Chapter 15 Race and Ethnicity

I. The Social Meaning of Race and Ethnicity.

A. A race is a socially constructed category composed of people who share biologically transmitted traits that members of a society consider important. There are no biologically pure races. Race is a significant concept chiefly because most people consider it to be such. Biologically speaking, race has less and less meaning in the United States.

P. 362: Definitions vary from culture to culture, as does the importance of race.

Importance of race often is that it allows a status marker to create/legitimate social hierarchy.

1. Sociologists consider racial types as misleading at best. No pure races.

2. Over many generations and throughout the Americas, the genetic traits from around the world have become mixed. 7 million said they were mixed race in 2000.

B. Ethnicity is a shared cultural heritage. Ethnicity involves even more variability and mixture than race because most people identify with more than one ethnic background.

US is a multi-ethnic society, has been for a long time.

Concepts of ethnicity change: Irish Catholics, Jews, etc. now assimilated

Chart on page 365

A1. White settlement/conquest of North American, slavery and rise of democracy part of an overall narrative of white supremacy. Tied to the construction of racial categories, in particular white, black, hispanic as a racial category.

C. A minority is a category of people, distinguished by physical or cultural traits, who are socially disadvantaged.

2. Minorities have two major characteristics:

a. They share a distinctive identity.

b. They occupy a subordinate status.

II. Prejudice.

Prejudice is a rigid and irrational generalization about an entire category of people.

Prejudices are prejudgments and they may be positive or negative.

Often product of socialization into a particular group identity.

A. Stereotypes are exaggerated descriptions applied to every person in some category.

Minorities also engage in stereotyping.

C. One measure of prejudice is social distance, that is, how closely people are willing to interact with members of some category. Almost eighty years ago, Emory Bogardus developed the seven-point social distance scale and determined that people felt much more social distance from some categories than from others. A recent study using the same scale reported three major findings:

1. A trend toward greater social acceptance has continued.

2. People see less difference through various minorities.

3. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks may have contributed to low social acceptance of Arabs and Muslims.

D. Racism refers to the belief that one racial category is innately superior or inferior to another.

E. Theories of prejudice:

1. Scapegoat theory holds that prejudice results from frustrations among people who are themselves disadvantaged.

a. A scapegoat is a person or category of people, typically with little power, whom people unfairly blame for their own troubles.

2. Authoritarian personality theory views prejudice as a personality trait in certain individuals.

3. The cultural theory of prejudice argues that prejudice is embedded in culture.

Explains and legitimates existing discrimination, reinforces ethnocentrism.

Not only the privileged are prejudiced.

4. The conflict theory of prejudice proposes that powerful people use prejudice to justify oppressing others and/or to play the less privileged off against each other. Culture wars.

III. Discrimination

Discrimination is an action that involves treating various categories of people unequally.

While prejudice refers to attitudes, discrimination is a matter of action. Like prejudice, it may

be positive or negative.

A. Institutional prejudice and discrimination refers to bias inherent in the operation of society’s institutions.

B. Prejudice and discrimination form a vicious circle based on the Thomas theorem: situations defined as real become real in their consequences.

IV. Majority and Minority: Patterns of Interaction.

A. Pluralism is a state in which racial and ethnic minorities are distinct, but have social parity. Salad bowl. Is America a pluralistic society?

B. Assimilation is the process by which minorities gradually adopt patterns of the dominant culture. Racial traits can diminish over time only through miscegenation, biological reproduction by partners of different racial categories.

C. Segregation refers to the physical and social separation of categories of people. It may be voluntary, but is usually imposed.

De jure vs de facto

E. Genocide is the systematic annihilation of one category of people by another.

V. Race and Ethnicity in the United States.

Conflicting narrative of American identity. Whiteness, revisited. A social and political construction.

In Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois famously argues that whiteness serves as a “public and psychological wage,” delivering to poor whites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a valuable social status derived from their classification as “not-black.” The claims embedded in this thesis—that whiteness provides meaningful “compensation” (Du Bois’s term) for citizens otherwise exploited by the organization of capitalism; that the value of whiteness depends on the devaluation of black existence; and that the benefits enjoyed by whites are not strictly monetary—shaped subsequent efforts to theorize white identity and to grasp the (non)formation of political coalitions in the United States.

