Sociology 2nd Test Terms/Concepts

Ethnicity

“A system for classifying people who are believed to share common descent, based on perceived cultural similarities.”

Race

“A system for classifying people who are believed to share common descent, based on perceived innate physical similarities.”

Constructivism

“The view that social categories such as race, ethnicity, or gender are social creations, not biological facts.”

Essentialism

“Races are natural groupings whose boundaries are determined by deep-seated and unchangeable traits that are found within each individual. It is the opposite of the constructivist view of social identities.

Why do we challenge essentialism?

Historical accuracy: racial categories change over time, and a contemporary conception of race only begins to emerge during the early days of European Colonialism. Geographic specificity: racial categories vary by location, and, in tandem with their categorical historicity, reflect the socio-political conditions of that region. Scientific accuracy: DNA in humans is remarkably not diverse; we share about 99.9% of our genetic code with one another, and what variation is present is higher within racial groups than between. There is no discernible “race gene”. Sociological analysis: we aim to emphasize the social dimensions of race, particularly how racial categories and inequality become structured in human societies and how we are socialized to interpret racial categories; institutionalizing biological essentialism is one way that happens.

Racial Formation Theory

Devised by Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986), this theory argues that…

• Race and racial categories are “socially constructed,” rather than emerging naturally from biological differences

• The content and relevance of racial categories are determined by social, historical, political, and economic forces

Race & Racial Categories: Micro-level

socialization, the Looking-Glass self, performance and interpretation

Race & Racial Categories: Macro-Level

structure, institutions and their organizations, ideologies

unstable/malleable

changing in response to conditions) and structured/rigid

structured/rigid

embedded in institutions

Native-Americans and Tribal Status

Because much of the history of the United States is tied to land occupation and displacement of the native populations living there, the Census underwent many changes in how it counted Native-Americans—and why. The biggest concerns on the part of the federal government were land, taxation, and citizenship.

One-Drop (Rule)

Historical belief in the US that having “___ of negro blood” made a person black (that is, any Afro-Caribbean ancestry) Shared belief among Americans during slavery (1700s-1865) and through the Reconstruction (1864-1877) Formalized in law in 1910s-1930s in Jim Crow South: Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia (and via “fractional laws” elsewhere)

Blood Quantum Rule

(native ancestors / total ancestors) Shared belief among Americans during westward expansion, including the Indian Removal Act (1830) and Trail of Tears (1830-1850) Formalized in law by the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934, which sought to provide resources and services to Native-Americans in response to previous efforts to culturally assimilate the indigenous American population

Racialization

Refers, broadly, to the process by which individuals and groups come to be understood…

• …as a racial or pseudo-racial group, different from the dominant racial or ethnic group (in the US, whites with mostly western European ancestry)

• …as differing socially, culturally, biologically, etc. because of that racial categorization (e.g., “Blacks are inherently better at sports.”) Racial meanings are constructed around the privileged/dominant race group in a society.

Importantly, racialization often draws from otherwise ethnic features—dress, language, religion, etc.—as well as class and nation in racial construction.

Mutually Constitutive Levels in Racism

• Prejudice

• Discrimination

• Institutional Racism

• Systemic Oppression

Mutually Constitutive

Means they produce and reify (strengthen, make more “real”) each other

Prejudice

Beliefs or attitudes held about entire groups based on subjective, selective, or inaccurate information. They lead to “prejudgment” of the individuals associated with groups. These can be overt beliefs, such as conscious stereotypes, or covert attitudes and cognitive effects, such as implicit bias.

Stereotype

“A simplified generalization about a group (for example, women or men) that is often false or exaggerated”

Impacts of Stereotypes on the observer:

Mischaracterization, over-generalization, and false assumptions. Interpretation of identical behaviors as different depending on person observed

Impacts of Stereotypes on the observed:

Conforming to expectations of stereotypes/biased representations, including

• Internalized prejudice/stereotyping, including the changing or altering of one’s own behavior or attitudes via “The Looking-Glass Self”

• Stereotype threat, or behavioral changes emerging from feeling at risk of conforming to a stereotype and reinforcing negative beliefs about a group.

