Normative culture is the way society interprets the world for us and pushes us towards a set of culturally correct ideas or behaviours and away from other choices deemed abnormal, bad, or incorrect. Yet the world is more than these binaries.
Ideas that are culturally agreed upon or correct may be ethically reprehensible as is the case with racism. Science is very clear races don’t physically exist but are quite arbitrary and socially constructed. Even the more popular idea of ethnicities is highly conflated as evidenced by this quote from Wikipedia “Ethnicity is usually an inherited status based on the society in which one lives” which would make many new world immigrants ethnically Canadian or American.
Suffice it to say, society divides people into somewhat arbitrary groups based loosely on culture, language, and skin colour. When you aren’t part of the dominant or default “race,” you may experience obstacles to dating, jobs, education, monetary advancement, and a whole host of other things.
Like other forms of normative culture, negative impacts may cause shame and shape change where possible: changing accents, abandoning cultural traditions, and even using bleaching creams on skin.
Today we’ll discuss some “unspoken rules” or scripts that guide our conduct in society with regards to dating. We’ll also talk a little about the intersection of two kinds of normative culture: the culture that says being white is superior to other social races, and the culture that says being a man is superior to other social expressions of gender.
Links
Is Race Socially Constructed?
https://www.livescience.com/53613-race-is-social-construct-not-scientific.html
The myth of race, debunked in 3 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnfKgffCZ7U
Ethnic Group on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_group
Intersectionality Explained on TED
https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality1
Bias on OKC
https://theblog.okcupid.com/race-and-attraction-2009-2014-107dcbb4f060
Intersexy Video