Chapter 9 race

© 2011 W. W. Norton Co., Inc.

Race and Ethnicity

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Discussion

• Describe the first time you can remember that you realized you are a particular race or ethnicity?

• Describe a time when your race or ethnicity giving you an advantage? A disadvantage?

• Describe a time when you observed race or ethnicity giving another person an advantage? A disadvantage?

http://www.pbs.org/race/004_HumanDiversity/004_00-home.htm




Race

• Biological definition– a group or population that shares common genetic characteristics physical features

• Sociological definition– socially constructed category of people who share certain inherited physical biological traits

– race is both a myth and a reality


Ethnicity

• Populations of people who share cultural heritage, language, religion, national origin, a common history.

• Not the same as race


Ethnocentrism

• Belief that one’s own groups values and behaviors are right and even better than other groups.

• Fuels racism


Racism

• The belief that certain racial and ethnic groups are inferior to others and that discrimination against them is justified.


The Myth of Race

• Race is a social construct that changes over time and across different contexts.

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The Concept of Race

• Many historical efforts to explain race were biased due to ethnocentrism (the judgment of other groups by one’s own standards and values).

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The Concept of Race

• Social Darwinism, another nineteenth-century theory, was the notion that some groups or races evolved more than others and were better fit to survive and even rule other races.

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Charts like this one helped phrenologists interpret the shapesof human skulls. How did nineteenth-century theorists usethis sort of pseudoscience to justify racism?

You May Ask Yourself, 2nd EditionCopyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company


The Concept of Race

• Today DNA testing is used to determine people’s racial makeup, and while this process may be more accurate on some level than nineteenth-century racial measures, it still supports the it still supports the notion of fixed, notion of fixed, biological racial biological racial differences.differences.

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Racial Realities

• Racialization is the formation of a new racial identity in which new ideological boundaries of difference are drawn around a formerly unnoticed group of people.

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Figure 9.5 Race Questions from the 2010 U.S. CensusYou May Ask Yourself, 2nd Edition

Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company


Race versus Ethnicity

• Race is imposed (usually based on physical differences), hierarchical, exclusive, and unequal.

• Ethnicity is voluntary, self-defined, nonhierarchical, fluid, cultural, and not so closely linked with power differences.

• An ethnic identity becomes racialized when it is subsumed under a forced label, racial marker, or “otherness.”

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What sociological inferences can be made from these statistics?

Interracial marriage in the USA reached an all-time high in 2010: 8.4% of all marriages, compared with 3.2% in 1980, finds a Pew Research Center study, released today, that analyzes unions between spouses of different races or ethnic groups.


Minority––Majority Group Relations

• Pluralism, in the context of race and ethnicity, refers to the presence and engaged coexistence of numerous distinct groups in one society, with no one group being in the majority.

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Prejudice, Discrimination, and the New Racism

• Prejudice refers to negative thoughts and feelings about an ethnic or racial group.

• Discrimination refers to harmful or negative acts against people deemed inferior on the basis of their racial category.

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Discrimination• Families are outraged after 65 kids were banned from a private suburban swim club in Philadelphia. They believe the campers were kicked out because of their race.

• The swim club president said the children would change the "complexion" of their club.


Institutional descrimination

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Institutional Discrimination• Discrimination is built into the

operations of an institutions.

– Exclusion-African American baseball players

– Segregation• Stacking-positional segregation• Key Functionaries-those who hold key

decision-making positions


Key Functionaries in Sports (2001)

• None in NHL

• 6% in the NFL (all AA)

• 23% MLB (four AA and three Latinos)

• 31% of head coaches in NBA minorities (all AA)

• Division 1 Colleges: 2.4% Athletic Directors are of color, 9% female

• Best representation: WNBA (45% people of color and 85% female)


Intersectionality

• Examines how gender, race, social class interact to produce various forms of privilege and oppression.

• “The view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity" (Ritzer, 2007, pg. 204 ).


Media representations of male/female athletes


Normalization of racism


Summary

• Racial and ethic status serve as a basis for inequality and influences the experiences we have.

• Race is socially constructed, but has real consequences.

• Racism and ethnocentrism occur on individual and institutional bases.

• Racism and ethnocentrism occur so often they become normalized.

Education

Chapter 9 race