Introduction

• Irish Americans are an excellent example of the fluidity of culturally constructed racial categories. Prior to the late nineteenth century, they were discriminated against as a minority despite having light skin.

  • Prejudice against Irish Americans traces its roots back to England, where the Irish were considered by the English to be an inferior group, which was assumed to reflect a natural ordering of human groups.

• Of course, since such “natural” orders are built by culture, they can just as well be dynamic, as evidenced by the transition from supposed “nonwhite” groups to “white” groups over time;

  • Irish Americans, Jews, Italians, Finns, Greeks, Armenians, and all Latin Americans were once classified as “nonwhite” in the United States.

• No amount of research into the biological features of these groups will explain how and why these transformations took place.

• This is race: a concept that organizes people into groups based on specific physical traits that are thought to reflect fundamental and innate differences.

• Chapter 9 focuses on the question: If differences of identity are not rooted in biology, why do they feel so real, powerful, and unchangeable?

• Even though they may feel inevitable and natural, the categories and strategies that are used in stratified societies to uphold the social order as constructed and dynamic as any other cultural process.

Is Race Biological?

• Are humans subdivided into biological races? Most people assume so. After all, we do look different, and there are even drugs developed for specific racial groups. “African American medicines” do seem to lend scientific credibility to the idea of meaningful racial categories.

  • The heart medication BiDil was developed for and tested on African Americans. But this has more to do with economic, social, and political factors than with science.

  • The drug would likely be equally effective for anyone because human hearts do not come in distinct “types” that correlate with skin color, a human heart is a human heart.

    • “African American” might be a relevant category for marketers, but it is not a meaningful category as far as internal medicine is concerned.

• This is just one example of the idea of human races and naturalization: the social processes through which something, such as race, becomes part of the natural order of things.

  • Yet, the project of naturalization has one basic flow: there is no single biological trait or genre unique to any group or race of people.

• European and American scientists have long tried to naturalize race, or categorize humans into racial groups and explain why nature organizes people into those groups. Anthropologists have long argued this project is futile.

  • Racial markets (skin tone, facial features) are arbitrary and variable.

  • Biological variation is clinical, meaning that change is gradual across groups and traits shade and blend into one another. For example, skin tone is so variable within any human population that there are no clear lines between actual skin tones.

  • There is far greater variation within human groups than there is between them.

• Race is biologically meaningless. However, this fact does not mean that race has no biological and (especially) cultural consequences.

• As Clarence Gavlee writes, “To say race is a cultural construct is not to say it does not exist; cultural constructs have an objective reality despite their reliance on human thought” (2009, p. 53).

  • For example, there are significant differences in rates of disease and average life span between different racial groupings in the United States. These embodied discrepancies can be attributed, at least partially, to racism and discrimination.

    • Racism: the repressive practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that uphold racial categories and social inequality.

    • Discrimination: the negative or unfair treatment of an individual because of his or her membership in a particular social group or category

How is Race Culturally Constructed?

• Cultural processes make the artificial seem natural. This is true of race, as with other cultural constructions. Races are constructed through racialization: the social, economic, and political processes of transforming populations into races and creating racial meanings.

• Most Americans are raised to view our history as one of slow but steady progress toward racial equality.

  • But history illustrates at least one example of regression: in the earliest days of European colonies in North America, Africans were not viewed as racially inferior—and certainly not considered “property.” What changed?

• A couple of decades after founding Jamestown, the English in North America used enslaved Africans as labor but imposed relatively few restrictions on them and tended to admire Africans as intelligent and resourceful.

• By the mid-1600s, there was greater reliance on African labor. At the same time, land was increasingly scarce and in 1676, a class rebellion was spurred by poor workers and indentured servants.

• Most of the rebels were European, but enough were African for it to be identified as an “African” protest—and the consequences were aimed at them. African American rights thereafter were severely limited, and a shift in thinking about African inferiority was promoted.

