According to the definition offered by Weng (2017), a social construct is an artificial distinction created by people to create a form of division that allows one group to show dominance over another group. The social construct of race in the United States originated from…
Race and Sexuality Essay Examples and Topics
The concepts of race and sexuality have been linked in many ways and in many contexts throughout the history. Racial bias often involves a certain sexual dimension and it can take the form of racial fetishism.
Scientists understand race as a social construct and not as a biological reality, while human sexuality involves biological, emotional, erotic, social, and physical feelings and behaviours. How people perceive the relationship between race and sexuality informs attitudes toward sexual preferences for particular races, ad sexual relationships for and between particular races.
Cause: Sexual racism exists in every sexual community in the world. In the past, interracial couples and sexual orientations that were different from heterosexuals were banned and punished, not just frowned upon. A lot has changed in the last 50 years, but some sexual racism remains even today.
The prevalence of interracial couples in the world demonstrates the rate at which attitudes changed in the last 50 years or so. Even though the situation is better now, sexual racism was very harsh in the past.
- “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” - Nelson Mandela
- “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” – Audre Lorde
In 1958, Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple that lived in Virginia married outside the state because of the anti-miscegenation laws that were present in nearly half of the US states at the time. When they returned married to Virginia, both were arrested in their home and sentenced to a year in prison. Jeb Bush, the Governor of Florida from 1999 was accompanied by his wife Columba, a Mexican woman. The two were one of the first interracial couples in the world to stand in power side by side.