjects 5, 6, and 14) only listed four races: Black, Asian, white, and Latino. These differences in responses can be attributable to culture and ethnic pride. According to anthropologists, members of ethnic or other minorities can stress their specific racial or ethnic otherness as mechanisms of gaining attention when they cannot be bundled under more general racial classification (Brown et al.). Furthermore, respondents with higher education standards or from relatively richer backgrounds provided more elaborative data on race. For example, Subjects 13 and 14, who had higher education, understood race as not a scientific truth but a construct. For example, Subject 14 concluded that "race is much better seen as a social construct than anything else." This concurs with modern anthropological theory, which dismisses race as fact. Sex/ Gender Differences in Responses Another cr...