SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Sociological perspective



Going Through It

The world comprises of a multitude of race and ethnicities. More than 4500 languages are spoken by people around us. Men and women belonging to the different classes struggle to make ends meet. Our societies represent us living with each other. Our behavior reflects our personalities and actions (Acker, 1990).

We, individuals are representatives of different class and gender. Our race and ethnicity also tells others who we are along with what language we speak. Individuals like you and I are responsible for creating inequalities which further escalate into conflicts. If we go back in history, it is said by many sociologists and historians that Modern conceptualization of races do not stem from hard scientific evidence of genetic differences, an evolutionary hierarchy or some "natural" order (Acker, 1990).

Racial and ethnical classification are based largely on European folk knowledge, with the development of larges ship and other sea going technologies, Europeans began to circumnavigate the world in the fifteenth century. Some of their first contacts with people of color, most specifically with Africans involved slave-trade interaction. The first categorizations of humans

into distinct" race" categories grew out of this of this brutal system of exploitative social relations, and reflected many cultural myths and inaccuracies about the cultural and biological differences between Europeans and Africans. For example, Johann Blumenbach, a German scholar, established the first developed typology of "race" in the late 1700s, just as slavery was becoming more central to the economies of the United States and major European nations. He was the first to refer to white Europeans as “Caucasians." This terminology stemmed from Blumenbach's fascination with European is the Caucasus Mountains of Russia, whom he viewed as the peak of human evolution and therefore as biologically superior (Feagin and Feagin 1999) (Ani, 1994).

Moreover, in ...