Chapter 9 – Ethnicity and Race

Race and Ethnicity

• These are two basic concepts that are often times used interchangeably as if they were synonyms.
• The difference between the two are that race refers to phenotypes, and ethnicity can be loosely defined as culture.  By phenotypes, we refer to people’s physical characteristics: their skin color, hair color, eye color, hair texture, etc.  When we refer to ethnicity, we’re speaking of factors such as language, nationality, and culture. 
• Thus, these are not the same thing.  For example, somebody born and raised in the United States could have their race be Asian, but their ethnicity could be Chinese American, Japanese American, Vietnamese American, etc.  
• Thus, there could be a lot of ethnicities within one race group. Simultaneously, there can be many races within one particular ethnicity.  The ethnicity of Mexican, for example, contains white, indigenous, Asian, black races and more.  
• A very common mistake that people make is to think that the category of Latino or Hispanic is a race.  It is not.
•  Rather, it is an ethnicity.  What unites all Latinos is language and region of origin.  These two factors are separate from race.  Thus, in the U.S., you’ll find Black latinos (many from the Caribbean), Asian latinos (Japanese Peruvians, Chinese Mexicans, etc.), white latinos, etc.  

Prejudice vs. Discrimination:

• These two concepts are also usually used interchangeably as well.  They are both similar in that they indicate unfairness and a transgression of justice against a particular group.
• However, prejudice is a negative attitude towards an entire group; it is a belief that people have; it is specifically an activity of the mind.  In contrast, discrimination refers to the unfair treatment against someone.  The main distinction here is that prejudice happens in the mind, whereas discrimination happens in actual interaction.
•  One way to think about it is to view discrimination as the manifestation of prejudice.
• Thus, if you believe a stereotype such as “all Asians are bad drivers”, that would be a form of prejudice because it’s a belief.  If you then proceeded to not hire any Asian applicants to drive school buses, then you would be committing discrimination, since it is an act.  In that sense, your belief that “Asians are bad drivers” manifests itself in the form of discrimination by not hiring Asian applicants to drive school buses.  

Stereotypes:

• Stereotypes are generalizations that are made about an entire group.  An example of a racial stereotype is to think that all Latinos are immigrants (clearly many are born in the U.S.).  
• A gender stereotype is to think that all women want to have children (many simply don’t). 

Scapegoating

• Scapegoating refers to blaming a particular problem on a party that’s not responsible for it. For example, often times immigrants are blamed for unemployment rates increasing when in fact it might be due to changes in the economy (like the 2008 recession).  

Racism

• There is a lot of confusion about the term racism because it is defined differently in different circles. 
• Racism, as most people use the word, is a belief that people who share certain physical characteristics, such as skin color, are inherently superior to others.  
• However, in sociology, racism is a system of domination that includes beliefs in the superiority of one race over another.  The key word in the definition above is “system”, which refers to laws, institutions, education, the economy, etc.  By this, we make a very important distinction of “power”.
• Everybody can be prejudiced… a black person in the U.S. can think all white people are liars, for example. Yet, this person, has very little power that is embodied in the laws and institutions.  Thus, it would be wrong to call this racism, because the black person in this case does not have institutional power.  Everyone can have prejudice, but it takes institutional power to shape the entire society around those prejudices.
• Thus, racism is more than just beliefs and thoughts, it is the ability to structure society along race lines.  Since in the U.S. institutional power is held by white people, then only white people in the U.S. can be racist.  In Japan, only Japanese people can be considered to be racist, as they are the ones that hold institutional power.
• One of the reasons why we make the distinction of saying that only those with institutional power (whites in the U.S.) can be racist is that the ability to create and structure an entire society around these lines can’t be neglected because it provides very different privileges and outcomes for people of different races. 

Implicit bias

• When we speak of implicit bias regarding race, we are referring to the fact that we can be prejudiced and act and think in racist ways even when we try not to.  Some might characterize this type of racism as subconscious.  
• This is a very important distinction to make because we often think that a racist is a bigot.  
• A bigot is someone who is strongly dislikes an entire group of people.  
• Thus, this raises the question, “If a person wants everybody to be treated equally, can that person be racist?”  The answer to this is, Yes. We are not always conscious of how we react to radicalized situations.  
• Harvard has created a test to illustrate how implicit bias works.  Most people who take the Race Implicit Association Test tend to be quite surprised at the results, which often times show strong preferences for whites.  It is not only white test takers who obtain these results, but also people of different races.  The reason for this is that we’re all part of the same society and learn the same racial stereotypes.  

History of the Concept of Race and Race as a Social Construction

History of the Concept of Race

• Many people believe that race and racism have always existed, and that because of that, they happen “naturally” in human societies.  This is simply not true.
• While people in societies have always made distinctions of “us” and “them”, using the concept of race to make these divisions is a relatively new practice that gained widespread use after Christopher Columbus sailed to America in 1492. 
• Humans did not “naturally” begin to believe that certain people of one color were superior to people of a different color.  
• It is only after colonization, the violent taking of land and establishing political authority over other people, that we begin to see well-formed ideologies of racial superiority emerge.  These ideologies were then used to justify the taking of land and killing of the indigenous people of the Americas (as well as other places), as well as the enslavement of Africans.  
• That is to say, race was created in order to form and justify systems of oppression of people of color.  
• Race is a rather modern concept that was used to categorize people into different groups, and towards the end of 1800s, a major eugenics movement emerged to try to justify these beliefs of racial superiority/inferiority through science.
• What we know call scientific racism, was an attempt to measure superiority and inferiority of different races using the scientific method.  The flaws in the findings and methods of these studies have already been shown in the scientific community. 
• Eugenicists measured the size of craniums to try to prove that white people’s brains were bigger than other races, and this was believed to be proof of higher intelligence, for example.  