• - Heightened impression management, or explicit efforts to resist, avoid, and denounce prejudicial interpretations

Discrimination

Any behavior, practice, or policy that harms, excludes, or disadvantages individuals on the basis of their group membership. Discrimination is often used by dominant groups to control opportunities and reduce the challenges from subordinate groups, with or without explicit intent.

Discrimination: Explicit, Intended, or By Law

Individual/ Group: A company actively refusing to hire Black or Latinx applicants

Formal/ Organizational: Racial profiling in suspect profile construction and arrests

Discrimination: Implicit, Unintended, or Informal

Individual/ Group: A company only hiring Ivy League graduates (~7% Black | ~15% Latinx vs. ~12% | ~21% across all 4-year universities)

Formal/ Organizational: Racial disparities in neighborhood policing, incl. reinforcement through data modeling

Housing Segregation as Discrimination: Explicit, Intended, or By Law

Individual/ Group: Racial Covenants

Formal/ Organizational: Redlining

Housing Segregation as Discrimination: Implicit, Unintended, or Informal

Individual/ Group: Racial Steering & Blockbusting

Formal/ Organizational: Subprime Mortgages

Institutional Racism

Occurs when the actions or policies of organizations or social institutions exclude, disadvantage, or harm members of particular groups. When more than one form of discrimination impacts a group’s overall interaction with the institution, and such occurrences are not solely or majority caused by specific individuals.

• Individual prejudices and discriminatory action

• Discriminatory policies

• Broader organizational or institutional culture, structure, and operations

Systemic Oppression

Patterned prejudice and discrimination, embedded in interlocking institutions, organizations, and social systems, which magnify and reproduce inequality over time.

Racism is sufficiently “systemic” if discriminatory practices are…

• Widespread and patterned

• Embedded in institutionalized policies and practices

• Intersecting across multiple social systems and institutions, such that discrimination and inequality are reinforced and strengthened

Recidivism

Repetition of criminal offenses

Strong predictor of recidivism

Unemployment

Explain the Cyclical Process of Oppression

• We may hold prejudicial attitudes or implicit biases, which can inform both deliberate and unconscious discriminatory behaviors.

• These discriminatory behaviors, if employed by authorities, lead to the establishment of policies and systems.

• Those policies and practices, later institutionalized and interlocking with other institutionalized forms systemically, negatively impact communities of color on a large scale.

• The negative impacts (poverty, unemployment, incarceration, etc.) reinforce our prejudices and serve to justify further discrimination.

Forms of Racial Stratification

• Economic Inequality: Income, Wealth, Educational Attainment, Mobility

• Health Outcomes: Mortality, Life Expectancy, Morbidity

• Social Control: Arrest and Incarceration Rates, Targeted/Predictive Policing

• - These dimensions and measures are adopted by sociologists as indicators of broader “systemic racism.” When taken together, these indicators suggest that individual acts of prejudice and discrimination are not the primary issue in examining racial stratification; persistent, widespread, institutionalized, and interlocking systemic racism produces these stratified outcomes

“Model Minority” Myth

This is an assumption that features in Asian culture, parenting, values, etc. have resulted in their “success,” and thus they are evidence that racial minorities can succeed with better practices, attitudes, and perseverance.

This is a myth (it is not true), and has regularly served to vilify or punish other racial minorities while ignoring inequality within the category of “Asian”

Data Disaggregation

“The breaking down of groups or categories into meaningful sub- categories—for example, race disaggregated by national background or gender—for data interpretation.”

Disaggregated data can reveal forms of stratification and inequality hidden in “aggregated” data.

“The breaking down of groups or categories into meaningful sub- categories—for example, race disaggregated by national background or gender—for data interpretation.” Disaggregated data can reveal forms of stratification and inequality hidden in “aggregated” data.

True or False: Upper-class resources and status can mitigate (though not erase) the impact of racial hierarchy, especially in cases where economic resources and markers of status, like education, can be mobilized.

True

Intersectionality

The ways multiple dimensions of social life, including race, ethnicity, class, and gender, intersect and interact—is important for understanding stratification and inequality.

“Historical Materialism”

Refers to the understanding that material relations—economy, technology, labor, extraction from the environment—shape and organize social life—institutions, social systems, representational categories

Idealist View of Racism:

Psychological; focuses on stereotypes and racism as “flawed thinking” on the part of “bad people”

Secondary Views of Racism:

Race is “secondary” to class; racism is the result of deliberate power grabs; race is a tool to divide the oppressed; etc

Materialist View of Racism

Modern and contemporary societies (like the US) are built on materialist racial orders, ones that categorize and classify individuals into hierarchical relations. These hierarchies are maintained through institutions and social interaction.

