Ultimately, race is a way in which one group designates itself as superior and other groups as inferior. The superior group does this to enforce or reinforce its wishes and ideas in social, economic, and political realms. The concept of racial majority and minority, therefore, is not a numeric representation but rather a power difference.

Throughout our history, there has been a preoccupation with physical characteristics as the defining indicator of race, coupled with a concern with the population defined as non-white. There has also been a fixated need to identify sub-divisions within one broad racial category (i.e. Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese,

Even more ineffective than classifying people by race, is the belief that it is possible to accurately judge people, their values and merits based on the racial category they are defined by. Although success in America is believed to be based on a meritocratic system, a system where equality of opportunity exists, the truth is, inequalities in the distribution of income, wealth, power and prestige reflect not one’s qualification of merit but one’s racial classification. The crucial issue is not the equal treatment of those with equal qualifications per se, but rather, the access of minority group members to the qualifications themselves.

What has occurred and prevents America from being a truly meritocratic society, is the dominant groups have take steps to make permanent and institutionalize its advantages by developing an ideology of difference, grounded in classification systems, that allows them to rationalize their treatment of less-powerful groups. This ideology of difference supports a language for thinking about differences and fashions images of “the other.” It is significant to race as a social construction because according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,

Some topics in this essay:
Chinese Vietnamese, , racial classification, people race, racial category, classified white, classifying people race, ideology difference, social construction, power prestige, racial stratification, race racial, classifying people,