Family study Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Family study - Assignment Example its, with the Indians and Mexican Americans (Hispanics) being categorized as closely-knight families emanates from their traditional socio-political and economic conditions. The Africans had to live together as large family units, to be able to fend for themselves, since the status of slaves did not offer opportunities for venturing into prime economic generation ventures (Newman, 2007). The Mexican and the Indian Americans had to form tightly-knight together families, due to the need to establish identity either as acquired/immigrant group or as the invaded group, respectively. This traditional social construct of minority families define the structure of these families to present day. Focusing on race and ethnicity in defining the structure of minority families is woefully misleading, since there is no set of shared physical characteristics that tie people together (Newman, 2007). The attempt to understand families should be based on the similarities that exist across ethno-racial and religious groups, since focusing on differences results in emphasizing the boundaries distinguishing the members from non-members (Newman, 2007). Additionally, focusing on the differences results in the analysis of belonging to a certain group is something to be proud or ashamed of, instead of focusing on the cultural uniqueness of the different groups (Newman, 2007). This results in a negative social construction. Assimilation should therefore be the aspired mode of defining the future American society. Nevertheless, ever reaching a point of where racial and ethnic categorizations are irrelevant does not seem a possibility. Growing in an interracial or interfaith family has the advantage of helping to break the racial stereotypes held by different races against one another. However, the major disadvantage associated with growing up in an interracial or interfaith family is the difficulty of building a self-identity (Newman, 2007). This is owing to the fact that self-identities