Gender, Race, And Ethnicity And Power Essay

One’s identity has the ability to play a central role in one’s schooling experience and in return, affect the way they perceive the world around them. Growing up in an Asian household located in a predominately Asian American neighborhood located in the San Gabriel Valley, I always identified myself strongly to my race and took pride in being a first generation Asian American child. Race has definitely affected my schooling experience in many different ways, both positively and negatively. In addition, there were a variety of other aspects such as stereotypical gender roles and socioeconomic class status which factored into the way I learned in the U.S. education system. In this paper, I will examine how race, class, and gender played a big role throughout my schooling experience.

During the time I was born, in the 90’s, stereotypes were taught to children through school, family members, and media. “A stereotype is a mental category based on exaggerated and inaccurate generalizations used to describe all members of a group” (Bennett 91). As a child, I obviously did not realize I was being taught these cruel definitions based to categorize people into which racial group they should belong to. To put it another way, Bennett states, “As psychologists have pointed out, stereotyping is a natural phenomenon in that all humans develop mental categories to help make sense of their environments” (91). Provided that, I stereotyped my interviewee the same exact way numerous people stereotype me. For this reason, to better understand both the interviewee and myself racial identity, I consequently analyzed how we each portrait the world we live in.

In Anderson and Collins’, chapter on “Why race, class, and gender still maters” encourage readers to think about the world in their framework of race, class, and gender. They argued that even though society has change and there is a wide range of diversity; race, class and gender still matters. Anderson and Collins stated, “Race, class, and gender matter because they remain the foundation for system of power and inequality that, despite our nation’s diversity, continue to be among the most significant social facts of peoples lives.” (Anderson and Collins, 2010) When I was a little girl, I never knew that people were classified in to groups such as race, class, gender. I knew there were people that had a different color of skin than

Race, Class and Gender issues are commonly brought up. Throughout history many groups have been stigmatized not just for their race, but for their sex, and class as well. People of lower class incomes get slandered for where they live and for not having the economical means to purchase most common goods. Women have been considered the weaker sex for centuries, and currently, some of the old fashioned and ignorant theories on women being subordinate to men prevail.

Gender is considered an axis of social order. Its categorisation into masculinity and femininity is social constructed and maintained in everyday life (Clark and Page, 2005; Mackie, 1994). Gender identity is our innermost understanding of our self as ‘male’ or ‘female’. Most people develop a gender identity that matched their biological sex (their body). Gender identity can be affected by, and is different from one society to another, depending on the way the members of society evaluate the role of females and males. Our gender identity can be influenced from the ethnicity of the group, their cultural background, and family values. Gender like social class and race can be used to socially categorize people and even lead to prejudice and discrimination. From day –to-day, continuous production of gender has been called ‘doing gender’ (West and Zimmermann, 1987), meaning that gender is “made” by us in everyday lives in our interactions with others.

Gender, class, and race are different forms of categorical inequality established by exploitation meaning that a certain class, gender, and race gets an overwhelming amount of opportunities than those of the opposite group. We have all been affected by these types of inequality in one way or another. Unfortunately in my case my gender and race has affected certain aspects of my life in a negative way. I identify as a hispanic women, which means that in the United States I am a double minority. Being a women, especially in my household, always put me in acquiring less power than the men and boys. Also, being hispanic has put me in a disadvantaged position throughout my life.

Sarah Veslany PLSC 428 Final Exam 4/28/2015 Contemporary social science asserts that there are no gender binaries that exist in nature, but rather that social institutions, history, and public pressure encourages people to conform to and display heteronormative behavior. Gender in this particular issue is referring to how an individual identifies themselves psychologically. Meaning that gender in a social science context alludes to the cultural interpretation of masculine and feminine characteristics rather that the biological foundation of gender. Gender is seen as a recurring performance of gendered behavior. The social science field rejects biological differences in gender and instead puts emphasis on how societal constructs of gender.

Many people confuse the definition of gender and sex. “Gender, on the other hand, refers to the meanings, values, and characteristics that people ascribe to different sexes. Sex is a biological concept, determined on the basis of individual 's primary sex characteristics.” (Blackstone) Society gives social cues on the appropriate behavior for each sex. For example, women are to exert more feminine traits such as dependent, emotional, passive, innocent, nurturing, and/ or self-critical. On the other hand, men are to behave more masculine such as

Gender is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as the state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones. Gender dictates how many people live out their lives. But It’s important to ask ourselves why this idea of “gender” has so much control over people. Although some may argue that gender is solely determined by the sex of a person, gender is a social construct made up by old traditions and enforced gender roles based on the sex.

1, To say that race and gender are socially constructs means that while both race and gender help shape the world in which we live, society can alter their meaning and significance. They have power because we give them power. Race is a social construct because, by definition, society can and does arbitrarily define it. For example, when American society forbidden interracial marriage (Conley 331), and determined an individual's race using the “one drop rule,” where someone is considered black if even their most distant ancestor was black. This is an example of how race can be imposed upon someone without his or her own individual endorsement. Race is not even biologically sound. Wayne Joseph was a man who was born and raised black, yet from

Society has clearly defined boundaries between what is considered to be male or female. The development of an individual’s gender role is formed by interactions with those in close proximity. Society constantly tells us how we should look, act and live based on gender. Family, friends and the media have a tremendous impact on how these roles are formed and the expected behavior of each gender role.

The boundaries of gender are expansive. Many theorists have debated the etiology of gender and the norms within a gender. Recently, given the expansion of the types of genders these theories have been studied more closely. Thus it has been offered that gender is both natural and socialized. There are biological and social factors that play into the identity of a person.

Society makes us who we are today. However, Gender strongly impacts our society. It shapes the ideas of an individual. Gender is a social classification based on one's identity, presentation of self, behavior, and interaction with others. The learned behavior is activities, attitudes and norms that society seems appropriate to one. Gender is the masculinity and femininity of an individual. People learn the gender through socialization. Someone may say you “walk like a man” or “throw like a girl”. No one is really taught, it is what they see around them. Basically, this is how we define gender in the world today.

Biological and psychosocial cultural identifies the meaning in gender identity. It is said that the sex of a child is biological (the genetic makeup) and the gender is psycho socio cultural (male/female defined by social status). Specifically, when addressing the gender it is defined as one's role and personality that they assume, for example in the American culture females are nurturing and the males are to be aggressive. Through social interaction, biology and the media gender identity is developed. This gender identity is misrepresented through social media which leads to a huge misunderstanding of this concept in society. These factors, unfortunately, set limits and define the standards of what is masculine and feminine, which lead to a harmful impact on society members, causing serious problems to an individual in particular and society in general.

As I mentioned above, the topic I chose to research is gender. Often times people use the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Sex is biological; either you are a male or a female. It is based on things such as DNA, hormones, genitalia, etc. The term sex is very rigid, whereas the term gender is much more fluid. It could take into account biological factors, but it doesn’t always. Gender refers to the ‘physical, behavioral, and personality traits that a group or culture consider to be normal, natural, right and good for its male and female members (Ferris, The Real World: An Introduction to Sociology, 2014).’ Gender determines how society influences our understanding and perception of differences between being ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine.’ Gender is something that is socially constructed and is learned as we grow.