SOC 180: Advanced Race and Ethnicity

September 5, 2014Class 2

Reading: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of Race and Racisms

Class Goals

Develop an understanding of race and racism

Develop an understanding of how racist ideology has changed over time.

Develop an understanding of how whiteness has been created through laws and policies.

Develop an understanding of why the idea of race persists and who presently benefits from dividing people into racial groups.

Defining race

Race: refers to a group of people who share

physical and cultural traits as well as a common ancestry.

implies that the people of the world can be divided into discrete groups based on physical and cultural traits.

linked to notions of white or European superiority that became concretized during the colonization of the Americas.

Defining Racism

Racism: (1) the belief that races are populations of

people whose physical differences are linked to significant cultural and social differences and that these innate hierarchical differences can be measured and judged, and

(2) the practice of subordinating races believed to be inferior

Europeans in the Americas

When the Spaniards arrived in the Americans in 1492, what happened?

Did the idea of race exist?

Africans in the Americas

Why were Africans brought to the Americas?

What is the relationship between slavery and race?

The need for labor in the colonies

Were the Europeans able to use Native Americans for labor?

Why was Bacon’s Rebellion important?

What do the slave codes tell us about the

legal codification of race?

Linnaeus, 1735

Nott and Gliddon, 1857

As scientific methods changed, so did ways of measuring race.

Intelligence Testing

New methods, new ideas of racial differences.

What does this tell us about race and science today?

Immigration Laws & Race

Chinese exclusion

Johnson Reed Act

Our first immigration laws were highly racialized. The targets: Chinese and Southern and Eastern Europeans.

Racial Prerequisite Cases

Between 1878 and 1952, U.S. courts considered 51 cases in which a non-citizen contested his denial of citizenship on the basis of his race.

Ozawa: White skin ≠ white.

Thind: Caucasian ≠ white.

What is white? Who decides?

Irish, Italians, and Jews

How did the Irish learn to be white?

When did the Italians come to be seen as white?

How did Jews come to be seen as white?

Race: The Power of an Illusion, Volume 2

“The Story We Tell” is about how racial categorizations came to be seen as natural.

Weekly Question

Why does the idea of race persist, even though scientists are unable to find a genetic basis for social ideas of racial differences? When thinking of why the idea of race persists, consider who has benefited and who presently benefits from dividing people into racial groups. 

Once you answer the weekly question, please go back to blogger.com and edit your blog posting. Make your edits based on the peer feedback you received and add one paragraph based on today’s weekly question.