Real World Experiences
Charlotte B. Levy
San Antonio College

This Paper is for Professor Lisa Black, Sociology 1301, and Section 095.
Real World Experiences
This paper will explain the “real-world” experiences in our society according to their color, culture, ethnicity, and background. Berger stated that social construction affects how people think and behave and what they value, ignore and punish (p. 12). This makes culture a powerful social construction, a concept constructed or made by society. Human tend to believe that they are a little better than others. Also, the structural barriers that minorities encounter cuts across all aspects of social life and women’s unequal access to power, prestige, and property on the basis of their sex. For this reason, a person should not be based on his or her color, culture, ethnicity, and background because everybody is created equal and everybody deserves the same rights and opportunities.
Berger (2014) stated that according to Bornstein et al, culture is a system shared beliefs; norms, behaviors, and symbolic representations that persist overtime and prescribe human behavior and assumptions (p.12). For example, in August 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen year-old from Chicago, visited relatives in Mississippi. Emmet Till allegedly whistled at a white grocery store owner’s wife. Roy Bryant, the store owner, learned of the event, Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam made plans to “teach the boy a lesson.” They kidnapped Emmet Till and then brutally beat, mutilated and shot him before dropping him in the Tallahatchie River. While Bryant and Milam were arrested for the murder, the all-white Mississippi jury took just over an hour to acquit the two. Till’s mother held an open casket funeral in Chicago so mourners could see how her son had been mutilated. Even so, Bryant and Milam later boasted about the murder in a Look magazine interview, since double jeopardy protected them from retrial. Because race is a social construction, the process of defining races typically benefits those who have more power and privilege than others (Schaefer, 2011, p. 246).
Recently, in Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. NBC journalist Joel Seidman’s reported that the tragedy of Michael Brown's death did not involve litigable conduct on the part of Officer Wilson and how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings and spurred by illegal and misguided practices. Those illegal practices included constitutional violations and excessive and dangerous use of force disproportionately targeted against African Americans (Seidman, 14 March 2015). Berger (2014) stated the belief becomes destructive if it reduces respect and appreciation for others (p. 14).
The term race has been used to categorize people on the basis of physical differences, particularly outward appearance. Genetic analysis confirms that the concept of “race” is based on falsehood. Race is more than flawed concept; it is a destructive one. During the Jim Crow Era, the presence of black people would undoubtedly have caused such annoyance to the many racist and segregationist whites (Rachel Godsil, 2006). Schaefer wrote that fear and dislikes of “new” ethic groups divides the countries throughout the world (p. 267). The hostility to a potential immigrants and refugees whether the Chinese in the 1880s, European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, or Mexicans, Haitians, and Arabs today reflects not only racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice, but a desire to maintain the dominant culture of the in group by keeping out those viewed as an outsiders (p. 268).
Many women experience differential treatment not only because of gender but because of race and ethnicity as well. These citizens face a “double jeopardy”– that of subordinate status twice defined. As is probably clear from our history many of