Chapter 8: Race and ethnicity Flashcards
race
Race is not real at all. Explain why (3):
- The physical characteristics that are used to assert racial differences between people and groups are superficial distinctions. All people that are called “brown,” for example, do not have a genetic makeup identical to each other and different from people who are called white, or anything else.
- Race is based on subjective perceptions of physical appearance and ancestry rather than objective genetic differences.
- placing people in categories based on biological or genetic information is impossible because those differences do not exist, and the categories used over the years have been subject to change over time.
sociologists—and experts from many other disciplines—refer to race as a —-
social construction
social construction
social construction is the view that elements of our social world, including race, are products of particular cultural and historical contexts and upheld by people and institutions.
ethnicity
refers to shared culture, ancestry, and history, and may also include shared language and religion.
Where race is something people strongly associate with —-, ethnicity is strongly associated with —-.
- biology
- culture
racism
The word “race” gained its significance beginning in the 18th century as a result of two major social forces:
the rise of the scientific model and colonialism
Carl Linnaeus
described four racial types based on continent and the colour of their skin: American (red), European (white), Asian (yellow), and African (Black)
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (3)
Classification+ caucasian+ origins
- described five varieties of humans: Caucasian, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans, and Malays
- Believed caucasian to be most superior because it is white in color, which we may fairly assume to have been the primitive color of mankind, since… it is very easy for that to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white.
- His racial hierarchy presumed that all humans originated from whiteness, although scientific evidence tells us that this is not true.
Why was developing taxonomies of the 18th century bad (2)?
for both systems
- Linnaeus didn’t just classify humans based on their physical appearance (skin colour, in his case); his classifications equated physical appearance to character traits about each group. Indigenous Americans were described as red with straight Black hair and wide nostrils, but also that they were under the control of others, as though this were some essential fact of their race.
- Blumenbach’s five-category classification was explicitly about hierarchy (Gould 1994); he placed Caucasians at the top and Mongolians and Ethiopians at the bottom, with the American and Malay as their intermediaries
scientific racism
The development of racial categories into a hierarchy that could be used to explain supposed superiority and inferiority
One of the ways that sociologists consider how something might be a social construction is to —-
compare change over time
intelligence researcher James Flynn
made an important discovery dubbed the “Flynn Effect”; over time, IQ results have increased. If intelligence was tied to race, there would be no change in the average IQ scores of a population over the multiple decades that Flynn examined. The growth is particularly notable in countries that have undergone substantial economic and social development—some of the same countries that had previously been dubbed too cognitively challenged to prosper.
Ethnicity is about shared —, —-, —-, and other elements of culture.
ancestry, language, food
minority groups
stereotypes
discrimination
implicit bias
democratic racism
