Chapter 5

Question 1

race

Answer 1

a flawed system of classification, with no biological basis, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population into supposedly discrete groups

Question 2

racism

Answer 2

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

Question 3

genotype

Answer 3

the inherited genetic factors that provide that framework for an organism’s physical form

Question 4

phenotype

Answer 4

the way genes are expressed in an organism’s physical form as a result of genotype interaction with environmental factors

Question 5

colonialism

Answer 5

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

Question 6

miscegenation

Answer 6

a demeaning historical term for interracial marriage

Question 7

white supremacy

Answer 7

the belief that whites are biologically different from and superior to people of other races

Question 8

whiteness

Answer 8

a culturally constructed concept originating in 1691 Virginia, designed to establish clear boundaries of who is white and white is not – a process central to the formation of U.S. racial stratification

Question 9

Jim Crow

Answer 9

Laws implemented after the U.S. Civil War to enforce segregation legally, particularly in the South, after the end of slavery

Question 10

hypodescent

Answer 10

sometimes called the “one drop of blood rule”; the assignment of children of racially “mixed” unions to the subordinate group

Question 11

nativism

Answer 11

the favoring of certain long-term inhabitants, namely whites, over new immigrants

Question 12

racialization

Answer 12

the process of categorizing, differentiating, and attributing a particular racial character to a person or group of people

Question 13

individual racism

Answer 13

personal prejudiced beliefs and discriminatory actions based on race

Question 14

microaggressions

Answer 14

common, everyday verbal or behavioral indignities and slights that communicated hostile, derogatory, and negative messages about someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion

Question 15

institutional racism

Answer 15

patterns by which racial inequality is structured through key cultural institutions, policies, and systems

Question 16

racial ideology

Answer 16

a set of popular ideas about race that allows the discriminatory behaviors of individuals and institutions to seem reasonable, rational, and normal

Question 17

intersectionality

Answer 17

an analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification