Sociology 3410 Final: Race

Front 1

Multi-Racialism

Back 1

-the biology of someone born of two separate races
-Believed to bridge the gap
--In America we tend to call multi-racial people of black ancestry as black, and multi-racial people of other races as white.
-America has always projected itself to the world as a democratic society, but the problem is historically, it has been paired with racism. Leads to a tremendous contradiction.

Front 2

Principle #1: Racial Progress but Continued Racism

Back 2

•Barack Obama inaugurated as 44th President
-He faces 30 death threats a day, stretching US Secret Service.
-the existence of institutional racism

Front 3

Principle #2: White Americans & Minority Groups Perceive Race Differently

Back 3

-white are most likely to believe in post-racialism, while blacks are least likely to believe in it. Latinos and Asians fall in-between these two poles.
•Blacks perceive existence of a lot more discrimination in different spheres, but the highest in Applying for Jobs
•Resumes with stereotypical Anglo-Saxon names were 50% more likely to be called back

Front 4

Principle #3: Differential Perceptions of Race Result from Separation & Different Everyday Experiences

Back 4

-Residential Segregation is the Main Force Producing Separation between Groups
•Where people live, strongly influence the kind of schools that they go to, how clean your neighborhood is
-America’s Creed: if you work hard you can achieve anything
-Certain minority groups are systematically harmed by institutional racism

•The strongest predictor of whether or not someone will get the death penalty is the race of the victim.
-If the victim is a white person, the perpetrator is highly likely to be sentenced to death.

'White Flight'- the white people feel uncomfortable and move out

Front 5

Principle #4: Race in America Governed by Contradictions

Back 5

The American Dilemma (Gunnar Myrdal)
-Contradiction between white Americans in their very strong belief in the America’s Creed, contradiction between what they believed and how they acted.

Thomas Jefferson
-Had slaves out in the field to provide him leisure time to write the declaration of independence.

The Capitol was constructed by slaves.

Frontstage/Backstage
-When surveyed about race they say what they think researchers want to hear. But around friends, true feelings come out.

Race in America has always revolved around Black/White

Front 6

Principle #5: The Continued Centrality of the Black/White Racial Framework-Despite Growing Multiculturalism

Back 6

Example: Interracial Marriage
-Marriages between white Americans and other racial/ethnic groups have increased noticeably since the 1960s, but these marriages are significantly more likely to occur between Latinos and whites, and Asians and whites, than between African Americans and whites.


•Possible explanations for this fact include:
1. Relations between blacks & whites remain particularly sensitive because of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the battles that have been fought over the inclusion of blacks in society.
2. Hispanics and Asians may perceive white Americans as the reference group in their quest for upward mobility.
3. White Americans perceive Hispanics and Asians are being more acceptable partners than they do African Americans.

Front 7

Idea that Race is Biological

Back 7

•People within these groups exhibit different behaviors and modes of thought

Debates:
•Monogenesists: God had a single generation, and they were all essentially the same.
•Polygenesists: argued that humans were so different, God must have had many generations

Front 8

Eugenics:

Back 8

-attempt to apply the idea of animal husbandry to humans. The inferior would eventually die out because they wouldn’t be mating.
•Became a damaging idea because it was adopted as a social idea.
•The Nazis tried to knock out Jews and non-Arian people, because they were inferior.
•Mass sterilization often of women, feeble minded-ness people were inferior.


In 1926 they passed the Racial purity Act
Caroline Buck-decide she’s mentally unstable, had a daughter.
-Decided that she was part of 3 generations of poor genetics.
-Wanted to sterilize her.
-Our supreme court legalized it.
-Nazis used this against us, when they were on trial.

Hitler wrote fan letters to American Scientists

Front 9

The Problem of Racial Classification

Back 9

-The plasticity of phenotype is an essential part of the problem of human variation.
-This means that though human beings are 99.9% the same genetically, they vary continuously in terms of phenotype (i.e., appearance)

Front 10

Result of Racial Classification

Back 10

-very difficult to establish how many “races” exist.

Front 11

-Historically, the following traits have been used to classify humans:

Back 11

•1. Skin color
 Bad because there is too much variation, 2 fair skinned people can have 1 dark skinned child.
 Anthropologically speaking, Indians are classified as Caucasians.
2. Hair color
3. Hair type
4. Facial Angle
5. Size and shape of facial features
6. Head size (the Cephalic index=skull width/skull length x 100)
7. Blood Type
 However, because of variation all of the criteria are flawed. One can always find an exception to the rule.

Front 12

Movie 2/1/12

Back 12

-We can’t find any differences between race.
-scientists have measured facial angle to compare to the primitive
-scull sizes are measured, eye color, hair color
-constantly searching for a different organ that is fundamentally different
-Frederick Hoffman believed that the black race would become extinct
• showed data, but he ignored poverty and poor health care
-Racial purification was one aim of the Eugenics movement
-Jesse Owens wins Olympic Games
• chronic illness
-Cobb “there is not one single physical feature that would identify any athlete as negro”
-if we were to walk from the tropics to Norway, we would see a continuous change in skin color, in no point would we be able to pinpoint where we go from the dark race to the light race.
-we can’t isolate a gene for any skill

Front 13

Social Darwinism

Back 13

-there’s always an order, always a desirable a good, with undesirable traits at the bottom.

Front 14

We all have a common ancestor

Back 14

-there is more variation within races than between races
•trait selective
•plasticity-the idea that race can happen so fast that you can’t group people together.
•Phenotypes-appearance reductionism
•Very hard to say genetics=appearance

Front 15

Race is better viewed as a social construction paradigm.

Back 15

•Clearly human beings look quite different from each other.

Front 16

How do we account for this phenotypical variation?

Back 16

Migration:
The only part of that theory that becomes problematic is how they got from Africa to Australia.

Isolation:
Journeys that took 1000s of years
-People that live along the equator, all tend to have dark skin to adapt to the direct rays beating down.
-Skin color becomes paler to adapt to less sunlight

Sex Selection:
-Over time certain features become culturally valuable and desirable. As people choose mates, they look for mates that have those particular features.
-Western culture has a bias toward women with blonde hair.

Front 17

What does it mean to say that race is socially constructed?

Back 17

•A race is a group that is defined by a particular society using criteria that that society sees or views as being centrally important
-W.I. Thomas: if people define situations as being real, then they are real in their consequences. Society acts on the realness they have created.

Jews in Nazis Germany are an excellent example of social construction of race.
-Jews were an ethnic group, and then made into a race.
-They created a separate skin for Jews, they had to wear a yellow star of David.

-In American society, being black is defined or has been defined, a black individual is a person who has any degree of African Ancestry.

Front 18

Jefferson's Blood

Back 18

•His DNA was linked to his slave’s children.
-Whenever we talk about racial identity, it’s always this interactive process of what they say about themselves, and what society is saying about them

•People become afraid of their real identity becoming known, if people get treated as black instead of white, and they are treated differently.

-Life on the color line
•just by crossing state lines and moving into Indiana, David Williams was not accepted by his white relatives, he lived in poverty and was forced to live with his black relatives.