Ch 9 - Race
Timid Bigot (Merton)
A "timid bigot" is one who is prejudiced but does not discriminate—a closet racist perhaps, who backs down when confronted with an opportunity for racist action
Prejudice
A more overt form of resistance, the fourth paradigm of group responses to domination, would be collective resistance through a movement such as revolution or genocide or through nonviolent protest as in the US civil rights movement.
Institutional Racism
institutions and social dynamics that may seem race neutral but actually disadvantage minority groups. - Ex: race and property
Hispanics are often called an:
"in between" ethnic group because of their intermediate status, sandwiched between Caucasians and African Americans. - Unlike African Americans, the majority of Latinos in America today have come by way of voluntary immigration, particularly during the last four decades of heavy, second-wave immigration. - Puerto Ricans are the exception, because they have been able to travel freely to the United States since 1917, when Puerto Rico became an American territory and its inhabitants US citizens. - The chief motivation for Latino immigration is economic because of America's high demand for labor in the service, agriculture, and construction industries.
Clifford Geertz and Primordialism
Clifford Geertz's term to explain the strength of ethnic ties because they are fixed and deeply felt or primordial ties to one's homeland culture.
Ernest Barth and Donald Noel's assimilation theory on Immigrants
Ernest Barth and Donald Noel (1972) noted that assimilation is not necessarily the end result for immigrants. - On the contrary, other outcomes such as exclusion, pluralism, and stratification are possibilities. And as others point out, some immigrants assimilate more easily than others, depending on a variety of structural factors, like migration patterns; differences in contact with the majority groups; demographics including fertility, mortality rates, and age structure; and ultimately, power differentials among groups. - This is the case for the "new immigration," which, in comparison with the earlier era of European immigration (1901-30), is a large-scale influx of non-European immigration that began in the late 1960s and continues to the present
Harold Isaacs
Harold Isaacs (1975) noticed something that these theories of assimilation could not explain: People did not so easily shed their ethnic ties. Ethnic identification, among white ethnics and everyone else, persisted even after a group attained certain levels of structural assimilation
Elizabeth Warren and Her Native American Heritage
Massachussetts senator Elizabeth Warren provides one high-profile example of such ethnic claims. At certain times in her career she claimed Native American heritage. - In the dog-eat-dog world of politics this symbolic ethnic claim came back to bite her as opponents challenged her to prove her ancestry. - Most infamously, President Trump has mockingly called her "Pocahontas," using the term even during a meeting with Native American leaders. - One lesson from the Warren controversy is that while symbolic ethnic assertions of Native American status are rising, formally claiming American Indian ancestry is more than a matter of checking a box. - Membership criteria vary from tribe to tribe but most require genealogical proof
The One-Drop Rule
One means (but still not foolproof) of drawing sharp racial boundaries in America was the one-drop rule, asserting that just "one drop" of black blood makes a person black.
straight-line assimilation
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
What are the social consequences of race?
Scholars have defined four broad forms that minority-majority group relations can take: assimilation, pluralism, segregation, and conflict.
Lamarckism
The basic tenet of Lamarckism is that acquired traits can be passed down across generations. - For example, an acquired attribute such as flexibility, language skill, or sun exposure can be passed down to a person's offspring, affecting generations to come. - Lamarckism was debunked by Charles Darwin, who in 1859 published his theory of natural selection
What are the 4 forms of response to oppression?
withdrawal, passing, acceptance, and resistance.
