Discussion Questions: Please read all of the questions from the readings listed below and answer two questions from each reading:
The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, & Sexuality
Introduction (pp. 1-5)
Language both mirrors reality and helps to structure it (2). Explain and give an example.
How does the media influence on how we see race, class, and gender. Give an example.
What is the difference between ethnicity and race?
Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class privilege are all interlocking systems of oppression that ensure advantages for some and diminish opportunities for others, with their own history and logic and self-perpetuating relations of domination and subordination (3). Explain what this means. Do you agree/disagree? Why?
What are the economic impacts of constructing race, class, and gender?
The Social Construction of Race, Class and Gender (pp. 7 12)
It is not difference itself that leads to subordination, but the interpretation of difference. It is the assigning of a value to a particular difference in a way that discredits an individual or group to the advantage of another that transforms the difference into a deficiency (10). Explain. Agree or disagree?
Race:
Race has been a social construction that has allowed US to set apart racial minorities from European immigrants (9). Explain how this adds to social construction. Give examples. Agree? Disagree?
What determines race in mixed-race individuals? Whites, slave owners particularly, made that determination. Why? And how did that construction of race benefit whites? Class:
Differences in wealth and family income have been overladen with value judgments and stereotypes to the extent that identifying someone as a member of the middle class, working class, or underclass carries implicit implications about his/her moral character and ability (11). Explain. Give examples. Agree/disagree?
Sex/Gender:
How is gender changeable? Give examples gender constructs in our society as they relate to social, political, or economic life?
Racial Formations (13-19) Omi & Winant
Race is a socio-historical concept. Racial meanings have varied over time and between different societies (15). Explain. Give examples.
One of the first things we notice about people, besides sex, is their race (16). What happens when we cant racially or sexually categorize? Why?
Everybody learns some combination, some version of the rules of racial classification, and of their own racial identity. . . a way of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world (17). Agree/disagree? Explain.
Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege (33- 37).
Given the tendency of slaves, servants, and landless free Europeans and Africans to cooperate in rebellion, the elite had to teach whites the value of whiteness in order to divide and rule their labor force (33). Explain what this means.
To keep racial categories separate, 1691 law increased punishment of Euro women who married African or Indian men. What were the advantages of this for wealthy white landowners?
This redefinition of whiteness was built as much on changing gender as on changing class relationship (37). Explain. Give examples.
can you please use quotes from the readings
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