Race
Racism- the belief that one race is inherently superior to others.
Some folks suggest we drop race from the vocabulary.
Tiger Woods- Cablinasian- Caucasion, Black, Indian, Asian.
Colin Powel- African, English, Irish, Scotish, Arawk Indian, Jewish.
*White male slave owners raped their slaves.
*African Americans had Kids with Native Americans in 18th and 19th century.
Currently, 50% of Asian Americans and 10% of Blacks marry outside their ―race.‖
Perceptions of race affect our lives so we must deal with it.
Blacks on average score lower on I.Q. tests. Inferior?
1920’s Jews scored lower too. Calvin Cooldige used it as an argument against Jewish
immigration as he signed the 1924 ―Immigration Restriction Act.‖ Americans must be
kept American.
When Jews rose in the class hierarchy, their scores rose as well.
When inner city African Americans get enriched facilities, their I.Q. scores go up as well.
Product of discrimination, not prejudice.
Prejudice- attitude that judges a person on his or her groups real or imagined
characteristics.
Discrimination- unfair treatment of people due to group membership. Behaviors.
1. Educational-Less money = lower quality environment and education.
2. Economic- hard monotonus jobs, poor pay, not as many opportunities to move up
the ladder.
3. Political- Minorities not well represented in politics, yet.
4. Social- Lower status sometimes ends up being taken les seriously-Latinos, Black.
Higher status- more is expected from them (Asians, Jews) treated poorly when
they do not meet up to raised expectations.
Alice Miller- Grandiosity, we elevate ourselves because we feel less in the first place.
Robert K. Merton
Prejudice Discriminate
Yes No
Yes Active Bigot Timid Bigot
No Fair weather liberal All weather liberal
There is internalized racism which members of a race practice against themselves.
Why?
Foucault- Remember our Gender exercise on the black board?
1. Blacks lighten their skin, straighten their hair.
2. Mixed race folk try to ―pass.‖
3. Asians get eye surgery to have round eyes.
Being a we in opposition to an other defines a normal and abnormal. The minority
becomes abnormal and needs to be fixed, conform.
Race is a category which structures the way we think and act towards ourselves and
others. We jointly use the categories and thus act towards each other on the basis of the
meanings these categories have for us. The idea of race is constantly in flux.
Racial identity—collection of characteristics that identifies a person as one race or
another. Varies from culture to culture.
Race can be seen as an accomplishment, a performance – Goffman- something we do
where we can fail or pass in our performance. Confessions of a black man.
Being ―white‖ in America means an absence of conscious racial identity. Life does not
evolve around race and ethnicity, usually. Why?
White is the Norm, the standard.
When is this not true? San Francisco- Chineese district.
Memphis!
Your reading contrasting two schools.
Etnomethodology- Being Black or a different race is a Breach. May not be aware of the
tacit rules of whites all the time. Being ―other‖ draws attention.
W.E.B. DuBois- Double Consciousness.
Deseree Robertson—Grad student here doing some research on multi-racial identity.
Race becomes problematic in this culture if you don’t identify as one or the other.
McRoy- racial identity refers to ―one’s self-perception and sense of belonging to a
particular group…including not only how one describes and defines oneself, but also how
one distinguishes oneself from members of other ethnic groups‖
Is there a biological component to race?
Hypodescent, which emerged in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, usually refers to the
one-drop rule (if you are 1/16th of that race, other than white, you are that race.) It issues
mixed race individuals an ―enforced choice of an African American Identity‖ and was
reinforced by the desire to maintain not only white privilege, but also white racial and
cultural purity (Debose and Winters, 2002). Between the years of 1905 and 1925, mass
projections of the patholization of mixed-race created devastating consequences on
biracial people:
―Mixed-race families themselves developed ―an artificially exaggerated
animus against interracial union,‖ as Corline Bond Day found, especially
between white men and light-skinned Negro women. A growing number
of Americans of mixed race began to abandon their claims to a ―third
space,‖ and to identify themselves as Negroes…During the early twentieth
century, Afro-Americans themselves internalized the ―One Drop‖ rule‖
(Pabst, 2003).
A paradox resides within the one-drop rule, within the notion that black/white
combination equals black and if one admits to or publicizes having racially distinct
parentage, one is both mixed and black. Biracial people’s social location is often
between both spheres of mixedness and blackness. Robert J. C. Young validates this
paradox with his comments on racial difference in the nineteenth century, which ―was
constructed not only according to a fundamental binary division between black and
white, but also through evolutionary social anthropology’s historicized version of the
Chain of Being. Thus racialism operated both according to the same-other model and
through the ―computation of normalites‖ and ―degrees of deviance‖ from the white
norm…But none of these was so demonized as those of mixed race‖
Like Foucault shared with us, can we say that Race is a Discourse? Is there a
―technology‖ surrounding Race? Race, it can be argued, is a way that culture reaches up
inside us and subordinates us.
Both ideas, gender and race, can be seen as meta-narratives which have outlived their
usefulness.