Discrimination
harmful or negative acts (not mere thoughts) against people deemed inferior on the basis of their racial category, without regard to their individual merit
Racism
is the belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits coupled with the power to restrict freedoms based on those differences. - Racist thinking is characterized by three key beliefs: that humans are divided into distinct bloodlines and/or physical types; that these bloodlines or physical traits are linked to distinct cultures, behaviors, personalities, and intellectual abilities; and that certain groups are superior to others
Eugenics
- A new movement, eugenics, took the idea of very distant origins and ran with it. - Eugenicists, led by Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), claimed that each race had a separate package of social and psychological traits transmitted through bloodlines. - Eugenics literally means "well born"; it is the pseudoscience of genetic lines and the inheritable traits they pass on from generation to generation. - Everything from criminality and feeblemindedness to disease and intelligence, Galton asserted, could be traced through bloodlines and selectively bred out of or into populations. - One of his followers, the American psychologist H. H. Goddard (1866-1957), applied eugenic thinking to generalize findings from his intelligence tests in America. - He tested a handful of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in the early twentieth century and generalized their test scores to whole populations, claiming— and garnering many believers too—that around 70 percent of the immigrants sailing from eastern and southern Europe were, in his phraseology, "morons" who posed a serious threat to the good of the nation. - Goddard supported the immigration exclusion acts that in 1924 largely blocked non-Anglos from immigrating and were intended to improve the "stock" of the nation
Statistical Discrimination
- A related dynamic is called statistical discrimination, where firms use race as a shorthand proxy for having attended poorer schools and having experienced other disadvantages that would lead to less productive performance. - Although this dynamic is not completely color-blind, it is different from overt racism in that the motivation is not about race per se but about underlying characteristics that tend to be associated with race. - Finally, institutional racism can even be encoded into the educational system through test construction. - There has been much debate about cultural bias in testing. - Beyond this issue, however, is the effect of stereotypes on performance. - The psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, for example, have shown that they can drive black students' test scores down just by priming them with negative stereotypes before they sit for the exam. - These are just a few of the ways race can continue to disadvantage certain groups even in an age when overt racial animus may have waned in significance.
Pluralism
- A society with several distinct ethnic or racial groups is said to exhibit pluralism, meaning that a low degree of assimilation exists. - A culturally pluralistic society has one large sociocultural framework with a diversity of cultures functioning within it. - This is the premise of multiculturalism in America. - Statistically speaking, in a pluralist country, no single group commands majority status. Switzerland, with its three linguistic groups— German, French, and Italian—is a striking example of ethnic autonomy and balance. - Demographic projections suggest that whites will make up about 46 percent of the US population by 2065. - A broader definition of pluralism, however, is a society in which minority groups live separately but equally. - Imagine America with no substantial stratification, no oppression, and no domination. - In Switzerland, despite slight income differences among ethnic groups (with the exception of recent immigrant groups like the Turkish), no one group dominates politically, but the same cannot be said for America
segregation
- A third paradigm for minority-majority relations is segregation, the legal or social practice of separating people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. An extreme case of segregation was the southern United States before the civil rights movement. - Under the Jim Crow system of segregation, reinforced by the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, a "separate but equal" doctrine ruled the South. - Strictly enforced separation existed between blacks and whites in most areas of public life—from residence to health facilities to bus seats, classroom seats, and even toilet seats - Although the Plessy decision ruled that separate facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were equal, in real life the doctrine legalized unequal facilities for blacks. - The NAACP has long recognized that segregation and discrimination are inescapably linked. - Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of education. - Social science data consistently show that an integrated educational experience for minority children produces advantages over a nonintegrated school experience. - School segregation almost always entails fewer educational resources and lower quality for minority students
Native Americans In Early Colonial America
- According to archaeological findings, the original settlers of the North American continent arrived anywhere between 12,000 and 50,000 years ago from northeast Asia, traveling by foot on glaciers. - This is disputed by some tribes, such as the Ojibwe, who believe that their ancestors came from the east, not the west. - Before European explorers arrived in significant numbers for extended periods in the fifteenth century (there is evidence that the Vikings had reached North America before then), the indigenous population was anywhere between 10 and 100 million. - The tribes living here when Europeans showed up were geographically, culturally, and physically diverse, but they were categorically viewed as a single uncivilized group by arriving Spanish, French, and British explorers. - Even today, "Indians" in America are part of 280 distinct cultural groups. - Foreshadowing the lack of respect to come, Columbus called all of the people he met Indians, despite their clear cultural differences, because he thought he was in India. - Confronted with foreign diseases and unfamiliar military technology, the Indians were quickly dominated by white invaders. - In Central and South America, the Spanish brutally enslaved them as labor for the mining industry. In the northern parts of North America, French colonialists nurtured their relationships with the Indians in order to cultivate a profitable fur trade. - The British, chiefly concerned with acquiring land, settled colonies with the long-term goal of expanding the British state, dispossessing and "civilizing" America's indigenous population in the process
Statistics About Latinos In America
- Latino, like the term Hispanic (the two are often used interchangeably), refers to a diverse group of people of Latin or Hispanic origin. - In 2016, the majority of Latinos in the United States were from Mexico (about 63.2 percent), Puerto Rico (about 9.5 percent), Cuba (3.9 percent), and the Dominican Republic (3.3 percent). - They are a huge and rapidly expanding segment of the American population; in 2012 they made up approximately 17 percent of the population, surpassing African Americans. - Latinos also live in a wide array of locations, although they have clustered on the West Coast and in the South and Midwest
Why does no foolproof way of determining racial boundaries exist?
