Race and Racism

George Floyd Murder

Police officers killed Floyd single handedly sparking racial justice uprisings

How does the george floyd murder reveal racism as a structural and ideological system, notjust the result of individual actions?

It exposed racism as a systemic issue embedded in institutions like policing, where policies and practices disproportionately harm Black communities

Race

a flawed system of classification, with no biological basis, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population into supposedly discrete groups

Racism

Individuals' thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create or reproduce unequal access to power, privilege, resources, and opportunities based on imagined differences among groups.

Intersectionality

an analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification

Why do we need to understand how systems of power intersect and transform experiences? Why can't we just "add them up"?

Because now we can understand and even intervene how these ideas and institutions shape individual lives and patterns of society

Three reasons humans cannot be separated into biological categories of race

We dont display-->
1. Gene flow- human gene pool is highly integrated
2. Clines- group genetic probabilities cannot predict the genetic makeup of any individual in the group
3. Concordance- the ability to predict the presence of a given trait based on the presence of another related trait

Genotype

the inherited genetic factors that provide the framework for an organism's physical form

phenotype

the way genes are expressed in an organism's physical form as a result of genotype interaction with environmental factors

Rate of genetic similarity between humans

99.99% similar

Racisms"--why do we talk about racisms, plural?

It reflects the variety of ways race has been constructed and how it manifests differently in different times and different places

Race in Haiti and the DR

(racial categories imposed by colonizers) Skin color, religious practice, and language use combine to mark Haitians as racially "other" in the DR (DR aligned themselves with the former colonizers)

How is race deliberately constructed differently on Hispaniola?

DR citizens wanted to create a different identity that contrasted with Haitians who saw themselves as Black and deliberately used many other terms to avoid using the word "black" as a descriptor and emphasizes Dominicans as hispanic (to be more like colonizers)

White supremacy

The belief that White people are biologically different from and superior to people of other races.

Whiteness

A culturally constructed concept originating in 1691 Virginia designed to establish clear boundaries of who is white and who is not, a process central to the formation of U.S. racial stratification.

How did some immigrant groups achieve white status?

1. Assimilation – Adopting dominant white norms (language, culture).

2. Economic mobility – Gaining wealth/status tied to whiteness.

3. Legal changes – Being classified as "white" in laws/census (e.g., 1924 U.S. immigration quotas favored Europeans).

4. Racial hierarchy shifts – Contrast with oppressed groups (e.g., Black Americans) reinforced their "white" status.

Jim Crow

laws implemented after the US Civil war to enforce segregation legally, particularly in the South, after the end of slavery

Hypodescent

sometimes called the "one drop of blood rule"; the assignment of children of racially "mixed" unions to the subordinate group

How does this work in the opposite way as "blood quantum" for Indigenouspeoples? How does it reveal the functioning of race as a tool?

Hypodescent tried to classify as many peole as black as possible through requiring the smallest amount of black blood to be black to reserve privileges for true whites whereas indigenous people need to now prove a high degree of blood ancestry to be marked as indigenous

Nativism

the favoring of certain long-term inhabitants, namely whites, over new immigrants

Racialization

the process of categorizing, differentiating, and attributing a particular racial character to a person or group of people

White privilege

your life is not made more difficult by being white

How does Peggy MacIntosh's famous piece Unpacking the Invisible Knapsackillustrate white privilege

detailing the unearned advantages and systemic benefits that white individuals experience in everyday life, often without being aware of them (it is hard to see things you never experience, but that doesn't mean they aren't real)

individual racism

personal prejudiced beliefs and discriminatory actions based on race

microaggresions

common, everyday verbal or behavioral indignities and slights that communicate hostile, derogatory, and negative messages about someone's race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion

weathering

stress related accelerated biological aging

institutional racism

patterns by which racial inequality is structured through key cultural institutions, policies, and systems

racial ideology

a set of popular ideas about race that allows the discriminatory behaviors of individuals and institutions to seem reasonable, rational, and normal

colorblindness

"I dont see race" - youre not acknowledging the fact that there is a problem of inequality

13th Film

Examines how the 13th amendments loophole, allowing forced labor as punishment for crime, perpetuated systemic racism through mass incarceration.