Race & Ethnicity

Race

A group/category of people who share physical and cultural

traits as well as a common ancestry. Usually imposed on people.

The idea of race implies biological reality. But is this true?

● Linked to notions of white or European superiority.

Example: Census categories for race have changed many times. Why

would they change if race is biological?

Have you ever felt wrongly racially categorized?

What physical traits correspond with race?

What biological traits do we use to

determine someoneʼs race?

Why not other traits that have a

genetic basis?

How do certain physical traits get

linked to notions of superiority and

inferiority?

Ethnicity

A group identity based on notions of similar and shared

history, culture, and kinship. Usually a self-identity.

Has a sociocultural foundation designed for belonging, rather

than the foundation of race in exploitation.

● Flexibility, malleability, and ethnic “options.”

Example: Some people more strongly identify with one piece of their

ethnic background even when they may have many parts.

Where do you learn about your ethnicity?

Pilar Ossorio says, “Thereʼs as much or more diversity and genetic

difference within any racial group as there is between people of

different racial groups.”

If race doesnʼt have a genetic or biological basis… why is it

important to study? What real consequences does race have on

individuals and society?

So why does race exist?

Because of racism, to create a racial class

hierarchy.

Racism

refers to both (1) the belief that races are populations

whose physical differences are linked to significant cultural and

social differences within a hierarchy, and (2) the practice of

subordinating races believed to be inferior

Beliefs and actions at the individual and institutional levels.

the social construction of race

The social construction of race means recognizing that race has no biological basis, but is created within society, with profound effects for all of us.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox.

The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye.

-Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them.

Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant.

The most powerful racial category is often invisible: whiteness.

The benefit of being in power is that whites can imagine that they are the norm and that only other people have race

Groups such as Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews were popularly defined as non-citizens and non-white when they first arrived, and then became white.

What we see as white today is not the same as it was 100 years ago.

Today, few Americans have an image in their minds of what an Irish American should look like. Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could.

Chinese and Japanese people look no more ‘similar’ or ‘different’ from one another than Irish Americans do from French Americans.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t differences as a matter of statistical distribution, but only that what we think we know about race has to be learned, and that what people ‘know’ and ‘see’ as salient and obvious changes over time.

The path to justice therefore involves attacking the prerogative to categorise people in order to justify their exploitation or colonisation.

It’s not about a token embrace of multicultural colour: it’s about power, and power is far too wily for us to expect it to stand still and be overtaken by demographic change.

when it comes to fighting racism, we can’t rely on demographic shifts to do the work for us.

Instead, if we recognise that race looks solid but is shifting, we can find additional ways to destabilise the structures of racial inequality.

Getting rid of racism requires clarity about the nature of the enemy. The way to defeat white supremacy is to destroy it.

The US will truly be ‘majority non-white’ only when white is no longer the privileged citizenship category, when white is no more meaningful than the archaic Octoroon or Irish. This is not to discount the anxiety about cultural loss conjured by talk of an imagined colourblind future, but to recognise the inextricability of racial identities and power inequality. With work, perhaps the next expansion of whiteness will be into oblivion.

Race

refers to a group of people who share physical and cultural traits as well as a common ancestry. It is a social construction and has no biological basis.

Ethnicity

refers to a group identity based on notions of similar and shared history, culture, and kinship.

Racism

refers to the belief that some races are superior to others, as well as the practice of subordinating races believed to be inferior.

Why do sociologists argue that race

is a social and historical construction?

• Why is it important to understand that the idea of race is a modern invention?

How old is racism? How is race distinct from previous ways of thinking about human difference? There are historical precedents to the idea of race,

, including the Spanish Inquisition and the subjugation of the Irish by the English.

Slavery existed

ong before the invention of the idea of race.

When the Spanish colonists arrived in the Americas

they displayed extreme cruelty to the native people of the Americas.

Enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas

to meet labor needs.

The idea of race emerged to justify

slavery and colonization.

• When was the idea of race invented?

Can you imagine a world in which racial classifications had no importance? Why or why not?

How did the writers of the U.S. Constitution think of slavery?

• Although the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” nearly half of the authors were slaveowners.

• Slavery was not abolished in the United States until 1865.

Why were slavery and freedom in tension during the writing of the Declaration of Independence?

What are today’s prevailing racial ideologies in the United States?

In what ways do those ideologies work to justify the current racial hierarchy?

How did the Indian Removal Act affect Native Americans?

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Native Americans due to forced displacements.

How were the justifications for Indian Removal distinct from those used for slavery?

What role did science play in the propagation of racism?

From simple classification schemes to more complex endeavors, bias has affected scientific attempts to explain differences among racial groups.

How did the unconscious bias of nineteenth-century scientists influence their measurements of various racial groups?

What biases toward race might be present in today’s sciences and social sciences?

During the Spanish Inquisition, there was discrimination against people who were___ and _____.

Jewish; Muslim

According to Carlous Linnaeus, the _______ were White, muscular, and governed by laws.

Europaenus

There are two parts to racism. Part one is the belief that races are populations whose ______differences are linked to significant ________and _________ differences within a hierarchy.

physical; cultural; social

Part two of racism is the practice of _________ races believed to be inferior.

subordinating

An ideology is a set of principles and ideas that benefits the dominant group. The racial ideologies that operate today reflect our times and are rooted in the history of the Americas

Before the conquest of the Americas, there was no worldview that separated all of humanity into distinct races (

In order to understand race, you must recognize

it is a social construct.