A. Native Americans were the original inhabitants of the Americas. Before European contact, they lived in hundreds of distinct societies. Between 1871 and 1924, they were subjected to a policy of forced assimilation. Now they are being encouraged to migrate from reservations to the cities in search of economic opportunity, but they remain far behind whites in educational and economic standing. Many tribes and individuals have recently come together to assert pride in their culture.

Agricultural tribes faired better than hunter/gatherers

2 White Anglo-Saxon-Protestants (WASPs), mostly of English origin, have dominated the U.S. since colonial days. Most came to this country highly skilled and motivated to achieve. Especially in the last century, many WASPs strongly opposed subsequent waves of non-Anglo immigrants. Their power is gradually declining in the twenty-first century.

In 19th Century, resisted immigration of "undesirables" from Ireland, Germany, ect.

Not all in the elite. Scotch/Irish in Appalachia.

C. African Americans came to this country as indentured servants or slaves. This denial of basic human rights was a sharp contradiction to the promise of the American republic, a fact which sociologist Gunnar Myrdal referred to as "the American dilemma." In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery, but after Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws perpetuated the subordinate status of African Americans. In the first part of the twentieth century, a mass migration of African Americans to the cities of the North occurred, followed by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Even today African Americans continue to be economically disadvantaged as a group, a problem exacerbated by the loss of factory jobs that has accompanied America’s move to a service economy. The educational gap between whites and African Americans has narrowed substantially in recent years. Political clout of African Americans has increased substantially in recent decades.

D. Asian Americans make up about 5.6 percent of the United States population. They have a "model minority" image.

"Asians" a Western construction.

1. Chinese immigration started with the Gold Rush. When the economy soured, discrimination increased and harsh laws were enacted limiting further immigration. In response, most Chinese Americans clustered in closed ghettoes called Chinatowns. Assimilation and upward mobility marked the era that began with World War II. Chinese Americans currently outpace the national average economically and educationally, although many living in Chinatowns continue to experience poverty.

Entrepreneurial culture.

2. Japanese Americans also came to this country in the last century to work, and soon experienced legal and social discrimination. During the Second World War many were confined in relocation camps. After the war, many made a dramatic economic recovery, and today this group is above the national average in financial standing. Their upward social mobility has also strongly encouraged cultural assimilation and interracial marriage.

3. More recent Asian immigrants include Koreans and Filipinos. Vietnamese.

a. Large-scale Korean immigration followed the Korean War. Korean Americans often own and operate small businesses.

b. Filipinos enjoy relatively high incomes.

E. Hispanic Americans make up 17 percent of the U.S. population. Largest minority.

1. Like Asians, really very different groups.

2. Most Mexican Americans (or Chicanos) are recent immigrants, though some lived in Mexican territory annexed by the U.S. in the last century. They are well below the national average in economic and educational attainment.

3. Puerto Ricans are American citizens and travel freely between the island and the mainland, especially New York City. "Revolving door." They are the most socially disadvantaged Hispanic minority.

4. Many Cubans fled the 1959 Marxist revolution and settled in Miami and other U.S. cities. Most were well-educated business and professional people and have done relatively well in this country.

F. Affirmative Action: Solution or Problem? There are good reasons to argue for and against affirmative action.

Quotas now illegal; must use more nuanced approach.

Beginning with JFK, serves to level the playing field, counter results of past institutional discrimination. Necessary to change institutional cultures.

Cons: If successful, not needed any more. Divides society: emphasizes differences, pits one group against another. Results in reverse discrimination. Actually favors privileged minorities, not those who really need it.

Social interest in creating a diverse society.

G. White ethnic Americans come from European nations other than Britain. Most experienced substantial prejudice and discrimination when they arrived here in the nineteenth century. Many have now fully assimilated and achieved substantial success.

VI. Race and Ethnicity: Looking ahead.

A. Immigration has generated striking cultural diversity.

B. Many arrivals have much the same prejudice and discrimination experienced by those who came before them.

C. Rise of ethno-nationalism