In the article Best of Friends, Worlds Apart, journalist Mirta Ojito documents how Cuban immigrant Joel Ruiz often finds himself caught between two worlds. Whites see him simply as black. African-Americans dismiss him as Cuban. They tell me Im Hispanic. He has started to refer to himself as Afro-Cuban.
1) Why has Ruiz chosen to refer to himself as Afro-Cuban?
2) Why do whites and African Americans respectively see him differently?
3) Be sure to discuss the concepts of race and ethnicity as socially-constructed categories in your response.
Term of race and ethnicity
Race:
a social construction based on perceived differences in human phenotypes in which beliefs about groups differentiated largely on the basis of color are assumed to have a biological basis; in history race has at times been linked with religious or national character; racial difference is, from an anthropological perspective, more properly understood as inscribed social and cultural difference.
Ethnicity:
a group identity resulting from social relations between groups in which consciousness of difference leads to both assigned and asserted distinctions and to a negotiation of difference; racial, religious, national, and cultural factors may all figure into the formation of ethnic identity; the ethnic is both the other and us, that which one is not and that which one is.
An individuals ethnicity can be adopted, selected and/or discarded.
Race is usually fixed.
essay must have a thesis statement and be organized thematically, not by readings. You must answer all parts of the question.
Sources:
a. In your essay, you must use specific and substantive examples (through paraphrasing and quotes) from the sources that I attached. You may use additional sources but only after you have used three readings.
b. . Films and film transcripts do not count as readings. PowerPoints do not count as readings
