SOC100H1 Chapter SP: CH 8, RS: CH 28, 30, 31: Racialized inequalities
SP: Chapter 8: Racial and Ethnic Groups
●Race, ethnicity, and racialization
○Ethnicity: the existence of social groups with shared national or cultural traditions
○Ethnic group: common ancestry and shared language and customs
○Racial groups: distinguished by visible physical features such as color, facial features,
and hair type
○Visible minority: refers to people “other than aboriginal persons, who are non-caucasian
in race or non-white in color”
■Replaced by the term racialized minority
○Race: set of people commonly defined as belonging to the same group by virtue of
common visible features
■Analysis of the genetic makeup of humanity have shown clearly that racial
differences are merely social constructs
■In a biological standpoint, there is only one race, and we all belong to it
○Suzanne Oboler and Deena Gonzalez: Despite the scientific disrepute of race, many
people believe that human beings can be described, classified, and evaluated according
to their appearance
■Racialization: the tendency to view and to group humans according to their
visible characteristics
●To impose a racial interpretation on a situation that can be interpreted in
other terms (ex: class terms)
●To perceive or experience the world in racial terms
○Racialized group: set of people commonly defined as belonging to the same group by
virtue of a common birthplace, ancestry, or culture (racial and ethnic groups)
○Racialization is a problem
■Encourages prejudice and discrimination based on the mistaken belief that
certain intellectual, emotional, and behavioral traits are inherent among all
members of certain racialized groups
●Ex: all asians are naturally good at math
■Racialization often entails minimizing historical, cultural, and linguistic differences
among peoples from the same region, such as africa, asia, or latin america
●It would be wrong to view all people of arabic background as single
cultural group while ignoring the important differences among people of,
say, iranian and lebanese ancestry
○Cultural race theory (CRT): views race as a performance, not innate quality
■Scott and Marshall describe CRT as an approach that sets out to challenge the
conventional liberal approach to civil rights issues and CRT regards the
privileged position of white, middle-class academics as a major obstacle to
comprehensive exposure of racism
■Can be viewed as a special case of standpoint theory, which proposes that only
disadvantaged people are in the position to see and assess the lived reality of
inequality
■Moved discussions on race and ethnicity from essentialism to performativity--
from a search for racial “qualities” to a search for racial labels and performances
●Essentialism: view that different social categories--”male” and “female”,
“black” and “white”, for example--may be characterized and differentiated
on the basis of in intrinsic qualities, traits, and dispositions
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●Performativity: idea that certain social actors, such as gender, are
socially constructed and then acted out using words and behaviors that
have come to be associated with what it means to be, say, male or
female
●Ways of looking at racialized groups
○Functionalism
■Sees the existence of racialized groups as a way of providing people with the
social links they need to survive
■Ethnic identification provides similar roots: people endow their racialized group
with meaning and significance, just as they once did with their king group, village,
and tribe
■Symbolically, ethnic solidarity is also based on ritual and ritual objects that
Durkheim called totems
●In preliterate tribal rites, anything could serve as the basis for group
solidarity
●These cultural totemic objects have different meanings for different
groups, however, providing a basis for group distinction
■Ethnic solidarity increases social cohesion among people of the same ethnic
group
■Ethnic identity provided people with roots and social connectedness in an
otherwise individualistic, fragmented society
■Propose that diversity benefits society as a whole, since it allows for the
development of more widely varying opinions and perspectives than might be
available in a homogenous society
●Ethnic diversity may have an evolutionary survival value for the country,
even for the human race
■By drawing and enforcing boundaries, conflict intensifies people’s sense of
identity and belonging and gives groups more cohesion and a heightened sense
of purpose
○Conflict theory
■Focuses on how one group--the more powerful group--benefits more than
another group from differentiation, exclusion, and institutional racism
■Seeks to explore, for instance, how economic competition may promote the
creation and preservation of ethnic boundaries and racial stereotypes
■Proposes that majority groups seek to dominate minorities because this allows
them to gain an economic advantage, but also because domination makes them
feel superior
●Ex: when the chinese immigrated to canada as cheap labor for building
the transcontinental railway, people admired them, but when the railway
was finally built, people viewed the chinese workers as a threat to their
own economic well-being, and the government passed the Chinese
Exclusion Act to cut immigration
■Racial profiling--tendency to expect individuals to act differently, ad to interpret
their actions differently based on their race
○Symbolic interactionism
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■Focus on microsociological aspects of race and discrimination, such as the ways
people construct ethnic differences and racial labels to subordinate minority
groups
●Ex: derogatory slang such as nigger, chink, etc.
■Also used to study the way social organization contributes to racialization
●The ways cities become divided into ethnic enclaves -- “chinatown,” “little
italy,” etc.
●Residential and other forms of segregation may lead to the social
construction of social distance
■Also used to study how racial (or ethnic) socialization contributes to ongoing
racial conflicts in society
●Racial socialization: process that, through interaction, exposes people to
the beliefs, values, history, language, and social realities of their own and
other people’s racial or ethnic identities
○The process of learning what it means, socially and culturally, to
be jewish, chinese, ukrainian, etc
■Also used to examine the way racialization increases the likelihood of racial
conflict by creating constant awareness of race or ethnicity in daily social
interaction
●In racialized situations, whenever a conflict arises, questions of race and
racism are never far from people’s minds
○Feminism
■Argue for equal rights of racialized groups, as well as those of women
■Racialized groups may be seen as “others”--as inherently different and distant
from the group that characterizes them as such (typically white, male)
■Kay Anderson: reviewed the unstable, often acrimonious history of essentialist
(“us” vs “them” thought
●Found that europeans in the nineteenth century were forced to rethink
what it meant to be “human” when they encountered indigenous
australians, whom they had expected to be “savages”
■This kind of encounter with “other” ethnicities, races, and cultures challenges
existing conceptions of masculinity
○Postmodernism
■Critical race theory (CRT) is a postmodern technique used to unpack some of the
themes around domination
●Argues that racism is deeply entrenched in our social and legal
institutions
■Mary Romero
●Explains that the sociological research on immigration in the US is still
very similar to what it was almost a century ago
●Researches still use theoretical categories such as race, ethnicity, and
immigration to measure the extent of assimilation, acculturation, inter-
generational conflict, and social mobility
■Principle theme is the way symbols and symbolic discourse are used to preserve
the distinctions between socially constructed communities, inciding races
●Ex: the role of the american confederate flag which connotes the pre civil
war society of the american south, in which slavery was accepted
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SOC100H1 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Ethnicity: the existence of social groups with shared national or cultural traditions. Ethnic group: common ancestry and shared language and customs. Racial groups: distinguished by visible physical features such as color, facial features, and hair type. Visible minority: refers to people other than aboriginal persons, who are non-caucasian in race or non-white in color . Race: set of people commonly defined as belonging to the same group by virtue of common visible features. Analysis of the genetic makeup of humanity have shown clearly that racial differences are merely social constructs. In a biological standpoint, there is only one race, and we all belong to it. Suzanne oboler and deena gonzalez: despite the scientific disrepute of race, many people believe that human beings can be described, classified, and evaluated according to their appearance. Racialization: the tendency to view and to group humans according to their visible characteristics.
