Intro to Race and Ethnicity Midterm

Vocabulary flashcards covering core sociological concepts, legal frameworks, constitutional amendments, immigration policies, and historical land dispossession.

Race

A human-invented way of categorizing people, usually based on certain physical characteristics, heritage, or cultural practices, with concepts differing across cultures and changing over time.

Ethnicity

A shared cultural identity, often based in shared traditions, language, religion, nationality, heritage, or history.

Racism

Discrimination or prejudice toward people because of their race, typically including inequalities and power imbalances rooted in American social, political, or economic systems and institutions.

Racialization

The process by which racial or ethnic categories and identities are constructed within a society.

Intersectionality

How a person's multiple social identities (such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, etc.) intersect or overlap in ways that can lead to different combinations of social inequalities or social privileges.

Xenophobia

The fear or hatred of people because they come from a different country or culture, or are perceived as foreign.

Historical Memory

How a society chooses to remember or forget its past through commemoration versus erasure, involving the creation of national mythologies usually based on modern political climates rather than historical reality.

Settler Colonialism

A structural system (not just a single event) where colonizers come to stay and "destroy to replace" Indigenous populations to acquire land and resources.

Orientalism

How the "Western World" perceives the "East" (primarily Asia and the Middle East) as exotic, while stereotyping it as backward, barbaric, and incompatible with the West; historically used to justify colonialism.

White Privilege

The idea that white people have certain unearned societal advantages over non-white people in certain circumstances, which can be formal or informal and is not necessarily universal.

Blood Quantum

An arbitrary, colonially imposed mathematical measurement of "Indianness" (tracked through fractions) meant to write Native Americans out of existence through "paper genocide".

Racial Profiling

When law enforcement targets people based on their race, ethnicity, or religion rather than evidence of criminal behavior (criminalizing people simply for who they are).

BIPOC / POC

Terms standing for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (and People of Color), which can be problematic because they lump all non-white people together into a binary of white vs. everyone else.

Three-Fifths Clause (U.S. Constitution, 1789)

A constitutional clause mandating that enslaved people be counted as "three fifths of all other persons" for congressional representation and direct taxes.

13th Amendment (1865)

A constitutional amendment that ended slavery "except as punishment for a crime".

14th Amendment (1868)

A constitutional amendment that guaranteed birthright citizenship and equal protection regardless of race.

15th Amendment (1870)

A constitutional amendment that prohibited the denial of voting rights based on race, color, or previous servitude.

Anti-Miscegenation Laws

Laws enacted in 41 states (beginning in the 1600s) making it illegal for white people to marry people of color.

Loving v. Virginia (1967)

Supreme Court case that finally struck down all remaining state anti-miscegenation laws nationwide.

Tribal Sovereignty

The legal/political status of Native American nations, proven by the hundreds of nation-to-nation treaties ratified by the U.S. government.

Hispano Land Grants

Millions of acres granted by Spain/Mexico in the Southwest that Mexican Americans ("Hispanos") lost after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) when the U.S. failed to protect their rights.

African American Land Dispossession

The loss of over 95% of the 15 million acres owned by Black farmers in 1910 (retaining about 1 million acres today) due to discriminatory laws, violence, and systemic policies.

Asian American Land Rights

A property rights issue defined by alien land laws that barred Asian immigrants from owning property or gaining citizenship, blocking them from building generational wealth.

Cherokee Freedmen

Formerly enslaved people guaranteed citizenship in the Cherokee Nation via an 1866 treaty, whose equal tribal rights were affirmed by the federal government in 2017 after decades of challenges.