- According to the social historian Ian Haney López (1995), the US Supreme Court grappled with this question in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. - In a landmark case in 1923, for example, Dr. Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh from India, was denied American citizenship. - The Supreme Court ruled that he did not qualify as a "free white person," despite being the first Indian Sikh to be inducted into the US Army in World War I. - In previous cases, the Court relied on a combination of scientific evidence and "common knowledge" to decide who counted as white. - But the Thind case posed a particular challenge because leading anthropologists at the time uniformly classified Asian Indians as members of the Caucasian race. - The very notion of whiteness was at stake: If the anthropologists were right, then the commonly accepted conception of whiteness would be radically changed to include dark-skinned immigrants like Thind. - The Court therefore decried science as failing to distinguish human difference sufficiently, relying on common knowledge alone to deny Thind's claims to whiteness. - As the Court put it, "The words 'free white persons' are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understandings of the common man"
The influence of specific gov't policies on the "black ghetto"
- Also helping create the black ghetto have been specific government policies, such as the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), which in the early 1930s granted loans to homeowners who were in financial trouble. - The HOLC also instituted the practice of "redlining," which declared inner-city, black neighborhoods too much of a liability and ineligible for aid. - Following the HOLC's lead, the US Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration—both of which were designed to make home ownership a reality for struggling Americans—funneled funds away from black areas and predominantly into white suburbs. - Finally, by the 1950s, urban slums were being razed in the name of "urban renewal," which essentially became a program of removal, as African Americans were relocated to concentrated public housing projects. - These deliberately discriminatory policies are perpetuated today by de facto segregation in the form of continued suburban white flight and the splintering of school districts along racial lines.
How did the colonialism of America affect Native Americans?
- American Indians' way of life was completely obliterated by the European settlements, as vital land was taken from them and their communal infrastructure was disrupted. - Most devastating were the newly imported diseases, such as smallpox and cholera, against which the Indians, having no native immunity, were virtually defenseless. There were also grueling forced marches from native lands to dedicated reservations. - By the end of the 1800s, the Native American population had dwindled to approximately 250,000 (US Census Bureau, 1993). - The Indian Bureau (later called the Bureau of Indian Affairs) was established as part of the War Department in 1824 to deal with the remaining "Indian problem," and its chief means was "forced assimilation." - This involved removing Indian children from their families and putting them in government-run boarding schools that taught the superiority of Anglo culture over "primitive" Native culture and religion. - Children who refused to adopt Western dress, language, and religion met with harsh physical and emotional punishment. (A similar project was undertaken in British-ruled Australia with the native Aboriginal tribes.) - Despite this poor treatment, Navajo men served the United States in World War II, in which 29 "code talkers" used the Navajo language in lieu of cryptography to protect the secrecy of American communications. - The work of the code talkers was critically instrumental in the American victory at Iwo Jima and many other battles throughout the war.
The Withdrawal Response to Oppression
- An oppressed group may withdraw, as the Jewish population did after Nazi persecution in Poland. - Before World War II, Jews in Poland numbered 3.3 million, the second-largest Jewish population in the world. - Eighty-five percent of Polish Jews died in the Holocaust, leaving roughly 500,000. - After World War II, violence against Jews continued, and many moved. - These conditions, plus the bitter taste of Polish complicity in the Holocaust itself, caused many Jews to leave for good. - By 1947, Poland was home to just 100,000 Jews. Another case of withdrawal was the Great Migration of the mid-twentieth century in the United States. - Blacks streamed from the Jim Crow rural South in search of jobs and equality in the industrialized urban North and West; an estimated 1.5 million African Americans left per decade between 1940 and 1970. - The North opened opportunities to blacks that previously had been violently denied them in the South, including economic and educational gains as well as the cultural freedom manifested in the Harlem Renaissance. - But leaving the South did not always lead to immediate improvements. In their search for a better life, many African Americans found cramped shantytowns on the edge of urban centers, exploitation by factory owners looking for cheap black labor, and increasing hostility from white workers. - Racialized competition for housing and employment sometimes led to violent clashes, such as the East St. Louis riots in the summer of 1917. - The riots, principally involving white violence against blacks, raged for nearly a week, leaving nine whites and hundreds of African Americans dead. - An estimated 6,000 black citizens, fearing for their lives, fled the city, another stark example of withdrawal.
