Race and Ethnicity

Learning Objectives
Racial, Ethnic, and Minority Groups
• Understand the difference between race and ethnicity
• Define a majority group (dominant group)
• Define a minority group (subordinate group)
Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
• Explain the difference between stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, and racism
Theories of Race and Ethnicity
• Identify examples of culture of prejudice
Intergroup Relationships
• Explain different intergroup relations in terms of their relative levels of tolerance
• Give historical and/or contemporary examples of each type of intergroup relation

What Is Race?
Ancestral (наследственные) and familial ties (семейные связи)
Superficial physical characteristics (внешние физ. характеристики)
E.g. regions (Mongolia and the Caucasus (Кавказские) Mountains), skin tones (black, white, yellow, and red) ?
3) Social Construction of Race: race is not biologically identifiable (раса не определяется биол. происхождением).
SCR: skin color - darkness (смуглость) or fairness (светлость) of skin (кожи) is an evolutionary adaptation to the available sunlight in different regions of the world.
Racial, Ethnic, and Minority Groups
“Race” (раса)
“Ethnicity” (этничность)
“Minority group” (меньшинство)

Social Construction of Race
Social Construction of Race: race is based on socioeconomic assumptions (предположения). In modern society, some people who consider themselves (считают себя) “white” actually have more melanin (меланин, темный пигмент) in their skin than other people who identify as ”black.”
In some countries, e.g. Brazil, class, and not skin color, determines race (расу определяет класс, а не цвет кожи). People with high levels of melanin in their skin may consider themselves "white“ if they enjoy a middle-class lifestyle. Someone with low levels of melanin in their skin might be assigned the identity of "black" if they have little education or money.

What Is Ethnicity?
Ethnicity describes shared culture—the practices, values, and beliefs of a group
Identifying ethnicity - complex (сложный), even contradictory (даже противоречащий).
E.g. ethnic groups: Russian, Jewish, and Serbian might all be groups who are included in the racial category “white.” the ethnic group British

What Are Minority Groups?
Louis Wirth (1945), minority group is:
“any group of people who, because of their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out (отделять) from the others in the society in which they live for… unequal treatment (неравное отношение), and who therefore regard themselves as (видят себя как) objects of collective discrimination (объекты коллективной дискриминации).”
Sociology: minority = subordinate (подчин), majority = dominant (глав)
Note: minority ≠ numerical (численный) minority; sometimes larger groups can be considered (могут считаться) minority groups due to their lack of power (за неимением власти).E.g., Apartheid in South Africa: a numerical majority (the black inhabitants (жители) of the country) were exploited (эксплуатировать) and oppressed (подавлять) by the white minority.

5 characteristics of minorities (Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris 1958):
unequal treatment (отношение) and less power over their lives
distinguishing (подчеркивание другими) physical or cultural traits like skin color or language
involuntary membership (невольное участие) in the group
awareness of subordination (осведомленность о подчин. положении)
high rate of in-group marriage ( уровень браков внутри группы)
Other minority groups: LGBT community, religious practitioners whose faith (вера) is not widely practiced where they live, and people with disabilities (инвалиды).
Scapegoat theory (Dollard’s 1939): dominant group will displace their unfocused aggression onto a subordinate group.
E.g. Adolf Hitler used the Jewish people as scapegoats for Germany’s social and economic problems. In Kyrgyzstan, ethnic Uzbeks became scapegoat for the nation’s woes (проблемы).
What Are Minority Groups?

Stereotypes, Prejudice, and
Discrimination
Stereotypes (стереотипы) - oversimplified (слишком
упрощенные) ideas about groups of people.
Stereotypes race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation
+ (usually about one’s own group such as men suggesting they are more clever than women)
- (usually toward other groups such as dominant racial group suggesting that a subordinate racial group is stupid or lazy). Stereotype is a generalization (обобщение) that doesn’t take individual differences into account (не учитыв. лич. кач-ва отдельных индивидов).
? Where do stereotypes come from? New stereotypes are rarely created (создаются редко); rather (скорее), they are recycled (повторно использовать) from subordinate groups that have assimilated into society and are reused to describe newly subordinate groups.
E.g. many stereotypes that are currently used to characterize black people were used earlier in American history to characterize Irish and Eastern European immigrants (эмигранты из Ирландии и Вост. Европы).

