During the times of slavery, a slave was considered only three fifths a person and two fifths property. This is based on political classification of a group of people, which at the time were considered more as taxable property than as a group of people with rights. Sociology tells us that race is not determined by biological characteristics completely, but that race is socially constructed by how society treats the groups historically and socially based on bioligical characteristics that have been given some level of social importance. Adolf Hitler racialized an ethnic group, the Jewish, and considered them a race of people, based on the fact that in "his" society, the Jews were in his eyes a biologically inferior group of people in comparison to his "race," the Aryans, which were a biologically and idealogically engineered group of people formed to suit his distorted vision of a perfect world. Nowadays, post 9/11/2001, the most persecuted group of people in America based on race and/or ethnicity are the Arab Americans. What is more surprising, is that Indian Americans are mistakenly considered Arab Americans and persecuted as well, based upon dress, skin color, and dialect. This predjudice is rooted in ethnocentrism, where one ethnic group see's itself as superior to another by judging one groups values acceptable in comparison to the values of another.
Understanding race classification as more politics than biology is important in understanding who we are as a society. Classification into a particular group based on partially used biological evidence and partially but more extensively used social value is how race is determined. Racializing an ethnic group is another practice that shows how we think as a society. We place such high importance on our opinions of a given group based upon our percieved value of that group's ethnic characteristics, thereby stereotyping all people associated with that group as a race, i.