Anthropology Chapter 5: Race and Racism

Race

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

Racism

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

Intersectionality

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

Colonialism

The centerpiece of European global economic activity, combining economic, military, and political control of people and places to fuel Europe’s economic expansion and to enhance the continent’s position in the emerging global economy

White Supremacy

The belief that non-Whites are biologically different, intellectually inferior, and not fully human in a spiritual sense

Whiteness

A culturally constructed concept originating in 1691 in 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

Segregation laws throughout the South legally enforcing the boundaries between White and Black Americans in housing, education, voting rights, property ownership, and access to public services

Hypodescent

The assignment of children of racially “mixed” unions to the subordinate group; one-drop rule; if someone is black and white, automatically Black

Nativism

The desire to favor native inhabitant over new immigrants; developed in wave of increasing immigration

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

Microaggression

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

Racial inequality is structured through key cultural institutions, polices, and systems (housing, education, health, etc.)

Racial Ideology

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