Social Meaning of Race
This is an excerpt from the paper...
Race was long considered to have biological meaning, while ethnicity was seen as having a social meaning and not a biological one. Race has been given a social meaning as well as it has been used to rank groups according to social class, and American society has long used race as a division. As Roediger notes, one of these divisions has been evident in how we think about labor and work. Blacks were brought to this country in the first place as slave labor and so were immediately placed into competition with the lower-paid white worker. Whites have used the idea of race to develop a social stratification that often includes ethnicity as well, so that workers from different parts of the world have at different times held the bottom rung on the labor ladder. Race has been a long-time determinant of this lower status, though, and today blacks are still seen as being more likely to live in poverty, more likely to work on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, more likely to be undereducated, and so on. Roediger discusses the issue of the black worker in terms of the development of the concept of the white worker, a concept he says was developed consciously by whites who compared themselves to blacks. he says this process started in the seventeenth century and cites Jordan to the effect that the British had an animus toward things dark and so had a racism that was imparted to the American colonies, which then imported blacks as slaves. Roediger notes how in some ar
. . .
blackness. Roediger notes how the British were prejudiced against darkness and transferred this prejudice to black people, seeing them as wicked because of their color. This idea is embodied in our language, but Roediger also shows how the language has shifted over time to avoid certain terms and to accept certain labels in order to differentiate between groups, including between black and white.
An examination of American history shows that Roediger's account of the development of racial attitudes has been noted by other historians not only with reference to blacks but also with the Native American and the Hispanic, though for different reasons. The fact of slavery is the key difference in differentiating between white and black, but white settlers also differentiated between themselves and other racial groups and again and again found reasons to emphasize differences. The slave trade developed at the same time as Europe began exploring new realms and encountering new peoples, and it was necessary for the white European to develop some philosophical attitude which placed himself and the "noble savage" he encountered in the wild on some sort of scale. Attitudes developed not just with reference to the slaves but with refe
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
, United South, Roediger Revolution, American Hispanic, Williams Roediger, Roediger Williams, Europeans Similar, White Europeans, racial attitudes, roediger notes, black people, University Press, indentured servants, attitudes developed, London Verso, development racial attitudes, native american, reference blacks, development racial, white worker, racial attitudes developed, roediger concentrates,
Approximate Word count = 1495
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Social Meaning of Race
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