What are some other consequences of the "browning of America?"
- Another consequence of the "browning of America" is the adoption by white nationalists of the rhetoric of minority status. - Though it will not be until 2044 that whites are no longer a majority—at which time they will still be the single biggest racial group at 49.9 percent of the population—that has not stopped many alt-right politicos from using the fears of being lost in the melting pot to bolster their political power very effectively. - Once we actually do arrive at a population distribution in which whites are a minority—though if history holds, likely a wealthy and politically powerful one—it will be interesting to observe what kind of dynamics emerge. - There are cases worldwide of what Amy Chua (1998) calls "market dominant minorities," such as whites in South Africa, Chinese in Indonesia, and Indians in some Caribbean nations. - When the minority group is the economically and socially dominant group, it is a delicate situation because blame and backlash can flare up when that country's economic prospects falter. - For the time being, however, it is (some) whites themselves who seem to be playing the part of aggreived, oppressed minority group—at least at the ballot box.
Caspar Lavatar and Physionomy
- Another eighteenth-century thinker, the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801), popularized physiognomy, which correlated outside appearances to inner virtues. - Not surprisingly, light skin and small features signified high intellect and worthy character. - Political philosophers were also on board with racial thinking. - Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, had already made the connection between climate and certain forms of government in The Spirit of the Laws (1748/1750). - Race was now considered not just a set of physical traits but something that comes with social implications. - Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued for a link between inner character and outside physiognomy and further claimed that these individual markers were also imprinted on an entire nation's moral life
Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 (Institutional Racism)
- Another example is provided by sentencing laws for dealing or consuming cocaine. - At the height of a period of panic over crack cocaine infiltrating neighborhoods, the United States passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. - This law declared that for sentencing purposes, 1 gram of crack cocaine was equivalent to 100 grams of powdered cocaine. - The result was a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for a first-time possession charge for a typical crack user. - Because crack was cheaper and more prevalent in low-income, predominantly black communities, the result was a huge racial disparity in drug sentences by race. - President Obama addressed this issue in 2010 by signing the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the sentencing ratio between powder cocaine and crack from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1. - This ratio, while an improvement, still leaves a significantly disparate impact by race
The Acceptance versus Resistance Response to Oppression
- Another response is acceptance, whereby the oppressed group feigns compliance and hides its true feelings of resentment. - In Erving Goffman's (1959) terms, members of this group construct a front stage of acceptance, often using stereotypes to their own advantage to "play the part" in the presence of the dominant group. - Backstage, however, privately among their subaltern or oppressed group, they present a very different self. - Sociologist Elijah Anderson refers to this as "code-switching," a strategy used by African Americans in the presence of dominant white society. - In Anderson's ethnography of a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, blacks learn two languages, one of the street and one of mainstream society, and daily survival becomes a matter of knowing which one to speak at the right time. - For an inner-city youth, an act of code-switching could be as simple as putting on a leather jacket and concealing his textbook beneath it for the walk home from school. - A more overt form of resistance, the fourth paradigm of group responses to domination, would be collective resistance through a movement such as revolution or genocide or through nonviolent protest as in the US civil rights movement.
The Passing Response to Oppression
- Another response to racial oppression is passing, or blending in with the dominant group. - For example, during his early adulthood, Malcolm X attempted to look more like white men through the painful process of chemically straightening or "conking" his Afro. - A more recent example was the pop star Michael Jackson. - And an even more recent, interesting case is that of Rachel Dolezal, who was of white, European ancestry but tried to (and did for a while) pass as African American by altering her hair and skin tone. - Her efforts were so successful for a time that she became president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP. - Once it was revealed that she did not have any African ancestry, she was dubbed the "undisputed heavyweight champion of racial appropriation". - Passing is not necessarily about physical changes, though. - One of the most common ways people have tried to pass has been to change their surnames. - The single largest ethnic group in the United States today is German Americans. - Not English, but German. Where, do you ask, are all the Schmidts and Muellers? - They now go by Smith and Miller, after a huge wave of name changing among German Americans during the world wars—if not during the first one, then often by the second.
