race and ethnicity

racial essentialism (lecture, video)

the idea that race/ethnicity is an essential quality of a person; biologically real that is natural and universal

• race and ethnicity are socially and historically constructed

racial classification in the us vs. brazil (lecture)

US

• black-white distinction based on ancestry

• hypodescent (child of a mixed-race union is deemed subordinate)

• one drop rule (1/32 rule)

Brazil

• race as a spectrum, based on variation in skin tone

• range of nuanced categories with shades of black, brown, light

• racism is real, but operates differently (wealth ‘whitens’)

social construction of race and ethnicity (lecture, desmond and emirbayer, video)

five social-historical factors

1. capitalism + imperialism + slave trade

2. the rise of egalitarian values

3. the pre-racial concept of the savage

4. pseudo-scientific legitimization of racist theories (social darwinism)

5. legal enforcement of racial categories and racial domination

pre-racial categories (lecture)

territorial identity (native vs stranger)

religion (believer vs heathen)

civilized vs barbaric

invention of the anglo-american idea of race (lecture)

reproduction of racial and ethnic inequalities (desmond and emirbayer)

race =

1. symbolic category

2. based on phenotype or ancestry

3. specific to social/historical contexts

4. “natural”

race vs ethnicity

race

• phenotype

• inherited through ancestry

• sharply bounded

ethnicity

• shared culture

• inherited socially

• more permeable boundaries