ANTH 1002 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Hypodescent, Sociocultural Anthropology, White Supremacy
Guest, Chapter 5: Race and Racism Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology
I. Race: a flawed system of classification with no biological basis that uses certain physical characteristics to
divide the human population into supposedly discrete groups
A. Racism: individuals’ thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create or
reproduce unequal access to power, privilege, resources, and opportunities based on imagined
differences among groups
II. Do biologically separate races exist?
A. Fuzzy boundaries in a well-integrated gene pool
B. Linking genotype and phenotype
III. How is race constructed around the world
A. Race and the legacy of colonialism
A.1. Colonialism: the practice by which a nation-state extends political, economic,
and military power beyond its own borders over an extended period of time to secure
access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets in other countries or regions
A.2. Brazil
A.2.a) Miscegenation: a demeaning historical term for interracial marriage
IV. How is race constructed in the US?
A. Race and the census
B. Constructing whiteness
B.1. White supremacy: the belief that whites are biologically different from and
superior to people of other races
B.2. Whiteness: a culturally constructed concept from 1691 VA designed to
establish clear boundaries of who is white and who isn’t, a process central to the
formation of US racial stratification
B.3. Jom Crow: law implemented after the Civil War to legally enforce segregation,
esp in the South, after slavery
C. The rule of hypodescent
C.1. Hypodescent: “one drop of blood rule” → the assignment of children of racially
“mixed” unions to the subordinate group
D. Race and immigration
D.1. Nativism: favoring of certain long-term inhabitants, namely whites, over new
immigrants
D.2. Chinese, Irish, and others
D.3. Middle Easterners
D.4. Radicalization: the process of categorizing, differentiating, and attributing a
particular racial character to a person or group of people
E. Types of racism
E.1. Individual racism: personal prejudiced beliefs and discriminatory actions based
on race
E.1.a) Microaggressions: common, everyday verbal or behavioral indignities
and slights that communicate hostile, derogatory, and negative messages about
someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion
E.2. Institutional racism: patterns by which racial inequality is structured through
key cultural institutions, policies, and systems
E.3. Radical ideology: a set of popular ideas about race that allows the
discriminatory behaviors of individuals and institutions to seem reasonable, rational, and
normal
F. Resisting racism
G. Race, racism, and whiteness
G.1. “White privilege”
G.2. Intersectionality: an analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race,
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