Research Paper on:
'Whiteness' as a Social Construct

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
world often appears divided along a clearly demarcated line of black verses white. Indeed, the whites in todays world find themselves racially and culturally segregated from all other races  and cultures. Being white, however, is much more than just the color of ones skin. From a cultural perspective, "whiteness" is determined by specific social, cultural, and historical  location. It could be contended, in fact, that a person of any colored skin could actually be more "white" than they are representative of their own biological race as  a result of various social, cultural, historic, and chronological considerations. The social construct of "whiteness" results from a number of factors  other than just skin color. Scholars such as Rao and Schmidt (1998) note that psychological groups are formed on the basis of obvious characteristics such as race. Interaction  with other groups is not even a prerequisite for such categorization (Rao and Schmidt, 1998). Interaction, however, is the key to the expansion of the social construct of whiteness  to include individuals from other races. Groups are commonly formed, in fact, on the basis of social and cultural factors. To understand how interaction is changing the social  construct of "whiteness", however, we must understand how that construct first originated. Typically our cultures are divided into two distinctive categorizations separating those that are from our own cultural  and ethnic background and those that are not (Little, Sterling, and Tingstrom, 1996). This tendency for categorization results in the outlook of "us" verses "them" (Little, Sterling, and Tingstrom,  1996). In the past in particular our "in-group" contained those individuals who were similar in racial and cultural identity to us