Race And Ethnicity In Latin America Summary

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There are no groups or taxonomies for human beings that are not socially created. Stephen Jay Gould discusses the origins and development for the essentialist perspective of race. Gould supports the notion of racial categories having an “unnatural” or social origin. He argues that races or “subspecies” cannot be determined because of the great deal of variation from human to human, the ease at which humans interbreed, as well as convergences and the mobility of humans (SJG 30-31). Recent history makes the most impact on the current division by phenotypic “racial” characteristics, which does not predate the origin of our own species, only the last tens of thousands of years which would not give enough isolation to create genetically different…show more content…
In the former region, the category ‘black’ supposedly includes anyone with a known ‘drop of black blood’…” (MRE 12-13). On Latin America, ‘Hispanic’ is discussed by G. Cristina Mora in relation to Pierre Bourdieu’s “classification struggle”. Not only does struggle imply that there is no “easy” or natural way of organizing people, but also that categories are created by interactions, not essentially within an individual (MH 10-11). Race is also constructed through social struggles and acts of conquest, specifically in the context of Western colonization and imperialism, those conquered and oppressed groups gaining a marked group identifier (RF). Capitalism, or in other words, “European mercantile expansion” lends a heavy hand in creating economically beneficial social divisions in which people are oppressed (ES). Manning Marable would agree that racial divisions act as designators for exploitable groups. Scientific racism became the prevailing ideology as moral, philosophical, and religious justifications became
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