Race And Gender Analysis

In today’s society, our opportunities are heavily influenced by our outer appearances. This can include race, gender, body modifications, and, in some cases, religion. Race and gender play especially crucial roles in everyone’s lives in our modern day, Western society. Whether you are a Caucasian man or a woman of colour greatly impacts how you are treated in various situations, although, in some areas and situations, one’s exterior is much more relevant than in others. Does this mean that prejudices and discrimination are innate to humans? Does this justify that race is a biological difference rather than a social one? Chapters two and eleven address these questions by looking at the relationship between human behaviour and biology, as well …show more content…
Naiman begins by explaining human instincts: we use the excuse “it is just human nature” to justify many actions, but what exactly is human nature? An instinct, as defined in How Societies Work, is a natural, intricate behavioural pattern that cannot be overpowered by will and must typically occur in all members of a species . Using this definition, it is clear that human behaviour is not completely innate; not all people behave in the same ways in response to the same situations. Although this definition is clear and straightforward, biological determinists continue to argue that inequality is based solely on biological variances and evolutionary changes. Lombroso’s theory of the atavistic man is an example of this. Lombroso, a late nineteenth-century criminologist, claimed that a criminal can be identified solely by physical characteristics, such as dark skin and large jaws. He also stated that prostitutes could be identified by the shape of their feet and size of their toes; he claimed that these people were more ape-like than the non-criminal population, and thus were less evolved and significantly inferior. During the late half of the nineteenth-century, not long after the introduction of Lombroso’s theory, the rise of social Darwinism occurred. Similarly, social Darwinism argued that social inequality was the result of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” model; social …show more content…
Chapter eleven emphasizes race and the problem of racism throughout Canadian history. Naiman states that there is no biological evidence of “race”, just as there is no biological evidence that women with particular feet shape are prostitutes. Race itself is a socially constructed idea; there can be more genetic differences between people who identify with the same race than between people who identify with different races. That being said, a race can be defined as a set of people who share a particular group of physical traits , with racism being hostility toward people based on certain physical characteristics and the racial group with which they identify. Racism as we know it was not particularly evident until the capitalist era, in which the development of European economies led to the enslavement of Aboriginals and the belief that darker-skinned people were inferior to the lighter-skinned Europeans. Before the global expansion of capitalism, hostility due to physical traits was not evident, as the ancient Greeks saw all outsiders as “barbarians” no matter their physical traits, early Romans based prejudice and discrimination on citizenship, and early slavery was based on the seizing of property rather than the belief of darker-skinned people being inferior

Show More