Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: Ch. 5 Race and Racism

race

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

Racism

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

Genotype

the inherited genetic factors that provide the framework for an organism's physical form

Phenotype

the way genes are expressed in an organism's physical form as a result of genotype interaction with environmental factors

Colonialism

the practice by which a nation-state extends political, economic, and military power beyond its own borders over an extended period of time to secure access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets in other countries or regions

Miscegenation

a demeaning historical term for interracial marriage

white supremacy

the belief that whites are biologically different and superior to people of other races

Whiteness

A culturally constructed concept originating in 1691 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

Laws implemented after the U.S. Civil War to enforce segregation legally, particularly in the South, after the end of slavery.

Hypodescent

sometimes called the "one drop of blood rule"; the assignment of children of racially "mixed" unions to the subordinate group

Nativism

the favoring of certain long-term inhabitants, namely whites, over new immigrants

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

Microaggressions

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

patterns by which racial inequality is structured through key cultural institutions, policies, and systems

racial ideology

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

Intersectionality

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