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-identification by people according to the races or groups in which they most comfortably identify as their own. Race is not in fact a biologically structured inescapable identity that humans are born with, but rather a social construct created by society, the population, and most importantly, ourselves.

 

One example of a country with a culturally constructed race system is the United States, where one acquires his or her racial identity at birth, as a ingrained status, but isn't based on biology or on one's ancestry (textbook pg 342). In the standpoint of a racially mixed marriage in America involving one black and one white parent, the child is biologically 50 percent white and 50 percent black, but American culture overlooks this biological heredity and culturally classifies this child as black. This is the rule of descent, more specifically hypodescent: “it automatically places the children of a union between members of different groups in the minority group” (textbook pg 342). The practice of hypodescent began with the founding of the earlier American colonies with the installation of slavery. But with the abolishing of slavery in the early 20th century, a person's racial status became solidified in legal definitions and application. With the induction of the Jim Crow laws, the State added stringent laws classifying populations as black based on traceable and/or noticeable ancestry. Hypodescent is arbitrary in that it was maintained and created by a certain culture, therefore it being a cultural construction. Unlike the biological implications of race and ethnic groups, culturally constructed notions of race are not static, but rather continuously changing over time as different divisions of societies fluctuates and diverges.

 

As a country of immigrants, as the world's great big melting pot, consisting of thousands of races congregating in one society, American culture today, is pretty much for the most part, culturally understanding, aware and ignores considerable diversity in biology, language and geographical origin. When one hastily examines the country of Japan however, one can assume that Japan is “homogeneous in race, ethnicity, and culture” and for the most part, in a biological standpoint, the people of Japan are all of the identical race. With closer inspection of the social structure and stratification of Japan's culture this can not be more further from the truth, “10 percent of Japan's national population are minorities of various sorts, including the aboriginal Ainu, annexed Okinawans, outcast burakumin, children of mixed marriages, and immigrant nationalities, especially Koreans, who number more than 700,000” (textbook, 344). The racial approach in Japan can best be described as, “intrinsic racism”: the belief that a racial difference is a sufficient reason to value one person less than another. (textbook, 344). Japan's social culture also operates with a pseudo-hypodescent where mixed offspring automatically become members of the minority group, while children of mixed marriages between the majority Japanese and other are denounced for not being “pure” Japanese. Race is culturally constructed in Japan with the definition of themselves with the opposition to members of a different race. 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。