Criminal

1 Pages 217 Words

Deep within the word, “American” is its association with Race. To identify someone as Hispanic is to say very little, we need the adjective “white” or “Latino” or “colored” to make our meaning clear. In this country it’s the reverse. American means white and that’s it, and Latinos struggle to make the term applicable to themselves hyphen after hyphen and so on. Because American means white, those who are not white are presumed to be recent arrivals and often told to “go back to where they came from.” Thus we appear to operate within the dichotomized racial categories of American/non-American; these are racial categories, because they effectively mean white/nonwhite (17).
This is the reason why I believe race in the United States has indeed been socially constructed is through stereotypes and lack of knowledge. The comparison between “whites” and “Latinos” are very different and how each of the group is perceived is very different. A "stereotype" is a generalization about a person or group of persons. We develop stereotypes when we are unable or unwilling to obtain all of the information we would need to make fair judgments about people or situations. In the absence of the "total picture," stereotypes in many cases allow us to "fill in the blanks."...