Understanding Race

1. Racial Profiling is the act of believing something about somebody based on

physical traits. In this case of Racial Profiling it is traits such as skin, hair, any
religious clothes or other racial differences with the people around them.
Racial profiling is usually brought over topics of police discrimination or TSA
officer discrimination. TSA officers after 9/11 started to pull more Muslims
who had turbans on or sheiks who also wear turbans aside to perform a
random security test. This was based on the fact that the terrorists who
brought down the twin towers were Islamic Extremists who wore turbans
supposedly. The contact hypothesis would make more people less likely to
perform these random security test while racial profiling. Instead they
would learn through contact who they really are and the stereotypes that
were constructed on Muslim Americans after 9/11. This would lead to less
racial tension in at least airports and overall eventually less in the U.S.
2. Some of the ethnocentric actions that the majority race performs to keep
power in the society are genocide, and expulsion. Genocide is the mass killing
of a declare inferior race or ethnicity. This is what happened in Germany
with Jews and what happened in the Turkish Empire with the Armenians. This
makes it so that any other racial or ethnic minority groups become more
aligned with the majority group to ensure that the same thing doesnt happen
to them. They do this through the process of assimilation. The other method
is called expulsion which involves moving a group of people that are declared
inferior by the majority and moved out of the country forcibly. This was the
common method used by countries to drive out Jewish people. Jewish people
were considered inferior all throughout Europe and so countries would allow
them to live separately and then would eventually remove them from the
country. This made it so that the country was more homogenous of the major
race or ethnicity which allowed them to keep more power in the country and
not have to follow along with other opinions based upon heritage. In modern
day expulsion is the campaign promise of some of the Presidential
Candidates and what is happening to the Roma tribe in Europe.
3. The social construction of race is that people make race identities and ethnic
differences based on comparing themselves to each other based on things
like skin color, place of birth, and speech. Race is not a genetic difference, all
homo sapiens have the same genetic code with the few genetic mutations,
but those genes are only expressed slightly differently which causes people
to believe that races are inherently different. Americans are very multiracial
due to the fact that America was built by immigrants for the most part. This
has led to people being very similar but still identifying as different races.
When surrounded by all these different racial identities people feel the need
to identify as something, and so we create racial identifies that are based on
who we identify as.
4. Model minority means the minority group that is thought to have succeeded
the most economically, socially, and educationally, despite being a minority.
In the United States the model minority are Asian Americans. Some
advantages of being a model minority are that the majority views them in a

good light which leads to less racial discrimination as compared to other

minorities. This leads to more possible offerings in jobs, housing, and other
areas of importance. Some downsides are that people who are part of the
model minority are not considered minorities by other minorities which leads
to conflicts between minorities because of this view. This happened in L.A.
with the Korean-African American riots where the two minorities fought
because the African-American community did not view them as another
oppressed minority but rather as oppressors. The Koreans owned the stories
in predominantly black communities.