Racism as a Social Construction 

• When we say that race is a social construction we mean that people invented this idea.  It does not really exist.
• Remember that to say that something is socially constructed, is to say that that something exists because people agree that it exists.  As an example, the border between he United States and Mexico does not really exist in nature, but we have agreed it exists, so the consequences it has for people in both countries is very much real.
• Thus, race does not really exist.  It does not have a biological foundation (biologists are in virtual agreement on this).  Most people have a very difficult time understanding this since when they look around, they see black, white, Asians, Latinos, etc… It seems like a self-evident truth.  
• When we speak of race as something biological, we think about the things that we can see: a person’s skin color, their eye color, their hair texture, etc.  Now, these factors, a student could say, are determined by genetics, are they not?  “How could the professor say this is not biology?!” DNA does dictate much of our appearances, this is true.  But society has decided to afford meaning to these differences.  
• Humans share 99.9% of genetic material. That is to say, there is a fraction of 1% of difference between any two given individuals.  This .1% (remember, that’s less than 1%) accounts for all the human variation we find such as skin color, height, hair texture.  But remember, not all the genetic variation is visible.  That also accounts for blood type, metabolism rates, susceptibility to different diseases, baldness, voice, etc…
• So when scientists looked at the .1% of variation between humans, they found that 85% of the variation that we see between humans happens within the groups we call “races”.  Think about your brother, sister, or cousin. You’re mostly similar in genetics, but you will have differences such taller, shorter, bigger nose, hair color, skin color, hair texture, eye color, metabolism rates, body types, longer arms, susceptibility to disease, and on and on, and on…
• So, clearly there is a lot of variation between people of the same race group and even between siblings.  Remember, even siblings can have different skin colors.  In contrast, only about 5-10% of the variation in human species happens between the groups we call “races”.  
• So let’s put this into a scenario that you can visualize.  We said that 85% of the variation we find among humans happens within a particular race group.   To help us visualize this, let’s think about the Japanese. Within the Japanese population, there’s going to be a lot of genetic and phenotypical variation.  Some will be shorter, taller, darker, more prone to diabetes, less tolerant to lactose, etc.  Thus, there’ a lot of variation. These variations will also be found in the population of people in, let’s say, Germany.  In Germany some are shorter, more prone to heart disease, etc…  This means that we expect there to be individuals within each group that are very genetically different from one another.  Two Japanese people, even if they look very similar to one another, could be very different genetically because one could be prone to heart disease, have a  very different blood type, etc.  This will also be true in Germany, you will find pairs of individuals that will be very genetically different from one another even if they look very similar to one another.  
• Here’s the key: Because there’s so much genetic variation within racial groups, there’s bound to be Germans who are more genetically similar to some Japanese than to other Germans.  Imagine a German and a Japanese person who both have the same blood type, metabolism rates, attached ear lobes, susceptibility to heart disease.  Maybe they don’t look too much like each other, but they are in fact very similar genetically.  These two might be more similar to one another than to their own compatriots.  In this scenario, how can we say that these two individuals are of different races when they are more genetically similar to one another? Shouldn’t these two genetically similar individuals, one Japanese and one German, be categorized in the same race?  
• Here is where race being a racial construction comes into play.  Yes, there are genetic and physical differences between people, and this exists in nature.  However, it is human beings who have decided which of these differences we’re going to use to divide people into different groups we call races.  That is to say, humans decided this; humans created race by skin color.  We could have just as easily created race by eye color, and now all white people with brown eyes would have been in the same group with indigenous people with brown eyes.  
• Now let’s create a fictional scenario in which we create race groups that are not based on skin color.  We’ll use another discernible characteristic such as height.  We could create arguments as to why tall people are superior.  They can see from higher, which is an advantage.  They can take longer steps, which could help them in migrate.  They can also reach higher hanging fruits.  They can also physically dominate shorter people.  Thus, we have created an ideology of Height Supremacy.  Then we create laws and policies around this idea (much like we did with race, slavery and segregation).  We could make laws such as tall people will not marry short people, and they’ll also go to different schools and live in different neighborhoods. It would not be long until short and tall people start thinking of themselves as fundamentally distinct from one another.  They would probably develop their own unique identities to distinguish themselves from one another.  By the end of all this, we would have socially created different races when before there were no distinctions.
• Furthermore, let’s remember that there is no clear line that divides races.  If one were to walk from the Northern Europe to Southern Africa, we would not find a specific line that divides white people from black people. Instead, we would find a continuum of gradual change in skin color.  The same would be true if we walked from western Europe to Eastern Asia.
• So in conclusion, there is no clear biological division between people of different races.  Humans created this myth in order to shape society, specifically during the process of colonization.  At the root of this understanding is this scientific finding: there is more genetic variation between races than there is within  races.  Because of this, there is no such thing as race.  It only exists in that people agree it exists, and therefore, it has very real social consequences.