Chapter 9

Question 1

race

Answer 1

a group of people who share a set of characteristics—typically, but not always, physical ones—and are said to share a common bloodline

Question 2

racism

Answer 2

the belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits

Question 3

scientific racism

Answer 3

nineteenth-century theories of race that characterize a period of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race

Question 4

ethnocentrism

Answer 4

the belief that one’s own culture or group is superior to others and the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one’s own

Question 5

ontological equality

Answer 5

the philosophical and religious notion that all people are created equal

Question 6

social Darwinism

Answer 6

the application of Darwinian ideas to society—namely, the evolutionary “survival of the fittest.”

Question 7

eugenics

Answer 7

literally meaning “well born”; a pseudoscience that postulates that controlling the fertility of populations could influence inheritable traits passed on from generation to generation

Question 8

nativism

Answer 8

the movement to protect and preserve indigenous land or culture from the allegedly dangerous and polluting effects of new immigrants

Question 9

one-drop rule

Answer 9

the belief that “one drop” of black blood makes a person black, a concept that evolved from U.S. laws forbidding miscegenation

Question 10

miscegenation

Answer 10

the technical term for interracial marriage; literally meaning “a mixing of kinds”; it is politically and historically charged—sociologists generally prefer exogamy or outmarriage

Question 11

racialization

Answer 11

the formation of a new racial identity by drawing ideological boundaries of difference around a formerly unnoticed group of people

Question 12

ethnicity

Answer 12

one’s ethnic quality or affiliation. It is voluntary, self-defined, nonhierarchal, fluid and multiple, and based on cultural differences, not physical ones per se

Question 13

symbolic ethnicity

Answer 13

a nationality, not in the sense of carrying the rights and duties of citizenship but of identifying with a past or future nationality. For later generations of white ethnics, something not constraining but easily expressed, with no risks of stigma and all the pleasures of feeling like an individual

Question 14

straight-line assimilation

Answer 14

Robert Park’s 1920s universal and linear model for how immigrants assimilate: they first arrive, then settle in, and achieve full assimilation in a newly homogenous country

Question 15

primordialism

Answer 15

Clifford Geertz’s term to explain the strength of ethnic ties because they are fixed in deeply felt or primordial ties to one’s homeland culture

Question 16

pluralism

Answer 16

the presence and engaged coexistence of numerous distinct groups in one society

Question 17

segregation

Answer 17

the legal or social practice of separating people on the basis of their race or ethnicity

Question 18

genocide

Answer 18

the mass killing of a group of people based on racial, ethnic, or religious traits

Question 19

subaltern

Answer 19

a subordinate, oppressed group of people

Question 20

collective resistance

Answer 20

an organized effort to change a power hierarchy on the part of a less-powerful group in a society

Question 21

prejudice

Answer 21

thoughts and feelings about an ethnic or racial group

Question 22

discrimination

Answer 22

harmful or negative acts (not mere thoughts) against people deemed inferior on the basis of their racial category, without regard to their individual merit

Question 23

institutional racism

Answer 23

institutions and social dynamics that may seem race-neutral but actually disadvantage minority groups