Race and Race Theory - Essay Example

It is also difficult to determine what characteristics of human beings need to be considered for racial discrimination. The concept of categorizing human beings according to their blood and kinship is a newer theory. Towards the end of the Middle Age, this concept took concrete form when anti-Jewish feelings were evolved as a manner to express resentment towards the religious beliefs of the Jewish community. These kinds of antagonism towards Jewish blood and kinship paved the reasons for hatred towards a community instead of an individual.

Baptism among the Jews caused threat to the Christian community as the former could not prove their purity of blood to the Inquisition. The concept of racism had its roots in the Mediterranean slave trade during the Middle Ages when the Western world equated the blacks with slavery. In the modern time the concept of distinguishing human beings based on social, physical and intellectual features has proved to be unsound. This notion has generated for ages and is more specifically a social and historical process.

Race cannot be confined to the physical or biological traits cultivated by an individual. The genetic inheritance of human beings that contribute towards those traits does not form the concept of “race”. . There is a continuous inclination to regard race as an essence that is concrete and objective. There is also a contrasting view of the non-racist society that race is merely an illusion created purely by some ideologists. It was with the growth of political economy in the global arena and the advent of seaborne empire that race began to take a concrete shape.

During economic crisis it is often the ethnic minorities who endure discriminations in the labour market. They even have limited access to proper education and health care facilities and this happens even during economic well-being although to a lesser extent. Although racial prejudices exist all over the world, the racial discrimination of human beings was originated by the Europeans. The era of European imperialism suggested that only those people belonging to the highest social rankings must govern the earth and it is they who should get access to all kinds of facilities for their development.

It is however not correct to state that the European’s attainment of imperialism gave rise to race, but on the contrary it can be stated that race has created sociopolitical discriminations and has shaped the international economy: “this is not to say that the European attainment of imperial and world-encompassing power gave rise to race. Indeed it is just as easy to argue the opposite: that the modern concept of race gave rise to, or at least facilitated the creation of, an integrated sociopolitical world, a modem authoritarian state, the structures of an international economy, and the emergence over time of a global culture” (Winant, 172).

What I find interesting about the article is that it discusses about the theoretical elements of race with the advent of the twenty first