Racial Discrimination

Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality or prejudice: racial discrimination. Unfortunitly this is something that americans deal with every day. Weather it is at school, at work or even in a public space, racial discrimination has been haunting our nation for hundreds of years now.There are many factors that go into determining the path a person's life may take; the most significant of these is the social class into which he or she is born. Every modern society has a class society. Each of these societies has based its civilization, its culture, its technology, on the oppression of the majority by a minority. Class is vitally important in understanding social inequalities suffered globally by the races which comprise our world, but also it extends more specifically into the different ethnicities which comprise a race.

There are many races which make up our world, and these races are broken up into many national ethnicities. While many people confuse race and ethnicity as one in the same, an ethnic group can be a group of people sharing a common religion, national heritage, or even a common cultural tradition. Race is not determined by belief or the decision to belong to a group, but rather we are all born into our race. A race is a "local geographic or global human population distinguished as a more or less distinct group by genetically transmitted physical characteristics." (dictionary.com)

When evaluating races and the differences between them, the norm is to study the different races and how they are broken up into the social classes of a society. In the United States for instances, studies have been done that show ...

[This will be a valuable paragraph or group of paragraphs (see outline) if you can find good studies in which researchers try to break up social classes according to race. Try to also locate holes in this scheme - show how there are exceptions such as individuals of one race who don't fit into the pattern described by the researchers. You should conclude that race is nothing more than a social construct used by society to bolster one group at another group's expense. You should see race as a social construct and your studies should show this as well.]

The concept of "race" may be usefully compared to the concept of "caste." [Try using a more powerful introductory sentence here. Your "caste vs. race" argument is powerful in showing that cultures create social hierarchies based on imagined or cultural difference among people, so write an introductory sentence to reflect this.] Caste includes ancestry and actual social stratification, and also includes ideas about real or imagined body type differences and socially significant cultural differences. Both race and caste are, fundamentally, modes of constructing social hierarchies on relations of birth [good]. The key difference is that race essentially involves the idea of groups originating in different territories, whereas members of different castes may be conceived as originating from the same territory.

The Indian caste system has been in use for several years [be more precise; castes have existed for thousands of years], and is still valued today. The system helps to keep people peaceful amongst each other, and maintains a sense of order. There are five different levels of the system: Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, and Harijans. In each of these categories are the actual "castes" or jatis within which people are born, marry, and die. Indians are comfortable with this system [be careful of making claims like this without supporting evidence. In this case, this reads as a very insensitive comment. Many of the lower caste are no more comfortable with "caste" than is a minority who is passed over for a promotion solely because of race.] in that they never move up or down in class. They will always in be in same class. This system has worked well for Indian people [again, be careful of these claims; it may have only worked well for the upper caste. This is equivalent to saying racism