Race, Ethnicity, and Culture

Likewise, sexual orientation is another form of social stratification. This is perhaps most poignantly illustrated by continuing discrimination and hate crimes that are directed toward gays and lesbians. Also, homophobic political rhetoric in the ongoing debate on same-sex marriage echoes discriminatory attitudes that fueled the antimiscegenation

Lev Vygotsky, a leader of this approach from early in the twentieth century, pointed out that children in all communities are cultural participants, living in a particular community at a specific time in history. Vygotsky (1987) argued that rather than trying to “reveal the eternal child,” the goal is to discover “the historical child.”

Berry (1998) notes that minorities’ disempowerment and discrimination are often determined by the characteristics of the dominant groups, such as their openness to share privilege and status, the nature of relationships between groups (e.g., positive or tension-filled), and levels of tolerance or embracement of difference or diversity. Other

To learn from and about communities other than our own, we need to go beyond the ethnocentric assumptions from which we each begin. Often, the first and most difficult step is to recognize that our original views are generally a function of our own cultural experience, rather than the only right or possible way.

The diversity of cultural ways within a nation and around the world is a resource for the creativity and future of humanity. As with the importance of supporting species diversity for the continued adaptation of life to changing circumstances, the diversity of cultural ways is a resource protecting humanity from rigidity of practices that could

Racial categories are arbitrary and contingent on the goals and theories of the classifier (Marger, 2015).

People often view the practices of other communities as barbaric. They assume that their community’s perspective on reality is the only proper or sensible or civilized one (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Campbell & LeVine, 1961; Jahoda & Krewer, 1997).

“Whiteness is an historical, cultural, social, and political category” created in part by the fact that “Whiteness is so often invisible to White people but not invisible to people of color” (p. 12).