Essay On Race And Ethnicity

We live in frightening times as violence continues to ensue over dogmas surrounding race and ethnicity. As a young millennial, I’ve witnessed the tragedies surrounding the deaths of Eric Gardner, Trayvon Martin, and Michael brown, create tensions tragically felt by communities because of race. According to Webster, Race is “A category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits”. It is a difficult social dilemma, due to the genetic diversity we experience in the United States. For example, one can insinuate that Barack Obama is the first African American President, but to what degree does his Afro- descendant oversee his Caucasian roots? While race is an essential adjective used to describe people, one must also be informed
Sadly, unity is not a reality we experience in our everyday lives. Objectively, race ties towards your genetic make-up while an ethnicity ties to the cultural elements that describe who you are. The media treats these two elements synonymously, and at many times insensitively. For example, it is an often trend to see the people in the media, treat the religion of Islam like a race or an ethnicity, when it is but a religion, that not every person in the middle east partakes in. It is these large gaps that make the media a great source towards division, as propaganda continues to masquerade behind old shadows of racism, like that of Jim Crow. We are able to vividly witness this illusion in “Dog whistle politics”, as news outlets find strategic ways to empower oppression over social groups (like minorities). The commentaries of such programming affects these minorities in a vital sense, because its sets false impressions that stereotype people of their true