  • By the end of the seventeenth century, the terms “black” and “white” came to symbolize the differences between the two groups, shifting the emphasis of stratification from class to “race.”

  • A further line of evidence that races are not discrete units, and one that has always challenged racial thinkers, is that “races” can and do mix.

  • Racial thinkers faced the challenge of maintaining cultural boundaries where nature saw none. The “one-drop rule” served this purpose by labeling anyone with known African ancestry as African.

  • See “Thinking Like an Anthropologist: Counting and Classifying Race in the American Census”

• Far from being natural and universally agreed-upon, racial categories are constructed differently in different cultural contexts.

  • For example, Latin America was colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese. They lived among Africans and Native Americans without restrictions on sexual contact (contrary to English policies in the United States).

    • As a result, there are a much greater number of “races” throughout Latin America, and they are more fluidly constructed.

  • Attitudes about “whiteness” and “blackness” persist, but these categories may have as much to do with socioeconomic status and behavioral attributes as skin color.

• It is not enough to say that “race is culturally constructed” or “race is not real.” Both statements are true but are widely misunderstood. Race, and racism, are all too real, in addition to other bases for discrimination: ethnicity, class, and caste.

  • These may be naturalized in much the same way as race to justify social hierarchies.

How Are Other Social Classifications Naturalized?

• Race and ethnicity are sometimes used interchangeably in the United States, but the terms have distinctly different meanings. Ethnicity: belonging to a group with a particular history and social status.

• Race is assumed to have some biological reality tied to physical appearance. Ethnicity may be based on any number of cultural traits: language or dialect, clothing, foodways, etiquette, or bodily modifications such as tattoos or piercings.

  • Members of ethnic groups emphasize familial metaphors and shared “blood,” establishing group identity and distinctness from other groups, often blending terms such as nation, nationality, and tribe.

  • Some members of ethnic groups may justify their identities along biological terms. This naturalizes a completely cultural category.

  • The reality of ethnic groups is more accurately explained by instrumentalism: a social theory that ethnic groups are not naturally occurring or stable but highly dynamic groups created to serve the interests of one powerful group or another.

  • The rise of “Hispanics,” “Latinos,” and “Latinas” in the United States is a perfect example of the creation of ethnic categories—ethnic because these increasing populations do not fit neatly into preexisting American racial categories.

  • The term “Latino/a” tries to encompass a huge diversity of national origins, tied together by geography/language if not homogenous culture.

    • Most “Latinos” think of themselves in terms of national origin, but powerful social forces including the federal government and corporations, such as Univision, have emphasized an ethnic identity out of this diversity.

  • Other forms of social stratification may be based on class: the hierarchical distinctions between social groups in society usually based on wealth, occupation, and social standing.

  • Socioeconomic status is a quantifiable category, but its social implications are more complicated. Most Americans realize that people are born into a particular class due to the economic situation of their families.

  • This “accident of birth” has profound consequences for education, occupation, class mobility, and place of residence.

    • Here we understand class as the hierarchical distinctions between social groups in society usually based on wealth, occupation, and social standing.

    • In earlier times, there was less recognition of the “luck” factor. Americans equated lower socioeconomic status with biological inferiority and lesser intelligence, thus naturalizing wealth and the capacity to acquire it.

    • The concept of class used to be less relevant in anthropology since many cultures do not have economic classes that correspond to lower, middle, and upper. As global capitalism expands, similar categories are increasingly comparable across borders.

    • For example, urban Kathmandu in Nepal used to be starkly divided between elites and commoners. Expanding capitalism has carved a growing middle class between these two extremes.

  • Social stratification (the classification of people into unequal groupings) may be formalized as caste: the system found in Indian society that divides people into categories according to moral purity and pollution.

  • As with most forms of social stratification, caste is puzzling to outsiders yet completely natural to insiders.

    • Westerners use the Portuguese term “caste” (casta, or “pure breed”) to refer to the Indian system, which internally, is split into varna and jati.

