Question Responses essay

Question 1

The mast narratives have imagined Haitian people and Native Americans as secondary and totally inferior to the whites. At the same time, today, the view on Native Americans and Haitians should have changed because racial biases and prejudices cannot persist in the democratic society. Nevertheless, it is possible to refer to the description of the recent crisis of Haiti, which revealed the humanitarian disaster and its perception and it is possible to compare Haitian humanitarian catastrophe to that of Native Americans. Both narratives refer to the impact of the US policies on Native Americans and Haitians. However, both narratives underestimate the impact of local factors on the decline of Native Americans and failure of Haiti to recover after the disaster.

Question 2

Stuart Hall argues that the social construction is prior in interracial relationships to biological factors. This means that physical differences between races turn out to be secondary and racial relations are grounded on social stereotypes, biases and perception of representatives of different races. As social relations and concepts change so do interracial relations and perception of representatives of different races. This is why Hall insists on the perception of the concept of race as floating signifier, which depends on dominant social concepts and interracial relations, which are irrelevant to biological factors but depend entirely on social ones. In such a way, the author views race a social construction because the perception of races is formed under the impact of deep-rooted social concepts, biases and complex interracial perception, which define interracial relationships. Therefore, it is the society and social norms, standards, stereotypes and relations that define the perception of people of different racial background and the perception of the concept of race at large.