Anthropology 1000 Chapter 5 - Race and Racism

UCONN

Genotype

Inherited genetic factors that provide a framework for an organism’s physical form; these factors constitute the total genetic endowment that the organisms can pass down to its descendents. 

Phenotype

How genes are expressed in an organism’s physical form (visible and invisible) as a result of its genotype’s interaction with environmental factors, nutrition, disease, and stress. 

Racialization

The social process of assigning a racial identity to a group of people based on perceived physical or cultural traits, often leading to their categorization as a distinct “race.” 

Race

Flawed system of classification, with no biological bias, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide groups. 

Race essemtialism

Humans that can be classified into a small number of races, fixed with biology and behavioral differences among them.

• We have 99.99% percent of commonality with other races.

Darker skin is concentrated near the equator and lighter is found farther away because….

this is a long term evolutionary adaptive trait. Darker skin protects us from the US radiation near the equator. Humans have migrated a lot out of ancestral locations though so this isn’t 100% maintained.

Ruha Benjamin

“Race is a technology” Understands race as a tool that can be used to create and maintain social hierarchies and power structures, influencing everything from historical laws to digital algorithms. 

Hypodescent

• The assignment of children of racially mixed unions to the subordinate group.

  • Subordinate children of anybody who was racialized.

Mestizaje

A common racial ideology in many Latin American countries that says that everyone is between mixed indigenous and European ancestry. 

• Common in many Latin American countries. Usually not accurate

Racial Ideologies

A set of popular ideas about race that allows the discriminatory behaviors of individual and institutions to seem reasonable, rational, and normal.

Example

• Christians v Non-Christians

• Pre-Conquest, Jews, And Roma

• Biblical Theories (Children of Ham)

• Scientific Theories

Conquest

Military and political domination, often paired with religious justification, that shaped who could be enslaved or excluded. 

Color Line

Social and legal boundary seperating people into a racial hierchy, especially between “whiteness” and “blackness”

• Fundamentally the binary structure we are stuck with today.

1662 Law

Children’s status followed that of the mother, allowing enslavers to enslave their own children and create a self-reproducing labor force. Sexual Slavery - Thomas Jefferson openly supported.

Social Pyramid in Virginia

Elite planter class (Small), Large enslaved African population, Indentured white servents 

1680-1682 First Slave Code in Virginia

Established differeential treatment based on newly codified racial categories

• Slaves could not

  • Travel w/o a permit

  • Be educated

  • Assembly publicly

  • Own weapons or property

• These codes shaped peoples understanding of race. Association in people’s minds.

Whiteness is Hegemonic

Maaning that it is not just law that maintains whiteness. It’s our entire cultural system that does this. Things that are understof culturally become treated as the norm. 

Slavery Abolition Act 1834

Britain outlaws slavery in its colonies

• Result of over 100 years of abolitionists fighting against

• US slaveowners focused even more on producing their labor force domestically

• Time of enlightenment - People looking for other explanations of the world around them.

Race Science

How does a secular society create the justification for social hierarchies, slavery and systematic oppression?

“Scientific Theories”

• Polygenism

• Monogenism

• Racial Typologies

• Social Darwinism

• Racial Hygiene

• Genetic Race

Polygenism

Theorized that human races were from different origins/species and variations is due to innate and immutable differences. Major proponents were Samuel Morton and Louis Agassiz.

Monogenism

Theorized that human’s races evolved from a singular origin and constitutive one species and variations due to adaptations to environmental differences.

Samuel George Morton (1799-1851)

Interested in humans and phisiology 

• Built a human skull collection from around the world

• Large skulll = large brain

Paul Broca

• Found Broca’s area in the brain

• Look at someone’s skull, see traits about them. (False)

De.Stephen Jay Gould 1981

• Replicated Broca’s studies and found mismeasurements and data manipulation.

• Determined that Broca and his followers used faulty science to attempt to justify their social biases.

William Montague Cobb

First African American to earn a PhD in Anthropology (1932)

• Howard University (Prof)

• Demonstrated there was no difference racial anatomical between Black athletes and white athletes

  • Jessie Owens (Black American went to the Olympics. Won medals. Many claimed that blacks are good at running to make up for their intelligence)

Settler Colonization

• A form of colonists in which one group (settler-colonists) seeks to permanently take the lands of another group, replacing Indigenous people and their political institutions with themselves and their own institutions  

• Race was/is a key technology in the US settler colony—it served to create a rationalization and justification for stealing Indigenous lands and African labor.  