    • Based on Hindu texts, varna is the hierarchy of Brahmans (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (artisans and servants).

      • Below these are the so-called untouchables, who do the dirty work of Indian society: metalwork, garbage collection, leather working, and so on.

    • Jati are actual social groupings, but varna are the larger caste groupings in practice. Jati hierarchies are often based on occupation so in a single village may have more than a dozen jati.

      • These groupings are enforced by rigid rules that regulate social conduct, particularly social and physical contact between groups.

    • Many Indians, especially those in urban settings, are seeing the decline of the caste hierarchy via democracy and affirmative action programs. However, formal legislation against discrimination and the actual end of everyday discrimination are very different things.

Are Prejudice and Discrimination Inevitable?

• Is prejudice (preformed, usually unfavorable opinions about people who are different) an unavoidable result of living in a world of “others”? Do individual and institutional discrimination naturally follow? Given their frequency, it might seem so.

• But prejudice and discrimination are developed in cultural contexts (although they are ubiquitous in socially stratified societies).

  • Most forms of prejudice (whether based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc.) are acquired as part of our enculturation—from trusted elders, authority figures, media, and peers.

• As frustrating as the social learning of prejudice can be, it offers one positive conclusion: learned behavioral patterns can be unlearned.

  • Prejudice is based on a number of markers, because people have multiple identities. Intersectionality refers to the circumstantial interplay of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identity markers in the expression of prejudicial beliefs and discriminatory actions.

• But even though prejudice can be unlearned, discrimination doesn’t automatically go away.

• Discrimination occurs in many forms, most notably explicit and disguised.

  • Explicit discrimination is easier to identify because it makes no effort to hide and is an accepted norm, evident in institutions and laws. It also often has an identifiable endpoint—for example, when discriminatory laws are abolished.

  • Disguised discrimination may live on well beyond the “official” end of its explicit source. When it ends (if it ever does) there may not be a momentous event to honor the occasion.

• Perhaps the most disguised, or unrecognized, aspect of discrimination is unearned privilege: an unnoticed and underappreciated lack of discrimination against certain groups.

  • Peggy McIntosh (1997) shows that having relatively light skin pigmentation in the United States as an unearned privilege because light-skinned people may do everyday things without additional attention or judgment directed at them.

  • Social inequality requires the consent of those who benefit from it. Fighting discrimination requires the recognition and efforts of both those who are discriminated against and those who aren’t.

Conclusion

• Social categories like race, class, and ethnicity constantly confront us in our daily lives. They feel intensely real and as natural and basic as anything else in our lives.

• But while they are certainly real, they are cultural constructions that reflect existing social, political, and economic structures in a stratified society. Our racial, class, and ethnic categories would look different to anyone from another cultural setting.

Key Terms

1. Caste - the system of social stratification found in Indian society that divides people into categories according to moral purity and pollution

2. Class - the hierarchical distinctions between social groups in society, usually based on wealth, occupation, and social standing

3. Discrimination - the negative or unfair treatment of an individual because of his or her membership in a particular social group or category

4. Ethnicity - a concept that organizes people into groups based on their membership in a group with a particular history, social status, or ancestry

5. Instrumentalism - a social theory that ethnic groups are not naturally occurring or stable but instead are highly dynamic groups created to serve the interests of one powerful group or another

6. Intersectionality - the circumstantial interplay of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identity markers in the expression of prejudicial beliefs and discriminatory actions

7. Naturalization - the social processes through which something becomes part of the natural order of things

8. Prejudice - preformed, usually unfavorable opinions that people hold about people from groups who are different from their own

9. Race - a concept that organizes people into groups based on specific physical traits that are thought to reflect fundamental and innate differences

10. Racialization - the social, economic, and political processes of transforming populations into races and creating racial meanings

11. Racism - the repressive practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that uphold racial categories and social inequality

12. Social stratification - the classification of people into unequal groupings