2/6/2018 Freund prompt

Freund states race is “biological fiction,” which means that it doesn’t exist in terms of person’s biological make up. He warns people that even though it does not have biological significances, society still weighs race heavily on their impressions, actions and thoughts about people based on other people’s races. Haney-Lopez agrees with the statement that race is a biological fiction. He defines race as “a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant elements of their morphology and/or ancestry.” He claims that race is more of a social construct and that can in a sense choose our races to an extent. That society is the one that picks your race for you, and once society has done that you can not change their mind even if it is wrong. Also based on the race you are given by society is where the inequality and the standards are set for you. Haney-Lopez also brought up the point that the color of our skin can only be a variation on geography rather than biology. I must agree with both. By labeling a person a certain race there is a great deal of inequality in the medical fields. For one example the article “Missing Persons”, explores the problem that there is not enough diversity within the health field. Showing how it will be hard for people of the minorities to be treated the same. Also, with the minorities groups living in lower income areas there are less fund and the quality of care is much less than those of other more privileged areas. And the idea of stereotypes within the communities affect the view medical professionals see people as explained in the article ‘Unequal treatment”. In this section you can see how stereotyping can lead to premature deaths and just bad care for groups that are quickly linked to a negative stereotype. Race holds a lot of power and influences when it come to medical help for individuals. Some many not even see it or realize it until they are giving facts. For explain the experiment where 3 different minorities giving the same symptoms were all given different treatments. But each group of people were given the same, all whites were given the same but that differed from what all the blacks were given and so on. I would have to agree with Freund and Haney-Lopez with saying that race is a “biological fiction” but it still runs our views on people in our society.