Race
"Race" is not a black or white issue in the social sciences, and for the last sixty years it has been increasingly called into question. This paper will answer three specific questions dealing with the social scientific criticisms of "race." The three questions will deal with the social construction of reality, the justification of basic concepts supporting the idea of separate races, and explaining the cause of high rates of hypertension among African-Americans.Our first question: When the author says that the classification of races is arbitrary, how is this similar to our discussion of the social construction of reality? Social construction of reality is a process by which a definition of reality is: 1) Socially created 2) Are internalized, and 3) Taken for granted. Classification of races is arbitrary because it is not based on fact and is not consistently applied. An example of this classification was during the racism of the late nineteenth century, mulattos had to either "pass" as whites or join wit
Our second question: To explain point #3 on the problems that have recently been identified in this "science of race". A study by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin in 1972 examined the distribution of seventeen traits, like those for blood group types, among the equivalent of seven geographical races and found that only 6 percent of these variations were distributed along racial lines. In other words, 94 percent of the variations he studied did not sort themselves out into neat, separate races. So, if you randomly picked two "whites" out of the population and analyzed all of their genes, you would find that their genes may have less in common with each other than do the genes of one of them with a random "black" person. Skin color in just one biological factor among many. This is why the scientific racists of the nineteenth century were never able to find measurable data that would objectively support separate racial types. Our final question: What does the article say about the cause of high rates of
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Approximate Word count = 687
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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