RESPOND TO EACH ATTACHED DISCUSSION BLOG 2 PARAGRAPHS PER BLOG

Race and Gender

Diversity is among the most discussed topics globally today. What is diversity? In simple terms, diversity can be defined as differences among individuals or rather groups of people based or various factors. Differences include gender, race, class, culture, religion, sexuality, citizenship, and many more. Social construction on the other hand is a term used to describe how different identity categories such as gender, race and class are formed within a given society and how they are maintained through social institutions. People have different experiences on their different diversities, which will be discussed by the end of this paper. Besides, this paper will discuss an autobiographical sketch of my personal experience, particularly in gender and race issues in life.

Every human being has to undergo social, physical as well as emotional changes in his or her life. As human being grow up, they learn more about themselves understanding how to accept how they look, their race, gender, and many more aspects. Identity is one of the compound aspects of human beings personality growth, and it is divided into different dimensions, which include gender and race. Race is a situation where one believes that a certain culture is better than the other.

Racism

Racism is among the world’s greatest problem affecting human beings in the 20th century. Racism is when one believes that one person is better than the other or rather a certain race is better compared to the other (Loewen, 2018). Racism is practiced in various situations or places in life, including in schools, workplaces, or even in a country at large. Racism provides an example of how social construction affects a society, further, it provides a clear representation of a society characterized by race differences. Race differences can be explained as the prejudices that people in a society have towards those perceived to belong to a different race. Race differences are a fact and affect everybody in every society (Cindy Tsutsumi, 2003). This is because, our attitudes towards others and ourselves depend on the race that we identify or identified with. This matters a lot, since race determines many fundamental aspects of life, like education, incomes, beliefs, immigration status and health.

A case of racism happened recently when a student in school mentioned that different races should report back to their countries, for instance, the African American should go back to Africa, the Chinese back to China and the Indians back to their country India. That raised a lot of questions, are human beings that different? Generally, people who practice racism in most cases dislike the other races culture, skin color, origin, or basically any other aspect that defines the nature of a person.

Racism has continued to affect immigrants, especially in the United States of America. A good example is the Muslim, people from Hispanic countries, Jewish people and African American students who travel to the U.S. for further education. The immigrants have a hard time being accepted in American society (Fredrickson, 2015). There is a notion that the Muslim culture basically promotes terrorism or rather Islam phobia, which has made it hard for them to be accepted. The Muslim culture is, in return, feared, hated, or even in other cases, discriminated as it is evident in the recent Muslim ban by President Donald Trump. Hispanic are seen as people that came to dominate, multiply and take over the country. White folks fear that Jews are coming to replace them, as seen in the Charlottesville Virginia white supremacy match in 2017. While African Americans on the other hand, are seen as slaves by the white people as a result of the slavery that historically happened in the past and are still being promoted in the 20th century through racism. The white students see the African American students as slaves and inferior, that have led to them being discriminated since they the whites are seen as better off than the African American students. Secondly, African American immigrants are seen by the white folks as people that came to take the jobs that were meant for them, thereby not giving them equal opportunity to thrive when they complete their studies. As an African American from a working-class background, I am guilty of having done little to examine my ancestry and how these affect my life or to examine the impact that race have on others. For most of my life, I gave little more than cursory thought to the culture and heritage of my first-generation African parents, other than to write the occasional report on slave trade and African migration in grade school. I regret never having discussed with my parents what their lives were like growing up.

My dad migrated from Africa when he was very young. He worked twice harder than his white counterparts to make ends meet, because of the racial prejudice that is existing in our society, while my mom was a fulltime housewife. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t wealthy either, my dad worked hard to provide for the family. We were raised to associate with different races or cultures. Men worked and the women stayed at home to take care of the children. It was a different time back then from what we have now in the 21st century. When I was growing up it wasn’t easy, I experienced racism myself because of my skin color. I had to ride the bus to school with children who were from different races, there was tension on the bus and whispering of the slur term nigga all around, but this did not deter me from working hard to become who I want to be. Another example is the migration based racist statement also made by current U.S. president, as reported in New York Times. He stated that the continent of Africa is a shit holes, that he would prefer migrants from European and Scandinavian countries to migrate to the U.S.

Although, several Americans are not comfortable acknowledging that racism still exist in our country. These adversities have had a negative and positive influence in our society. After all, wouldn’t it be nice to believe as our forefathers wrote in the Constitution “that all men are created equal”. It is high time people learned that in the current era, we are no longer living under racism intuition, rather a diverse society. People should work on helping each other grow rather than destroying each other based on the idea that they are better than a certain group. Racism should be discouraged at all means, and everyone should be given an equal chance or even equal opportunities regardless of their race. Racism affects the migrant majorly, for the fact that they are left feeling out of place and unaccepted in society. Even if we can convince ourselves that these issues have nothing to do with us personally, we aren’t prejudiced, or we’ve worked hard to get where we are, they do affect us. Institutionalized racism are a fact of everyday life in America and affect everyone in our society. Often our degree of consciousness and always our perspective depends upon with which race we identify or are identified along with our personal experiences with racism. But, even if we choose not to notice, we cannot escape from the fact that racial identities and more importantly, the embedded and systemic societal privileges or disadvantages that come from these socially-constructed roles affect how we define ourselves, how others relate to us, and what opportunities we are offered or denied in almost every aspect of our lives (Hess, Beth B. and Elizabeth W. Markson, Peter Stein, 2001).

Gender

Gender can be defined as the physical appearance, which can either be female or male. Gender discrimination is another differentiating factor that affects people globally. Gender discrimination can be described as discriminating a certain person based on their sex or gender, and most of the people who are commonly discriminated are the women or girls. The New York Times magazine has discussed different cases of women being discriminated and among the articles is that of Maya Salam (2019), where she discussed women fighting for equal pay in sports. Salam has stated a few examples of cases where women faced inequality in terms of pay in sports. A good example is that of the U.S.A. hockey in the year 2017, where the women's national hockey team declared publicly that they would boycott the world's championship since they wanted an increase in their wages. Immediately, the committee responded by giving the female players $2,000 training stipend monthly as well as signing bonuses for medal winnings. That is among the few cases which have been paraded on the ground that women are being discriminated or rather, there are gender discrimination cases. Similarly, there have been multiple cases of men being discriminated due to their gender. A good example is in the teaching industry, where most administrations prefer women over men. That has continued to be practiced considering that in schools, a large percentage of teachers are women.

Gender discrimination or even racism has continued to be among the aspects that define identity which has created obstacles for different people at different times. The worst of all is that these two factors are used to determine opportunities which should be presented to individuals and has led to people missing out on opportunities. Both gender discrimination and racism should be discouraged, and it all starts with everyone, failure to do that, the trend will be passed on to generations after generations, which will be hard to tame by then.

References

Cindy Tsutsumi, (2003). CLASS AND RACE IN AMERICA: Retrieved from