FREE ESSAY ON RACE: PIERRE VAN DEN BERGHE

RACE: PIERRE VAN DEN BERGHE

When we look at physical characteristics such as skin color from the social definition
perspective, there is no clear meaning, but these characteristics do have what is
referred to as social meaning. Pierre van den Berghe defined a racial group as a "human
group that defines itself and/or is defined by other groups as different from other
groups by virtue of innate and immutable physical characteristics" (8). Racial group
distinctions are based upon ideological racism, which links physical qualities to the
lesser or greater cultural and intellectual characteristics.
Originating more than one hundred years ago, people with only one-eighth African
ancestry, but even without any physical characteristics normally associated with African
Americans, is still considered black by today's society. People refer to this as the "one
drop of blood" rule, which basically is saying that if you have any African blood in you,
you will most likely still be considered black no matter how much of any other blood you
have in you. This is very unfair to mixed people around the world because people want to
be considered whatever they feel they should be, not what society classifies them as. If
this were true for all races, then how come someone who is only one-eighth white isn't
considered white by society? Probably because society considers African Americans as the
minority, so this became a cultural universal on how to judge if someone should be
considered black or white.
Ethnicity comes from the Greek word "Ethnos", which means "nation." Its earliest English
usage referred to countries or nations that weren't Jewish or Christian. There are two
different definitions of ethnicity, one broad and one narrow. The broad definition refers
to an ethnic group as being a social group distinguished by race, religion, or national
origin. If we look closer, we will see that these characteristics are both physical and
cultural, that's why this is referred to as the broad definition. The narrow definition
refers to groups that are distinguished primarily on the basis of cultural or
national-origin characteristics. The cultural characteristics being language, and the
national-original characteristics being the country from which a person or his/her
ancestors came. Today, the narrower definition is more preferred by social scientists
because it matches up more precisely with the original Greek meaning of nationality.
Ethnocentrism should also be mentioned here because this is a big cause of racism today.
Ethnocentrism is the belief that your group or country believes that they are better than
all the other groups and countries in the world. These groups always compare everything
about other groups to their own group and try to pick out that groups weaknesses or
differences.
With all this, we get the words prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice can be defined as
"an antipathy based on a faulty generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be
directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he or she is a member
of that group" (16). With prejudice being the feelings people have against specific
people or groups, discrimination is actually the actions one carries out upon these
people or groups. There are specific steps that have been used to show how discrimination
is formed, and they are broken down in to the following: Motivation, discriminatory
actions, effects, the relation between motivation and actions, the relation between
actions and effects, the immediate institutional context, and the larger societal context
(18). Even today, racial discrimination continues to be a multi-dimensional problem
surrounding all institutional areas of our society.