Language Influences On Children 's Formation Of Social Categories

Consequently, fundamental aspects of our social experience and identities, like race and gender, can be readily understood through the symbolic interactionist lens. Because both race and gender have no biological basis whatsoever, both race and gender can be understood as social constructs that function based on what we believe to be true about people, given what they look like. We use socially constructed meanings of race and gender to help us decide who to interact with, how to do so, and to help us determine, sometimes inaccurately, the meaning of a person's words or actions. Symbolic interaction perspective is a useful

By socialization we learn society’s classification schemes, they teach us how to perceive reality in a socially appropriate way. The process of being socialized involves knowing which features are salient for differentiating items from one another and which ones are irrelevant. Zerubavel recognizes that the categories do not come prepackaged, but instead through the process of ignoring similarities and exaggerating differences we lump together things we consider similar. These categories are indefinite and evidence of them ranges both historically and across

The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply

Race and gender are two facets that inherently dominate individuals everyday lives. A person’s social environment, work environment, and educational environment is congruent to their race and gender. From birth, it has been set up that everyone is assigned to a label. A pink or blue blanket is swaddled around a newborn child and a box is checked signifying that child’s place in society. These two actions ultimately define how a child is to be viewed and treated. As children grow into young adults they either decide to stick with their original assignment, while others decide to deviate from it. These individuals deviation results in many of them being viewed harshly and looked down upon because they strayed from their social norms. This constant cycle of being classified and labeled from birth is the social institution of gender and race. These social institutions aid in the inequality that is present in society, and race and gender are shaped by this. However, if these social institutions were removed, race and gender could dissipate. This is due to the fact that race and gender are not real, but are socially constructed concepts used to organize the power, or dominance, within our society to one social group over the other groups.

Each social group can be stereotypical against each other with the use of their own language by

Through out history society has created many stereotypes and assumptions based on race and nationality to confine us into categories. The reality is not every individual fits a specific category because we are unique even within the same ethnicity group. In “On Being Told I Don’t Speak Like a Black Person” Allison Joseph illustrates some speech stereotypes that come hand in hand with her racial background and how even people from the same racial background and house hold don’t all sound a like. The author portrays that race and linguistic has a huge impact on our daily life and how society sees her different to others. Also, her own identity is being put in to question base on a linguistic stereotype. Furthermore, base on ones racial orientation society already have a certain expectation of what they assume the person is capable of and an expectation of how one acts like. When we put stereotypes on individuals we discrediting the individuals identity, we are making those people part of a group base on a assumption and stereotypes can not be used to describe a who group because not everyone fits into a certain category.

Defining someone by their skin color is an everyday phenomenon. Many people see a specific shade of skin and believe they know exactly how that person is going to speak, carry, and illustrate themselves. It seems to be embedded in one’s head at a young age to have specific views given by family, friends, and coworkers such as, believing interracial relationships are immoral, or it being acceptable to judge others according to their skin color. In the articles “Race is a Four Letter Word” by Teja Arboleda and “Mr. Z” by M. Carl Holman, the color of the authors skin plays a substantial role on how they are treated and perceived. Living in a society that doesn’t understand one’s culture can make their life extremely difficult.

Prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping are important topics at the cause of debating within social psychology. A stereotype is a generalization about a group of people, in which certain traits cling to all members, regardless of actual individual variation (Akert, Aronson, & Wilson, 2010). As humans, people assign objects and individuals into categories to organize the environment. Individuals do this for not only organization, but also survival. Is stereotyping inevitable? That is the question; according to Devine (2007), it is, but Lepore and Brown (2007) have to disagree. Devine believes that “stereotyping is automatic, which makes it inevitable.” On the other hand, Lepore and Brown are not convinced that stereotyping is

It is important not to stereotype or label people as this can lead to discrimination. For example children may discriminate against other children by name calling and teasing if they are somehow different to them.

As humans, we often find comfort in the ability to separate and sort objects, ideas, and even people into innumerable categories that we may refer to with ease. Even if there exists no scientific support for such classification, we find that our innate nature allows us to socially construct certain divisions. Merriam-Webster Dictionary possesses numerous definitions for the word race; one that appears commonly describes this abstract idea as, “Any one of the groups that human beings can be divided into based on shared distinctive physical traits” (Merriam-Webster.com). This definition remains intangible as American history in particular paints an ever-changing picture of racial categorization

Have you ever judged a person by their age, gender or appearance rather than really knowing them? When you meet a tattooed man on the street, your first impression of him might be bad, i.e. a negative categorization, since tattoos are associated with criminals and unemployed people. However, he could be a person who does volunteer and works as a business manager. People tend to automatically categorize a person into groups by visual judgements, demographic features, personality and own perceptions or beliefs (Billig & Tajfel, 1973). Social categorization is a process of classifying people into different groups based on their similar characteristics and group memberships. It is a natural part of social perception and serves a basic epistemic and identity function in organizing and structuring people’s knowledge about the world and make things become manageable in daily life (Bodenhausen, Kang & Peery, 2012). It occurs spontaneously without much thoughts (Crips & Hewstone, 2007). In social categorization, we usually form a general conclusion about other people and begin to respond to them as a member of a particular social group than as individuals. It allows us to communicate and connect with those who share the same or similar group membership. Social groups that we use in social categorization can change under different situations and over time. Whaley and Link (1998) discovered that there is a strong association between categorization and stereotype-based judgments. For

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

Another example of how home language or race has impacted children and families is in a classroom that shows in group bias. In group bias towards the groups in which people are members (Patterson & Bigler, 2006). What could happen in an instance such as this is as the children become more aware of societal norms that favor certain groups over others, they will often show a bias toward the socially privileged group (Winkler, 2009). A study showed that children of color as young as five years old show evidence of being aware of, and negatively impact by sterotypes about their racial group (Hirschfeld, 2008). This is evident in a classroom where the children start taking on the bias role of the teacher. In a classroom, children are questioning the skin color of another child. Instead of the teacher stopping to talk about how we are all the same, just different colors, the teacher ignores it. This silence will force children to come up with their own biases, prejudices and assumptions about races other than their own.

There has been decades of research examining what it referred to as “automatic categorization” (Nelson, 2005. p. 207). Researchers describe this as an essential trait in humans that is a primal response to physical characteristics, such as race, gender, and age, that automatically prompts emotional responses and prejudices. This type of categorization sets the

The fact that the tested children grouped the actions in accordance with the grammatical structure of their respective language is evidence for linguistic relativity, as “both groups of children construe(d) the relations between objects in the world on the basis of their language specific categories, and not on the basis of some universal, conceptual categories” (Dirven and Verspoor 1998:140-141). This suggests that the children from the two linguistic communities will partly see the world in a different way, being inclined to categorise the things they see in contrasting fashions.