Materialist Racial Orders

slavery, genocide, caste, exploitation and oppression

The ______________ view of racism posits that modern and contemporary societies are built on racial orders, which place individuals into hierarchical relations—not by chance, but by design. These hierarchies are then maintained by institutions and social interaction.

Social Constructivist

In 1989, Feminist and Literary Scholar Peggy McIntosh wrote “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” She argued:

That lack of ability to “see” (because of their hierarchical position) can produce behaviors, attitudes, and modes of understanding the world that reproduce racism even if the white person explicitly and deliberately does not wish to be racist.

Explain Hierarchical Racial Interests

Part of materialist racism’s focus is on how racism exists and perpetuates regardless of the actual intent or feelings of those who benefit. That is, racial outcomes are not about individual desires; they emerge from hierarchical social location.

Put another way, white folks have “racial interests” (or “positional interests”)* that differ from people of color’s “racial interests”

Distancing Strategies

Refer to techniques employed by whites to dismiss or ignore racism and deny personal responsibility. These are often unintentional or default responses; even the most well-intentioned white people employ them unwittingly

Color-blindness

is a distancing strategy that seeks to erase or ignore racial difference by (1) suggesting race doesn’t matter, (2) focusing on idealized equality over current issues of racial stratification, or (3) arguing that individuals who do see race are the “real racists.

Other Distancing Strategies - Relocation

suggesting that racism is enacted…

• elsewhere: “it’s so much worse in the South”

• in a different time: “segregation is a thing of the past”

• by different people: “you make it sound like I’m as bad as the KKK!”

Other Distancing Strategies - Progress Farming

Suggesting that we focus on how much things have improved rather than on persistent issues of racial stratification.

• “It’s so much better in the US today now that civil rights are protected”

Other Distancing Strategies - Redirection

moving the conversation away from racism to the intention, goodwill, attitudes, or feelings of white people.

• “I didn’t mean to sound racist!”

• “I promise I’m a good person”

or expressions of discomfort, such as…

• emotional outbursts to focus on the frustration of white people rather than the injustices of racial stratification

• “tone-policing,” or dictating how people of color can communicate about race, usually with the suggestion that their anger or passion is discomforting to whites

“Active Unlearning”

• Acknowledge that racism is structural, and thus not merely a problem of flawed individual psychology

• Embrace that race “matters,” even if not biologically real and even if this acknowledgement seems counter to some assumptions of American meritocracy

• Resist the urge to emphasize intent and feelings; focus instead on outcomes and effects of behaviors

• Question default reactions to data on racism or being “called out” for racist behavior; that is, work to avoid resorting to distancing strategies out of comfort

Biological Sex

Assigned status based on physiological and/or reproductive traits deemed

meaningful by a society or culture.

Gender-Self Conception

One’s own understanding or identification of one’s own gender, given

social constraints, especially pre-existing categories and ideas of gender

Gender Expression

Outward representations of gender in performance, demeanor, attire, and speech

Sexual Orientation

One’s romantic and sexual inclinations, typically (especially in contemporary American society/culture) coded by your own gender and the gender of possible/ideal partners; also one’s self-conception of one’s own romantic and sexual inclinations, given social constraints, especially pre-existing categories and ideas of sexuality

Constructivist

"The view that social categories such as race, ethnicity, or gender are social creations, not biological facts."

Essentialism

The view that categories are innate, usually biological, and unchanging/unchangeable.

Chromosomal Determinism

Subset of biological determinism that argues that an individual’s behavioral traits, social roles, or intelligence are directly dictated by their chromosomal makeup (e.g., XX or XY)

Why were sex and gender categorized as two separate things?

Early feminists saw:

(1) gender roles-expectations of gender performance-varied substantia tween cultures and even among races/classes within the same society; al

• (2) the gender expectations placed upon women, in particular, were usually presented as opposite to or complementary of men's

Gender

“The ways that social forces create differences between men's and women's behavior, preferences, treatment, and opportunities and the
characteristics of men and women that reflect these forces."