Race is a complex organization of practices and ideas concerning certain observable traits of human bodies, including hair texture, skin colour and facial characteristics relating to an individual’s character, behaviour patterns and intellectual capacity. Doing race involves several concurrent actions such as identifying specific physical features like the shape of eyes, skin or hair colour; assuming that the features provide general and important information such as the level of intelligence, hard work or conscientious a person tends to be; Maintaining and creating socio-economic models that outline hierarchy in which people of a given race are viewed to be superior compared to persons related to another race and rationalizing or justifying the inequalities in the outcomes. Although people can personally initiate these actions, doing race is mostly a one-sided mechanism in which people align to a given group, establish negative traits on individuals of another group and think of them as inferior (Collins, 2020).
Due to the negative inequality generating process linked to the concept of race has advanced over time to respond to the changing technological, economic, cultural and political local conditions, race has conferred to various human variation configurations in the diverse surroundings over the historical period. Additionally, the central point of the concept recognizes that people can be categorized into specific and easily identifiable races depending on unalterable and inheritable biological features that portray the person with merits to resources and respect. More significantly, race has a tangible and visible outlook on society’s structures and institutions and daily attitudes and beliefs. The racial practices and ideas explain, justify and promote the new and long-standing racial inequality conditions between various people(Collins, 2020).
Arguments on people doing gender are proclaiming that is a continuously emerging factor in social interaction. Everyone in a society constantly works on gender by participating in displays and activities popularly accepted to be either masculine or feminine, revealing the obligation of a people to others for their gender-based behaviour. For instance, when a lady involves herself inhabits considered by others as abnormal, her gender group can destroy her future social interactions and create conflict or other social demerits as a mechanism to reinstate gender variations. There exists an association between gender variation and inequality. The oppressive nature of gender is depicted from power and resource variations arising from gender differences. The differences show that gender is not inbuilt within people, but it is achieved through daily life interactions (Chesley, 2011).
Doing gender consists of two aspects: gender performance and accountability. Accountability is made up of three parts that entail accountability to self, others and society. These ever occurring models of accountability lead to a mandatory process of doing gender. People are frequently obligated to the socially set orders of masculinity and femininity, even upon deviating from them. This ancient gender structure creates an appropriate framework to analyze gender alignment but does not demonstrate any aspect of social change. As a result, numerous calls have been launched to shift focus from doing gender to undoing or redoing gender. Suggestions put it that undoing gender occurs in gender-neutral interactions or when people’s binary distinctions based on sex is challenged. Disagreements to this insist that gender still prevails as attempts to undo gender only redo gender (Darwin, 2017).
Privilege is a valid assertion; it exists at home in gender and parenting where males have the advantage of gender inequality as women are mostly involved in child fostering. Parenting is a gendered ideology that urges women to incur most of their money, energy, and upbringing. The intensive mothering process is greatly motivated by directing women’s behaviour and attitude. Tensions arising between expectations of intensive mothering and job identity in working and at-home women show that intensive mothering dominates identity construction processes than employed women. Shaping of attitude and behaviour is necessary for even career women to contribute to effective mothering. In summary, intensive mothering play a crucial role for women doing gender through traditional trends and patterns with minimum consideration of employment responsibilities (Chesley, 2011).
Practices and ideals relating to masculinity depend on social localities such as class or race, leading to several masculinities to various categories of men. Two frameworks exist for masculinity and fathering. Modified traditionalism supports the practice of women working in male-dominated careers, but breadwinner men have status privileges and lack correlation to equal child care responsibilities. The egalitarian structure of masculinity acknowledges both men’s career and equitable caregiving to children. Class influences these ideals, as professional men adopt modified traditionalism and still participate in fathering while middle-class men most likely espouse the egalitarian model and limit fathering. The variations result from structural differences in male careers and the relative duty of a husband’s employment to wives’ employment. Masculine norms of male breadwinning are dominant; hence stronger associations between income and caregiving even for high-level child careering men (Chesley, 2011).
Ritualization subordination is still evident in our world, despite the shifts that tend to decline gender inequality. Gender can never be undone by society since gender differences are associated with differentials in power and resource, which are repeatedly reinforced via accountability mechanisms. The prevalence of at-home father families is observed, which is a rare occasion and illustrates an atypical gender family structure. 1968 to 2009 Current Population Survey (CPS) estimates at-home father families to range from 3.4% in which the wife earns 100% of family income to 5.6% in which the wife earns 75% of family income in the previous decade. Approximations of at-home mother and dual-earner families are more that further elaborates that despite the rise in at-home father households in the previous years, such families are unusual. The CPS records demonstrate that males in at-home father couples most likely have limited education to their wives and males in other setups. Furthermore, most at-home fathers respond to their staying at home as unable to get a job or are sick or disabled. In contrast, many at-home mothers reported family or home caregiving as the staying home reason (Chesley, 2011).
Gender and race do intersect in the formation of identities. First, an intersection between race4 and gender is observed in the association between stressful life events and depressions. Based on the Black-White paradox phenomenon, despite greater levels of exposure to many stressors, Blacks have low levels of depression. The discordance arising in high-stress levels and low depression levels among Blacks points out race as a mitigating factor in the stress-depression relationship. Gender could also be another factor that transforms the stress-depression association. Men have a higher probability of undergoing depression as an outcome of separation, divorce and work difficulties. At the same time, women are maybe highly vulnerable to impacts brought about by death, conflict or serious illness occurring within their surroundings. It is suggested that women can be more exposed to interpersonal stressors effects. Women may be more at risk of stress from their surrounding social network, including family relationships such as parents, spouse, children, and partner. Women constantly record more confusion, fear, irritability and smaller proportions of happiness after the quick stress test than men. Hence it is thought that depression gender differences could be attributed to stress sensitivity gender differences. As a result of this, the stress depression gender risk is a gender-specific aspect (Assari & Lankarani, 2016)
Studying the narrative on gendered meth, disproportionate set up of United States Midwestern methamphetamine markets within the indigenous white, rural, career, and poor communities portray intersections between gender and race. The interviewed participants regarded as supermom, superwoman and superthin are confined within the white womanhood cultural understandings. The urban African American female drug consumers described themselves as committed women to children care and domestic responsibilities and were deemed deviant by the white women ideas on motherhood. Drug use at motherhood harms women as they are under scrutiny and condemnation due to their deemed failures. However, white women drug users do not dissociate from this perceived social misfit at motherhood. Doing gender is equivalent to doing race, doing place and doing class in an intersectional manner. Women’s gendered narrative concerning self and drug utilization were specific norm responses held responsible for their place, race, gender and class. Gender enactment differs across social structural arrangements and conditional contexts contained within them, and original gender attention has the ultimate capability of exposing other factors such as power, identity, hierarchy and experience (Miller & Carbone-Lopez, 2015).
Reference
Assari, S., & Lankarani, M. M. (2016). Association between stressful life events and depression; the intersection of race and gender. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 3(2), 349-356.
Chesley, N. (2011). Stay-at-home fathers and breadwinning mothers: Gender, couple dynamics, and social change. Gender & Society, 25(5), 642-664.
Collins, P. H. (2020). Toward a new vision: Race, class, and gender as categories of analysis and connection (pp. 453-463). Routledge.
Darwin, H. (2017). Doing gender beyond the binary: A virtual ethnography. Symbolic Interaction, 40(3), 317-334.
Miller, J., & Carbone-Lopez, K. (2015). Beyond ‘doing gender’: Incorporating race, class, place, and life transitions into feminist drug research. Substance use & misuse, 50(6), 693-707.
