national identity

Examples of national identity in the following topics:

• Identity Formation

  • An example of national identity is the way in which Americans are united on the Fourth of July.
  • Indeed, the holiday would make little sense if one did not possess a sense of national identity.
  • Further, national identity is an ethical and philosophical concept whereby all humans are divided into groups called nations.
  • Members of a nation share a common identity and usually a common origin in their sense of ancestry, parentage, or descent.
  • Fourth of July celebrations, during which Americans dress in red, white, and blue, are manifestations of national identity.

• Race Relations in Mexico: The Color Hierarchy

  • This identity was associated with a lack of assimilation into modern Mexico.
  • This identity therefore became socially stigmatizing, and contrary to social expectations and ideals.
  • This categorization method is used by the National Mexican Institute of Statistics.
  • Intermixing eventually produced a Mestizo group that would become the nation's demographic majority by the time of Independence.
  • By the deliberate efforts of post-revolutionary governments, the "mestizo identity" was constructed as the basis of the modern Mexican national identity, through a process of cultural synthesis referred to as mestizaje.

• The Conflict Perspective

  • Du Bois theorized that the intersectional paradigms of race, class, and nation might explain certain aspects of Black political economy.
  • Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins writes "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped African American access to status, poverty, and power" (2000 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, 42).

• Characteristics of the State

  • The people of Poland have long formed a nation with a shared language and culture, but that nation has, through history, been cross-cut by various political borders.
  • Today, Poland's boundaries roughly align with the geographical area where the people of the Polish nation live, and thus Poland can be thought of as a nation state.
  • The concept of the state is also different from the concept of a nation, which refers to a large geographical area, and the people therein who perceive themselves as having a common identity.
  • The nation state is a state that self-identifies as deriving its political legitimacy from serving as a sovereign entity for a nation as a sovereign territorial unit.
  • The term nation state implies that the two geographically coincide.

• Pluralism

  • The French government has a melting-pot or assimilationist view of cultural coexistence, believing that the identity of being French should take precedence over all other forms of identification, including, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc.
  • On the other hand, Canada is more closely associated with the "salad bowl," or multicultural, perspective, as they believe in preserving the distinct identity of various cultural groups within their nation.
  • It is generally applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level (e.g., schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities, or nations).
  • Cultural isolation can protect the uniqueness of the local culture of a nation or area and also contribute to global cultural diversity.
  • It is argued that nation states, which would previously have been synonymous with a distinctive cultural identity of their own, lose out to enforced multiculturalism and that this ultimately erodes the host nations' distinct culture.

• Ethnicity

  • ... the named ethnic identities we accept, often unthinkingly, as basic givens in the literature are often arbitrarily, or even worse inaccurately, imposed.
  • Cohen also suggested that claims concerning "ethnic" identity (like earlier claims concerning "tribal" identity) are often colonialist practices and effects of the relations between colonized peoples and nation-states.
  • A "situational ethnicity" is an ethnic identity that is chosen for the moment based on the social setting or situation.
  • According to this framework, the idea of ethnicity is closely linked to the idea of nations and is rooted in the pre-Weber understanding of humanity as being divided into primordially existing groups rooted by kinship and biological heritage.
  • Some of the social traits often used for ethnic classification include nationality, religious faith and a shared language and culture.

• Race and Ethnicity

  • An individual is usually externally classified (meaning someone else makes the classification) into a racial group rather than the individual choosing where they belong as part of their identity.
  • Conceptions of race, as well as specific racial groupings, are often controversial due to their impact on social identity and how those identities influence someone's position in social hierarchies (see identity politics).Ethnicity, while related to race, refers not to physical characteristics but social traits that are shared by a human population.

• Ethnic Groups

  • For example, various ethnic, "national," or linguistic groups from Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, Latin America, and Indigenous America have long been combined together as racial minority groups (currently designated as African American, Asian, Latino and Native American or American Indian, respectively).
  • While a sense of ethnic identity may coexist with racial identity (Chinese Americans among Asian or Irish American among European or White, for example), the long history of the United States as a settler, conqueror, and slave society, and the formal and informal inscription of racialized groupings into law and social stratification schemes has bestowed upon race a fundamental social identification role in the United States.
  • The word "nationality" is more commonly used for this purpose (e.g.

• Minority Groups

  • The system of apartheid in South Africa exemplifies the complexities of the use of the word "minority. " Apartheid was a system of racial segregation established by National Party governments, which were in power from 1948-1994.
  • It is also subjectively applied by its members, who may use their status as the basis of group identity or solidarity.
  • In addition to long-established ethnic minority populations in various nation-states, ethnic minorities may consist of more recent migrant, indigenous, or landless nomadic communities residing within, or between, a particular national territory.
  • The abbreviation "LGBT" is currently used to group these identities together.
  • Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson discusses minority health research at the National Institute of Health.

• Gender Identity in Everyday Life

  • Gender identity is one's sense of one's own gender.
  • Gender identity is one's sense of being male, female, or a third gender.
  • Gender identity is socially constructed, yet it still pertains to one's sense of self.
  • Transsexuals, however, take drastic measures to assume their believed identity.
  • Sociologists tend to emphasize the environmental impetuses for gender identity.