Midterm Reflective Essay: Race Construction, Maintained by Society
By Wendy Baptiste | Lehman College, CUNY · Spring 2025
About This Student Project
This work was completed at the midpoint of the Spring 2025 semester of SOC 250: Racial and Ethnic Communities in the United States at Lehman College, CUNY — the course on which The Making of Race is built. Responding to the Midterm Reflective Essay assignment, the author took stock of how her understanding of race and ethnicity had evolved over the first half of the term. The work appears here as submitted. As described in License and Rights, student projects are published with their authors' consent and are not covered by the project's Creative Commons license; their authors retain all rights.
The Reflection
Over the past few weeks, I have experienced significant changes on my perspectives on race formation and ethnicity in the United States. Several materials have delved into the fact that “race is a social construct,” created by society and shaped by political, economic, and hierarchical systems. Race is shaped by historical events such as colonization and slavery and continued to evolve resulting in “racial categories” and “racialization.” Scientific experiments by influential people from the past to present have shown that race has no biological basis, yet society continues to uphold the notion that we are biologically different. As these thoughts gradually progressed throughout the years, it justified the unfair actions executed by the government, resulting in inequalities, which negatively affected black and brown communities and placed white individuals within the most advantaged and privileged scale of the social ladder. These justifications continue to affect marginalized groups, as they are believed to be of inferior races, resulting in “racial formation” which includes housing discrimination, education, and wage disparities.
While exploring these concepts, the moment that changed my viewpoint on race was highlighted in the documentary Race, the Power of an Illusion, The Difference Between Us, Episode 1. Before watching the film, my idea of race was that we were all somehow biologically different. The film opens with a clear understanding on how differently we are visually, but later shares an experiment, with results that stunned the participants as the results showed that they had closer genetic matches to people outside of their racial category. This connects to chapter 1 of “Critical Race Theory” where the text suggests that its theories views race as an idea that was created, shaped, and maintained by society, and not based on biological factors. Going forward I will continue to engage with the material to get into more theories, deeper understanding and conversations of race and ethnicities and the way it continues to shape and maintain inequalities in the United State.
Suggested Citation
To cite this work, you may use:
Baptiste, Wendy. “Midterm Reflective Essay: Race Construction, Maintained by Society.” In The Making of Race: Topics in Race and Racism in the United States, edited by Minglei (Hart) Zhang. New York: Manifold @CUNY, 2026. https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/read/midterm-reflective-essay-wendy-baptiste/.