Race And Ethnic Relations

2 Pages 509 Words

In “The Study of Race and Ethnic Conflict” the main idea of the article seems to be to get students to understand different racial and ethnic terms that are used and why they are used in different ways. It also seems to be to help students to understand the terminology that they will be reading throughout the book and its articles. It seems very void of opinion and other direct questions other than to says that the only steady thing that America has done to consistently separate whites and minorities is to offer no way for whites to consider themselves as anything but white.
On all census information and questionnaires the basic questions about race that we are used to answering are flawed because they offer only ways for people to distinguish themselves outside of the white population.
The authors also make the point that while many different venues of study have all different ideas and that the people within those venues have ideas that differ from one another, students should realize this and not take any one idea or area of study to be the exact and perfect truth.

In the article, “Classifying People by Race” the author make much of the same arguments, but goes into more depth about them. She identifies four major themes that are flaws in categorizing people by race and ethnicity. The first one she talks about is “the pattern of spreading the population into two groups: white and nonwhite.” In this section she talks about the historical problem of allowing to few categories in questionnaires for people to give an accurate account of what they consider themselves to be.
The second section talks about “a belief in racial purity” and that it is wrong for us to expect of hope that people will be of one race or ethnicity because we believe it is somehow better when a vast majority of people all over the world and especially in America consider themselves to be of mixed ethnicity whether is be different European ...