racial relations

Race has always been a controversial subject for many people. The reason for this is because of the fear many people have of offending anyone or to be known as a racist. The real problem people in society have with race is the amount of importance we put in it. In class we have said that race is population of people believed naturally and biologically distinct from other groups. When you look at the definition of race it shows you that race is not a legitimate way to classify people. A clue of this is in the beginning of the definition when it say a population of people believed to be naturally distinct from other groups. This is saying that race is just an assumption from other people and an assumption from another person should not define who you are, it is more your ethnicity that defines who you are. In fact in Jay Coakly book Sport in Society he talks about how in the early 19th century white scholars created race in order prove a naturally superiority in white and a natural inferiority in other ethnicity's. Like Drew M. said in his blog "race can also be understood as a social construction" which it is. This fact from Coakly's book you could say is one of the first public form of prejudice turning into racism. This two terms can also be misunderstood because many people will think they are the same when there actually different. Racism is more the belief that a group hold a natural superiority of another group, when prejudice is more an internal subject where a person form an opinion about another group of people they know nothing of. These two subjects I believe still do exist in different parts of society through out the world. Racism is not as big of a social problem now as it has been in the past, but it still is present in different parts in the U.S. From a sports aspect, in the past a case of racism could be in country clubs when it came to playing sports like golf. Prejudice however is little more common thing today than racism. Prejudice is see a lot in sports from the fans as well as the athletes. A lot of prejudice in sport doesn't even come from race it comes from the the type of people that go to that particular school or city. In college a lot of people can admit that they have judged other people by what school they go to or went to. A lot of times people won't get serious about these forms of discrimination until there teams meet, but it is a very common thing in our society. The bad thing about prejudice is that it is normally the result of generalization.

The media is also shows some forms of prejudice from time to time. An example of this would be on sports center when they will talk to athletes others about there race and what it means to be some one of there race playing in a sport. This will happen a lot when a athlete is in a position where he or she is either the only one or the one of few people of there race in there position. This also has emerged in sports magazines as well in television advertisements . Two examples of this is in the Nike combat commercial with adrian Peterson and the Dicks sporting goods commercial with Ndamukong Suh. In both commercials they gave the comparison of both athletes being animalistic. This goes back to the film we watched in class where the cartoons would compare African American adults and children to savages or to animals. For someone to look at these commercials in depth they would be offended, but most people don't because at this point unfortunately people are getting used to these types of images. People are becoming used to these images because the media has had these images so well ingrained that these images are starting to become norms. When they become the norm they become extremely difficult to get rid of. But throughout all these racism and prejudice we have to work hard on trying to get rid of these aspects of our society. The fact that race isn't who you are and that generalizations or assumptions are not what society should use in order to function in some aspects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QF2XDsswg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDiepg-OhQQ