Segregation during the WWII Era
- As Anthony Marx (1998) has noted, concern over segregation grew during World War II as America was caught in the embarrassing contradiction of espousing antiracist rhetoric against its Nazi foes while upholding an egregiously racist doctrine at home. - America emerged from the war as a global force with heightened stakes for its world reputation; this new status along with growing public dissent, perhaps helped motivate the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. - The Court's majority opinion that legally segregated public schools were "inherently unequal" is considered the ruling that struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine. - It was also the spark that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Socioeconomic status of Asian Americans
- Asian Americans are unique among ethnic minorities because of their high average socioeconomic status, surpassing that of most other ethnic minorities as well as most whites in terms of educational attainment. - For example, the median family income for the US population as a whole in 2013 was $71,062, whereas for Asian Americans it was $92,260 - That said, despite the overall success of Asian Americans, certain groups—notably Cambodians and Hmong (from Laos and Vietnam)—experience very high poverty rates
Unemployment and Asian Americans
- Asian Americans overall find it a bit more difficult to be reemployed once they lose a job. - In 2013, the Asian American unemployment rate for those with bachelor's degrees or higher was 0.1 percentage point higher than the rate for whites, and Asian Americans and blacks suffer from the longest average duration of unemployment spells. - In 2013, unemployed Asian Americans experienced a median 20.5 weeks before they found work again. For blacks that year, the figure was 21.5 weeks. (Whites and Latinos had 14.5- and 15.4-week median durations between jobs, respectively, in 2013.) - However, these black-Asian and white-Latino similarities obscure different reasons for the long duration for the various groups. - Whereas blacks typically face barriers to employment, Asians have more family support and savings and thus are able to wait out a bad labor market for the best possible job.
The Net Worth Disparity Among Whites and Other Races
- Latinos are a varied group but largely reflect African Americans, who had an average household net worth of $17,100 in 2016, on wealth measures. - The median Latino family in 2016 had about $20,600 in assets, and about one-third of both black and Latino households had zero or negative net worth. - Compare those figures to the $171,000 in household wealth of the average white family. - We know considerably less about Native Americans because reliable data are lacking, but given that they have a poverty rate of 26.2 percent (compared with just 11.6 percent for whites), their wealth is not likely to be high. - Asian Americans, however, have low rates of poverty (11.8 percent) and high rates of home ownership, at about 60 percent.
How close are we to this new black-nonblack color line?
- At least four states (California, Texas, Hawaii, and New Mexico) are deemed "majority minority" states, where whites are not the majority of the population within major metropolitan areas. - But let's not forget that racial categories are social constructions, not static entities. - To claim a multiracial identity presupposes the existence of a monoracial identity, when we know no scientifically pure or distinct race of people exists. - Similarly, the notion of a white minority presumes that whiteness is a fixed racial category, whereas whiteness has expanded to include groups that were considered nonwhite in the past and may continue to fold Asians and Latinos into a kind of whiteness that emphasizes symbolic ethnicity. - Indeed, as Warren and Twine (1997) point out, as long as blacks are present, a back door is open for nonblacks to slip under the white umbrella. - For example, the Asian success story as the "model minority" is made possible by Asians' ability to blend in with whites, because they are unequivocally not black. - We are at a point in American history when whiteness may be expanding again, with blacks, as always, serving as the counterweight
Scientific Racism and the Rhonda Example
- Belgian explorers, immersed in discourses of scientific racism, confronted two Rwandan tribes, the Hutu and the Tutsi, who for ages had been living and working together and intermarrying. - Because of all their shared social, cultural, and genetic heritages, scientists today cannot distinguish Hutu and Tutsi into separate biological populations. - But in the late nineteenth century, the Belgians gave preferential treatment to the Tutsi, whom they believed to be superior to the Hutu. - What followed was a brutal system of oppression in which the Tutsi dominated the Hutu.
Fair Weather Liberal
- Conversely, one who is not prejudiced but does discriminate is termed a "fair-weather liberal." - Despite the fair-weather liberal's inner ideological stance in favor of racial equality, he or she still discriminates, perhaps without knowing it. - For instance, a couple who consider themselves open-minded about race relations may feel compelled to sell their home as soon as they are confronted with new black neighbors (white flight, as discussed earlier). - Of course, they do not cite residential integration as their motivation for leaving, but instead offer an excuse that has embedded racist reasons, such as the differences in school districts. - In fact, the prime time for families to move out of integrated neighborhoods happens to be around the time when the eldest child of the family turns five and begins school.
