SOC exam 1 concepts

symbolic ethnicity

idea that descendants of immigrants want to know their heritage, but usually only do through symbols

can exist because ethnic discrimination isn’t consequential anymore

• Mary Waters

factors contributing to SE

• immigration act of 1964

  • congress was concerned too many people they did not want here were coming so they placed quotas

  • denied east asians 

  • many slots were unfilled 

  • was reversed in 1965

• civil rights movement

  • also an anti-war and feminist movement

  • at this time, children of white immigrants questioned who they wanted to be, not just plain vanilla  

• Han’s third generation return

  • grandson wanted to remember the grandparent’s ancestry

  • wanted a connection to that part of their identity

assumptions of SE

• rituals and practices must be accurate

• ethnicity is only salient when white people want it to be

  • they choose when to be ethnic

  • st patty’s day

• ethnicity is optional/ situational

implicit racism

Unconscious racial bias rooted in stereotypes

• the expectations people have of blacks (or women, or asians, or the poor), not because of who they as as individuals, but because of the group they belong to

• implicit racism theory

  • even non-racists associate positive traits with whites and negative traits with blacks

    • implicit racism tested by IAT

sense of group position

• SPG reveals that it is possible to be invested in the racial hierarchy even if you do not personally engage in discriminatory practices

• the components of SGP help us to understand the function of race in society:

1. a feeling of superiority

2.  a feeling that the subordinate group is intrinsically different and alien

3. a sense of proprietary claim

4.  a fear of encroachment on the part of subordinates; threatens the position of the dominant group

cannot have racism without all 4

• to maintain the hierarchy, white people must be convinced that their unearned position at the top is justifiable because they are the superior group

• Blumer - 1958

Plessy v ferguson

• 1/8 black man arrested on train car

• sat in white section and was told on by someone who recognized him to be a member of the black community

• white passing

• Louisiana SC said- he was black so in wrong

• US SC agreed and ruled separate but equal

• occurred in 1896

sociological perspective

three essential aspects:

-       Sociologists view society as an object to be studied

o   External to us that can be analyzed and evaluated

-       Sociologists understand relationships by looking for patterns

o   Can be identified through longitudinal analysis

§  Focused on the same individuals at different points in time

§  Anette Lareau: families up and down class ladder

o   Or though cross-sectional studies

§  Studying different individuals in different settings at the same time

-       Sociologists see society as a human construction

o   Human’s beings make rules and establish expectation about behavior according to rules and humans decided how humans who break the rules will be evaluated

social identity

• means the part of a person’s sense of self that comes from the groups they belong to and how others see those groups

• these distinctions as boundaries that can or cannot be crossed

• external

  • how other groups define

• internal

  • how group defines itself