A Critical Review of Ethnic Relations in the United States

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American Ethnic Studies
Introduction
A critical review of ethnic relations in the United States clearly reveals the fact that race is a social construct. What the element of race means, the features and characteristics that are attached to it and its classification (whether White, Black, or Asian), is not considered as primordial or static, but changeable and dynamic. Given this, it is important to understand that the meaning of race is conditioned on ways of shifting societal contexts (Pulido 810). This paper seeks to critically analyze the element of race and ethnicity as social constructs and the manner in which construction contributes to access or denial or privileges within the society.
Race and Ethnicity as Social Contracts
The notion of race as established in sociology and biology including the consequently outcomes related to the ascribed defiance’s on racism is viewed currently as an attempt that is used by the dominant white groups to protect their material interests, a view that can be proven through an example of the Southern plantation owners who heavily relied on slave labor in maximizing their profits during the pre-industrial era (Bridges et al 20). In this manner, the aspect of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the absence of genetic evidence emerged as a social dimension that reproduced racial inequality in the society.
Ruth Bader, a Supreme Court Justice justifies the manner in which the current regime has given root to a racial and ethnic caste that resulted in the endurance of disparities. The disparities have created disproportional gaps in unemployment, access to health care, poverty, and the distribution of resources within the society (Elizabeth & Margaret 12). Having established this, it is significant to understand that the dialectical fluidity of race and ethnicity between self-definition and other definitions of an individual’s chosen racial identity versus the society’s imposed racial identity precisely facilities an understanding of race as a social construction. For instance, an individual walking down a public street in America would be referred to racially as a Latino or African American in as much as such descriptions would fail to identify the individuals as of Mexican or American origins.
On the other hand, the salience of ethnicity when equally compared to race is inferred to in different kinds of literature as a secondary category of identity. In this case, racial identity formation is likely to take place during the process of assimilation, especially in instances where immigrants and their descendants lose their ethnicity and sociocultural support to assimilate a new one (Peggy 26). As established, the perception of ethnicity as a salient feature of identity remains an aspect that is primarily related to the conception of this aspect as a socially contracted element that discloses the self-identity of in individual. However, Leonardo reveals that the main problem with the construction of ethnicity is evident in its efforts to reinforce the element of ethnicity as a real aspect than race (600).
In a transcribed interview developed by a self-identified Mexican entrepreneur, the busine...