Race and Racism Flashcards

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from a lecture on race and racism in cultural anthropology.

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.

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.

Concordance

The ability to predict the presence of a given trait based on the presence of another related trait.

Miscegenation

A demeaning historical term for interracial marriage.

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.

Jim Crow

Laws implemented after the U.S. 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.

Nativism

The favoring of certain long-term inhabitants, namely White people, over new immigrants.

Racialization

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

Individual racism

Personal prejudiced beliefs and discriminatory actions based on race.

Microaggressions

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

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.