What is a subordinate group? and the Social construction of race?

What is a subordinate group? and the Social construction of race?





I have looked repeatedly in my book and can not understand the defintion of these two. Please help me. Thanks.





This is what I have come up with:


subordinate group - based on religion, race, etc.


Social construction of race - I have no clue.|||A minority or subordinate group is a sociological group that does not constitute a politically dominant voting majority of the total population of a given society. A sociological minority is not necessarily a numerical minority 鈥?it may include any group that is subnormal with respect to a dominant group in terms of social status, education, employment, wealth and political power. To avoid confusion, some writers prefer the terms "subordinate group" and "dominant group" rather than "minority" and "majority", respectively. In socioeconomics, the term "minority" typically refers to a socially subordination ethnic group (understood in terms of language, nationality, religion and/or culture). Other minority groups include people with disabilities, "economic minorities" (working poor or unemployed), "age minorities" (who are younger or older than a typical working age) and sexual minorities.





According to Jonathan Marks,





By the 1970s, it had become clear that (1) most human differences were cultural; (2) what was not cultural was principally polymorphic - that is to say, found in diverse groups of people at different frequencies; (3) what was not cultural or polymorphic was principally clinal - that is to say, gradually variable over geography; and (4) what was left - the component of human diversity that was not cultural, polymorphic, or clinal - was very small.





A consensus consequently developed among anthropologists and geneticists that race as the previous generation had known it - as largely discrete, geographically distinct, gene pools - did not exist.[70]





In the face of this rejection of race by evolutionary scientists, many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word "ethnicity" to refer to self-identifying groups based on beliefs concerning shared culture, ancestry and history. Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race," following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the U.S. civil rights movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide. They thus came to believe that race itself is a social construct, a concept that was believed to correspond to an objective reality but which was believed in because of its social functions.[7]