Individual Racism

Personal prejudiced beliefs and discriminatory actions based on base 

• Example: Microaggressions

Institutional Racisms

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

• Mechanism for institutional racisms include: the law, the courts, healthcare, education, corporate practices, etc.  

KKK

Domestic terrorism club. Murder, terrifying, political control formally enslaved people. Generally, it ran rapidly around the southern US.

Jim Crow Laws

• Revisiting of slave codes, laws that had made to been used against black people 

• State terrorism 

• Local Levels & State levels  

• Primarily about segregation  

• Laws saying black Americans could not be unhoused. If they were they could be jailed, then ‘rented out’ to work on

• Extra: Local and state laws enacted across the South following the terrorism of the KK and re-taking of Southern governments by white supporters of the confederacy  

• Mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the South, effectively barring Black Americans from quality education, healthcare, access to transportation, commerce, voting rights, and fair process in the court.  

2nd Wave of the KKK

• Cultural resurgence in the form of popular media  

• The Clansmen 1905 

• Birth of a Nation 1905 

• Methodist preacher William Joseph Simmons recreates the clan in 1915 

• Becomes bigger than the original klan ever was 

• By mid 1920s is estimated to have over 4 million members in across all US states 

• In Addition to being anti-black, the KKK was now anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-communist, and anti-organized labor.  

• Why now? Russian Revolution, WW1, Wave of immigration following WW1 

• Mass instability in the US and government changes create large populations of immigrants seeking to go to America. We have a lot of people moving in. Many form labor unions, talking about workers' rights.  

• KKK decides they cannot handle this. Becomes protestant. They were very particular about the type of white they want to promote.  

Nativism

The favoring of certain long(er)-term inhabitants (in the US, white settlers) over new(er) immigrants)

Woman in the KKK 

• Organized boycotts of non-protestant bisinesses 

• Members served on local and state boards of health, red cross auxilaries, hospital boards, etc.  

• Involved in Infectious disease outreach in immigrant communities 

• Believed immigrants were dirty and brought disease. Control over this was big. 

• Work to promote sterilization, punishment for mixed-race relationships  

Redlining

Systematic denial of services—typically financial services like mortgages or insurance—to residents of certain areas based on race, ethnicity or economic status. 

• Leads to wealth gaps, segregation, underinvestment

  • Cannot improve neighborhoods

Impacts of Redlining

• Wealth gaps—generations of Black and Brown communities prevented from building home equity 

• Redlined areas still have lower property values and homeownership rates, trapping generations into renting.  

• Housing instability—residents more likely to experience housing instability (and thus homelessness) and higher housing costs  

• Little to no tenant protections 

• Communities that are constantly being broken up or moving around.  

• Disinvestment—lack of investment in infrastructure, lack of businesses = “urban blight”, fewer mature trees, higher costs  

• Broken sidewalks, led lined pipes, no trees (aesthetically pleasing but having no trees brings down the temperature),  

• Poorer health outcomes.  

Structural Racism - The Interstate System

• Under construction 1956-1992 across the country 

• Between just 1957 and 1977, nearly 1 million people were displaced by the Interstate system—most of them communities of color 

• Isolated many rural communities, took people away from state roads, mountain roads 

• Highways (usually intentionally) created physical barriers between white and black neighborhoods.  

Race is no biological, but racialization has a biological impact—it effects peoples’ _____? 

Biology

• Impact we can see 

• Different rates of cancer, asthma 

• Because, in our country at this time, our system creates conditions/environment where its more likely that people forced into this type of housing to contract asthma.  

Structural Racism — Medical Racism

• Medical racism occurs when the patient’s race influences medical professionals’ perceptions, treatments, and/or diagnostic decisions 

• Also, encompasses policies and infrastructures that prevent racial minorities from accessing quality, respectful medical healthcare  

Antebellum Race Science Beliefs

Differences in thickness of skin, lung function and capacity, ability to feel pain, musculature, basic anatomy.

Spirometers

• Patient takes a deep breath and blows as hard as possible 

• Measuring the volume of air inspired anbd expired by lungs  

• Race correction 

• Automatic, technician may check the chart of appearance and estimate what their identity is, put into machine. Spirometry assumes blacks have lower lung capacity than white/Asians.  

• Test small black child for asthma, and plug in that race correction, then we assume they have a 10-15% lower lung capacity, it will change the diagnosis. Less likely to get treatment.  

• In the realm of “normal for black children” 

• Under-diagnosed however due to redlining they’re more likely to have it