SOC 08221 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Act Alliance, Symbolic Ethnicity, White Privilege
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3 Oct 2019
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Racism
• A system of advantage and disadvantages based on race
• Ideologies can make it difficult to accept that racial inequality continues
Race
• Social construction that uses certain traits to organize people into hierarchies
• Traits may be physical, religious, cultural, or socioeconomic
• Constructions entrenched in social structures and organizations
Ethnicity
• Cultural background, often tied to nationality of origin and or the culture practiced by
the individual and his or her family of origin
• May be associated with languages, surnames, holidays, and clothing styles.
Symbolic ethnicity
• An ethnicity that isn’t particularly salient in an individual’s daily life and becomes
relevant only at certain symbolic times or events
Minority Group
• A group that doesn’t hold a sizable share of power and resources in a society not size;
• Women are a numerical majority but lack the income and political power of men
• People of color are the majority globally, but they hold minority status in the United
States.
Immigration patterns
• U.S. view of immigrants has shifted based on time period and race/country of
origin
• Racialization: caricatures in popular media
• Earl immigration laws explicitly racist
DREAM Act
• Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors
• Could have prevented deportation of 2 million foreign-born people raised in United States
• Granted a 6-year period to either join the military or attend college.
Racialization
• The process by which a society incorporates and clearly demarcates individuals who
fit a certain profile into a particle racial group.
Tokenistic fallacy
• The common misunderstanding that when a small number of persons from minority
group become successful in a society there must no longer be racism in that society
• Even among socioeconomically similar individuals, the U.S. White majority enjoys
racial privilege in income and wealth
• Examples: Oprah, Barack Obama
Individual discrimination
• Discrimination in which actors carry out their own intentions to exclude based on race,
as opposed to being explicitly supported in doing so or directed to do so by an
organization.