Sociology of Race and Gender Lecture Notes

Vocabulary flashcards covering key sociological concepts of assimilation, ethnicity, race theories, gender dynamics, and intersectionality.

Straight-line Assimilation

Robert Park's 1920s Universal and linear model for how immigrants assimilate; they first arrive, then settle in, and achieve full assimilation in a newly homogenous country.

Primordialism

Clifford Geertz's term to explain the strength of ethnic ties because they are fixed and deeply felt or primordial ties to one's homeland culture.

Ethnicity

One's ethnic quality or affiliation; it is voluntary, self-defined, nonhierarchical, fluid and multiple, and based on cultural differences rather than physical ones.

Symbolic ethnicity

A nationality identified by later generations of white ethnics, focusing on identifying with a past or future nationality rather than rights and duties of citizenship; it is not constraining, carries no risk of stigma, and offers the pleasure of feeling like an individual.

Scientific Racism

Nineteenth-century theories of race characterizing a period of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race.

Ethnocentrism

The belief that one's own culture or group is superior to others and the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one's own.

Ontological equality

The philosophical and religious notion that all people are created equal.

Color-blind racism

The view that racial inequality is perpetuated by a supposedly color-blind stance that reinforces historical and contemporary inequities, disparate impact, and institutional bias by "ignoring" them in favor of a technically neutral approach.

Essentialist

Arguments explaining social phenomena in terms of natural, biological, or evolutionary inevitabilities.

Hegemonic masculinity

The condition in which men are dominant and privileged, and this dominance and privilege is invisible.

Patriarchy

A nearly universal system involving the subordination of femininity to masculinity.

Glass escalator

The accelerated promotion of men to the top of a work organization, especially in feminized jobs.

Structural Functionalism

A theory, best embodied by Talcott Parsons, in which society's many parts (institutions, norms, traditions, etc.) mesh to produce a stable, working whole that evolves over time.

Sex Role theory

Talcott Parsons's theory that men and women perform sex roles as breadwinners and wives/mothers respectively because the nuclear family is the ideal arrangement in modern societies for reproducing workers.

Intersectionality

The idea that it is critical to understand the interplay between social identities such as race, class, gender, ability status, and sexual orientation, even when social systems like the law treat each category on its own.

Matrix of domination

Intersecting domains of oppression that create a social space of dominance and a unique position within that space based on an individual's identity across gender, age, race, class, sexuality, location, and more.

Hetero-Normativity

The idea that heterosexuality is the default or normal sexual orientation from which other sexualities deviate.