Racial Sensitivity in the Modern World - Literature review Example

In the research, individuals were asked to maintain their head below water and were promised that the longer they stayed under water, the more money their relatives would get. This was repeated with relatives of differing closeness such as brother, cousin, second cousin etc. The study found that the participants were naturally able to stay longer when doing it for those who were genetically close to them. The results of the study indicated why people are more likely to like those of their own race and distance themselves from those of other races or ethnic backgrounds.

While it is not entirely clear whether race is a matter of genetics, it is obvious that people of the same race are more genetically related than those who are from different races. This difference in the race has brought many issues in the past to the point of warranting people to have better racial relations. Racial sensitivity is as a result of the conflict between the natural instinct that drives people to like their own race and place those of their own race before everyone else, and the rational part of the brain that tells one that that is no good.

As civilized beings, humans are rational enough to know that they should not hate each other based on race, but still have to deal with an irrational, instinctive part within them that says otherwise. This indicates why there is so much racial sensitive in the social arena. At the same time, as a result of many years of activism, racial sensitivity has become very common especially in public life. Racial sensitivity can be seen in everything that people do. For instance, in most Hollywood movies, there is always a black man who in most cases is depicted as having some special abilities.

This need to include only one person of the African American ethnic background and making him seem to have some special abilities can be seen as racial sensitive by the producers of the movie. For insane, in the movie Predators, the only black man in the movie was the only one who was able to detect the almost invincible predator. At the same time, he was the first character to die in the movie.