Stereotypes

Prejudice – beliefs (убеждения), thoughts (мысли), feelings (чувства), and attitudes (отношение) that someone holds about a group (в отношении к-л. группы).
- Prejudice - experience; it is a prejudgment (предубеждение) ? outside
of actual experience (без наличия к-л. опыта).
- Racism is a type of prejudice that is used to justify (объяснять) the belief that one racial category is superior (высший) or inferior (низший) to others. E.g.: the Ku Klux Klan - a racist organization that believed in white supremacy.
Prejudice and Racism

Culture of prejudice - the theory that prejudice is embedded (вставлять, вделывать) in our culture. We grow up surrounded by images of stereotypes and casual expressions (повседневные проявления) of racism and prejudice.
Consider the casually racist imagery on grocery store shelves or the stereotypes that fill popular movies and advertisements. Because we are all exposed to these images and thoughts, it is impossible to know to what extent they have influenced our thought processes.
Culture of Prejudice

Prejudice - biased thinking, discrimination -actions against a group of people.
Discrimination can be based on age, religion, health, and other indicators; race-based discrimination and antidiscrimination laws strive to address this set of social problems.
Discrimination race/ethnicity can take many forms, from unfair housing practices to biased hiring systems. Overt (неприкрытый) discrimination is not tolerated today. However, discrimination cannot be erased from our culture just by enacting laws to abolish (отменять) it.
Émile Durkheim: racism - social fact ? it does not require the action of individuals to continue (расизм не требует действий индивидов, чтобы иметь место). The reasons for this are complex and relate to the educational, criminal, economic, and political systems that exist.
E.g.: when a newspaper prints the race of individuals accused of a crime, it may enhance stereotypes of a certain minority.
Discrimination

Intergroup Relationships
Tolerance Intolerance
(терпимость) (нетерпимость)
Genocide - deliberate (умышленное) annihilation (истребление) of a targeted (usually subordinate) group.
Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people (евреи) in the first part of the 20th century, aka the Holocaust (+other minority groups such as Catholics, people with disabilities, and homosexuals). Forced emigration, concentration camps, and mass executions in gas chambers ? 12 million people died, 6 million of whom were Jewish
During the European colonization of the United States: Native American populations: 12 million people in1500 ? 237,000 in 1900

European settlers coerced American Indians off their own lands, often causing thousands of deaths in forced removals, such as occurred in the Cherokee, + slavery.
The introduction of European diseases (болезни) and Indians’ lack of immunity (отсутствие иммунитета) to them. Smallpox (оспа), diphtheria (дтфтерия), and measles (корь)
How planned this genocide was? The spread (распространение)of disease was an unintended (случайный) effect of conquest ≠ it was intentional (намеренный) with rumors of smallpox-infected blankets (одеяла, зараженные оспой) being distributed as “gifts” to tribes (к. «дарили» инд. племенам).
Genocide

Expulsion (изгнание) - subordinate group being forced by a dominant group to leave a certain area or country. Expulsion has often occurred historically with an ethnic or racial basis.
In the US, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in 1942, after the Japanese government’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The Order authorized the establishment of internment camps for anyone with as little as 1/8 Japanese ancestry (=one great-grandparent who was Japanese/ т.е. один прапрадед, к. был японцем) .
~120,000 legal Japanese residents and Japanese American citizens,
, were held in these camps for up to 4 years, despite the fact that there was never any evidence (свидетельство) of collusion (сговор) or espionage (шпионаж).
In the 1990s, the U.S. executive branch issued a formal apology for this expulsion; reparation (денежная компенсация) efforts continue today.
Expulsion

Segregation (изоляция) - physical separation of two groups, particularly in residence, but also in workplace and social functions.
de jure segregation (segregation that is enforced by law)
de facto segregation (segregation that occurs without laws but because of other factors).
De jure segregation: the apartheid movement, South Africa 1948-1994. Under apartheid, black South Africans were stripped of their civil rights and forcibly relocated to areas that segregated them physically from their white compatriots. Only after decades of degradation, violent uprisings, and international advocacy was apartheid finally abolished.
De facto segregation cannot be abolished by any court mandate. Neighborhoods in New York (China town, Harlem, etc.)
Segregation