Race Identity and Class Identity

Race Identity and Class Identity

Race Identity

Although concept of race has been abandoned by researchers and discredited by scientists, it still has some currency among the general public due to its historical legacy. The concept of race has a historical legacy that attempted to categorize individuals based on the position of the self as the superior and difference (based mostly on skin color) as “the other.” Over time, attributions were associated with innate biological characteristics that defined individuals' intelligence, morals, and behaviors.

Racial thinking was at its height in the 19th and early 20th centuries and was associated with the ideologies of empire and colonialism. Ideas about distinct racial groups with distinct characteristics were developed to support the notion that some races (those of White, European origin) were innately superior to others (usually non-White races of African or Asian origin). Thus, race categorization was the first step in racism and racialization—the creation of negative stereotypes associated with the social practices of the group. Racialization promoted and perpetuated ideologies that created rigid racial social categories (Downing & Husband, 2005).

In contemporary society, researchers have concluded that race is a social construct—part of a process in which individuals were assigned to particular racial categories that were not based on scientific fact but ideological differences. Thus, certain physical characteristics, such as skin color, became markers of social difference in which the concept of race was given specific social meaning. Frequently, when people are assigned to a particular racialized group, they are perceived to have specific characteristics that become stereotypes: For example, Black people may be deemed to be better at some sports than White people but also not as intelligent. In fact, a great deal of early scientific research on race focused on trying to determine intelligence by examining the size of the brain in different racialized groups (Downing & Husband, 2005)

Class Identity

Social class has traditionally been defined as a socioeconomic construct, and social classes—including lower, middle, and upper classes—have been demarcated based on available government statistics on income. The income levels for determining social classes have changed over the years because of inflation. For example, in 1985 an income of $15,000 or less for a family of four in the United States was considered poor or lower social class, whereas in 2007 the figure was $27,000. In addition to income, occupation has been associated with social class, with professional/white-collar occupations more closely aligned with middle and upper classes and hourly service and blue-collar jobs associated with lower social classes (Hofstede, 2001).

One of the most important cultural dimensions of class identity is the social relationship patterns of specific social classes. Middle-class and working-class people differ significantly in many aspects of their relationships, including number of friends, the definition of a friend, the difference between friends and family, and the way married couples experience friendships. Middle-class members, for example, are reported to have more friends than the working class, and they tend to live farther away from their ...