Assess The Difference Between Racial Formation And Inter-Group Formation

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There has been many disagreements and wars over skin color and race. Many people are not aware that race is not an inherently biological concept. Race has more to do with society than it does with biology. To prove this point sociologists have used between-group and within-group variation. Racial formation is how people separate themselves and others into groups to try and create differences between them. Since racial groups have no biological backing people can pick and choose what racial group they belong to. This picking and choosing of racial groups can alter the census reportings depending on what group people choose to place themselves in. The separation of races has no biological backing. Scientists have not found anything that makes one person different from the next. For example there hasn’t been found anything different or extra strand of DNA and no extra or different muscles. The differences we see such as skin color and hair texture do not change what biologically makes us a human. This …show more content…
Our citizens have many different backgrounds and this can make grouping them into racial categories even more difficult. In a perfect world if we were to group eachother into racial groups everyone in that certain group would look the same. However, this is not a perfect world and there tends to be a lot of overlap between groups. The sociological concept between-group variation says that there should be a very distinct difference between racial groups separating them. This is not the case. There are people who are considered white who have skin color that is darker than people who are considered black. Within-group variation says that people who are within the same group should be very similar to each other. This also is not the case. For example, a person who has very dark skin can be placed in the same racial group as someone who has skin that is much lighter than