This is a sample argumentative essay on human identity and racism to help you understand how to write such papers and deal with black studies. If you need professional help, order persuasive essays from Essayplant. Otherwise, just explore the human identity and racism paper, and practice essay writing on your own.
Human identity and success in life.
It is a matter of fact, that identity is the main determinant of human success or failure. At the same time, it is extremely important to define, what one understands under the word identity. What are the ingredients of human identity? If one will make a decision to investigate this issue, he will come across the fact that human identity consists of several “sub” identities. In social science and psychology there exists at least three identities: gender identity – is the gender with which a person identifies himself or is identified by others; cultural identity – a person’s self-affiliation as a member of a cultural group; and a psychological identity – the concept, which implies, that an individual has a unique identity. Besides the “sub” identities mentioned above, one may distinguish race identity, sexual orientation identity, class identity and possibly several other.
Another name, which one could use instead of sub identity, is a point of perception. Someone once claimed, that every person has at least three identities: first – how he percepts himself, second – how he is perceived by others and third – who he is in the reality. This paper will be devoted to an effort to reflect how different sub identities impact educational communities and why it happens. It will also reflect the three types of identity, which were mentioned earlier.
When speaking about educational community, first of all, one needs to keep in mind, that usually he/she is speaking about a
Curriculum and Diversity
community of relatively young people, with relatively small life experience, and frequently with certain stereotypes in thinking, which are peculiar to their age group and their surrounding. There may be no doubts about the fact that perceptions of people in these communities are based upon the combination of sub identities. For example, several decades ago, it was considered, that a young woman is a priori stupid, comparing to a young man, and therefore, university or college is not a place for her. Nowadays, gender identity is not as large reason of discrimination in educational communities, as it used to be. At the same time, there are quite a number of identities, which are perceived in a certain way, which make a person look better or worse in the eyes of an educational community. From my point of view, race identity is one of the main issues, which cause serious discrimination in contemporary educational communities.
It is not a secret for anyone, that black students are frequently members of universities’ sport teams, and pay a lot of attention to their sport carrier. This fact often creates the impression that blacks are not very responsible in their studies, and they are in college, just in order to get a diploma, and go on with their carrier in sports. There are not many people, who take their time to think about the reasons why many blacks are into sport teams to such a big extent. Many of them received their college scholarships only because they have had some major achievements in sports and they simply have to do sports to keep their scholarship. Certainly many of these people are really very keen on sports. At the same time, other black students are also perceived as irresponsible people, who are most likely to be cheaters and trouble makers.
Discrimination
If the phenomenon of discrimination upon racial identity is viewed from the point of Critical Race theory, one may find a decent explanation of why dicrimination itself is taking place. One of major six premises of this theory is that racist behavior takes place, when it is beneficial to whites. This concept can be clearly seen in the behavior, which takes place in the educational environment. Blacks are most frequently discriminated, when there is a need to show, that whites perform better. (Bell, 1993) According to Delgado, another contributor to the Critical Race Theory, stories of people, who represent other than white race, come from a different frame of reference, and therefore frequently their voice is not heard by representatives of a dominant white culture. (Delgado, 1995)
There are also many other writings of different scholars, such as Crenshaw, Dixson, Lynn and many others, who contributed a lot to clarification of reasons for discrimination upon the racial identity of a person, which is to a great extent reflected in the contemporary educational communities. For the conclusion, I would like to say that I share the opinion expressed by Delgado, that in order to appreciate the perspective of Critical Race Theory, which stands for equality of opportunities for representatives of evry race, it is extremely important to put one’s best effort to understand the voice of every particular contributor.
References:
- Bell, D.A. (1993) Remembrance of Racism Past: The Civil Rights Decline. In Hill & J. E Jones (Eds.) Race in America: The Struggle for Equality (pp. 73-82). Madison: University of Wisconsin
- Delgado, R (1995) Legal Storytelling: Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative. In R. Delgado (Ed.) Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge. Philadelphia: Temple University
- Dixson, A. D. & Rousseau, C. K. (2006). Critical race theory and education. New York, NY: Routledge.
- Lynn, M. (2002). [Special Issue]. Critical Race Theory in Education: Recent Developments in the Field. Equity & Excellence in Education. 35(2).
- Racism and discrimination, US News. https://www.usnews.com/topics/subjects/racism
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