Social Darwinism
- Darwin argued that acquired attributes could not be transmitted; instead, change can occur only through the positive selection of mutations. - Darwin's theory had an enormous impact on how people thought of race. - In effect, it called into question the popular belief that climate influenced racial difference and instead offered an account in which racial lineages were much more deeply rooted and long-standing. - What's more, humankind was now seen as being on a trajectory in which some groups have advanced (or evolved) more than others. - The popular nineteenth-century notion of social Darwinism was the application of Darwinian ideas to society—namely, the evolutionary "survival of the fittest." - Social theorist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) promulgated the idea that some people, defined by their race, are better fit for survival than others and are therefore intended by nature to dominate inferior races. - A new puzzle arose with Darwinian ideas: What, if not inherited climate change, could explain the development of humans along such radically different lines?
Does the idea of fixed biological racial differences still exist?
- Despite the ideas of scholars such as Boas and Park, the old idea of fixed, biological racial differences remains alive and well today, although in modified form. - The search for racial boundaries continues in the twenty-first century with the rise of molecular genetics. - DNA research now allows us to look deeper than the bumps on our heads, deeper than skin tone or palm lines. - Today you can find a number of DNA testing companies offering you an inside look at your heritage. - For as little as $70 or so, a testing kit arrives in the mail, you swab your mouth according to the directions, and then send the swab to the company. - Your "real" identity comes back from the lab in about seven weeks.
Racism and Asian Americans
- Early Asian immigrants were perceived as a labor threat and therefore met with extreme hostility. - The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which led to a ban against the Chinese in 1902, marked the first time in American history in which a group was singled out and barred entry. - Urban "Chinatowns" developed out of ghettos in which marginalized Chinese workers, mostly men, were forced to live. Japanese immigrants faced similar hostilities and were formally barred entry by the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924. - By 2010, Asian and mixed-Asian US residents amounted to 5.9 percent of the population. - This was a 46 percent increase over a decade, making Asian Americans the fastest-growing racial group. - They are most heavily concentrated in California, Hawaii, New York, Illinois, and Washington.
What are ways that America has promoted equity inequality among Blacks?
- Equity inequality captures the historical disadvantage of minority groups and the way those disadvantages accrue over time. - The institutional barriers to blacks acquiring property, discussed earlier, were only one such mechanism. - These included redlining by banks (whereby loans, especially mortgages, were not given in predominantly black neighborhoods seen as higher risk), racially restrictive covenenants (whereby owners had to agree to sell their homes to only whites), and blacks' disproportionate exclusion from government benefits such as FHA and VA mortgages and Social Security retirement pensions (agricultural and domestic workers, who were largely black, were initially excluded from these programs; Truman corrected this).
Reverend Minister Samuel Stanhope Smith and Ontological Equality
- In 1787 the Reverend Minister Samuel Stanhope Smith, who was president of what is now Princeton University, wrote an essay in which he proposed that dark skin should be thought of as a "universal freckle." - Differences in skin shade, he maintained, were really just like different levels of suntans. - It was his belief that if an African from the sub-Sahara were transplanted to Scandinavia, his dark-brown skin would turn lighter over the course of generations (and perhaps the underlying social and cognitive characteristics associated with race would change as well). - Notice how Smith's pliable view of race captures a spirit of ontological equality: We are all born the same deep beneath our skin; it just so happens that some of us have been out in the sun a bit longer than others. ** Ontological equality is the philosophical and religious notion that all people are created equal.
symbolic ethnicity
- Ethnicity can be thought of as a nationality, not in the sense of carrying the rights and duties of citizenship but in the sense of identifying with a past or future nationality. - For Americans, Herbert Gans (1979b) called this identification symbolic ethnicity. - Symbolic ethnicity today is a matter of choice for white middle-class Americans. - It has no risk of stigma and confers the pleasures of feeling like an individual. - For example, from 2000 to 2010 the second-fastest-growing racial group in the United States was Native Americans. - According to the US Census, the American Indian and Alaska Native (alone or multiracial) population grew by 1.1 million, about 39 percent, whereas the entire US population grew during that same time by 9.7 percent (US Census Bureau, 2012a). - These numbers are not the outcome of migration or a Native American baby boom, but instead reflect a growing interest in claiming one's heritage, so long as it's not too stigmatizing and brings just the right amount of uniqueness. - Native Americans are eligible for numerous types of federal assistance, ranging from health-care services to preferential admission rates at colleges (though a 2004 Civil Rights Commission report found that the federal government spends more per capita for prisoners' health care than for Native Americans')
European Immigration during and after WWI
- European immigration slowed during World War I and essentially came to a halt as a result of the 1924 National Origins Act, while internal African American migration from the rural South to the industrial North skyrocketed. - These shifts, along with the solidification of the one-drop rule, shifted national attention away from white-nonwhite relations toward white-black relations. - Whites of "ethnic stock" were drawn back into the earlier, broad category of white, thereby reuniting Anglos and other Europeans. - Public horror at Nazi crimes following the conclusion of World War II further strengthened the idea of whiteness as an inclusive racial category.
Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963)
- Far from being a deeply rooted structure that kept people bonded to their culture, ethnic identification, they reasoned, persisted because it was in an individual's best interest to maintain it. - They saw ethnic groups as miniature interest groups—individuals uniting for instrumental purposes, such as fending off job competition. - Glazer and Moynihan believed that ethnicity was fluid and circumstantial. - More recently, scholars have posited that ethnic identification is both a deeply felt attachment and an instrumental position that can change according to circumstance
Drug Persecution and Institutional Racism
- Given the role of drug prosecutions as a lynchpin of institutional racism in the criminal justice system, one might think that legalization would be a way to eliminate such disparate impact. - However, if we look at the case of marijuana, we can see that institutional racism can even color decriminalization efforts. - Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates, but blacks are up to 8 times more likely to be arrested for possession thanks to who gets targeted by police and where and how the drug is consumed (American Civil Liberties Union, 2013). - Such disparities continue into an age of semilegalization. - That is, to be legal, marijuana must be consumed in your home. - But those who live in public housing or rental apartments that do not permit it tend to consume the drug outside, where they are vulnerable to arrest. - In fact, in Washington, D.C., arrests for posession of marijuana almost tripled in the year after it was legalized there. - Ditto for arrests for selling: Those affected are primarily black residents. - Meanwhile, when licenses were awarded to legal growers in nearby Maryland, black companies were shut out since the commission awarding the contracts sought "geographic diversity." - So the profits in what is likely to become a massive industry will be unequally distributed by race too
The Idea of Race in Greece, Rome, and early Christendom
- However, in the ancient worlds of Greece, Rome, and early Christendom, the idea of race did not exist as we know it today, as a biological package of traits carried in the bloodlines of distinct groups, each with a separate way of being (culture), acting (behavior), thinking (intelligence), and looking (appearance). - The Greek philosopher Hippocrates, for instance, believed that physical markers such as skin color were the result of different environmental factors, much as the surface of a plant reflects the constitution of its soil and the amount of sunlight and water it receives. - To be sure, the Greeks liked the looks of their fellow Greeks the best, but the very notion of race goes against Aristotle's principle of civic association, on which Greek society was based. - The true test of a person was to be found in his (women were excluded) civic actions. Similarly, the Romans maintained a brutal slavery system, but their slaves, as well as their citizens, represented various skin colors and geographic origins. - The ancients may have used skin color to tell one person from the next—they weren't color-blind—but they didn't discriminate in the sense of making judgments about people on the basis of their racial category without regard to their individual merit. - The notion has been so thoroughly displaced by racialized thinking that to us moderns, it is impossibly idealistic to imagine a society without our race concept
The Controversy Over School Desegregation
- However, school desegregation has been under fire since several Supreme Court decisions in the 1990s. - Two 2007 cases in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington, came the closest to overturning the spirit (if not the letter) of Brown. - Earlier, former presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had both openly attacked desegregation initiatives, especially busing. In 1981, President Reagan's attorney general, William Bradford Reynolds, flatly proclaimed that the "compulsory busing of students in order to achieve racial balance in the public schools is not an acceptable remedy". -Today most US schools are only marginally less segregated than they were in the mid-1960s. - It seems that 1988 was the least segregated year in US schools. - Namely, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found the number of "hyper-segregated schools, in which 90% or more of students are minorities, grew since 1988 from 5.7% to 18.4%". - School segregation is invariably linked to poverty, which is perpetuated by residential segregation, and perhaps this issue is the one we should be addressing if we are concerned about mitigating racial disparities.
Congress and The First Naturalization Law
- In 1790, Congress passed the first naturalization law, limiting the rights of citizenship to "free white persons." - This law strikes us today as both restrictive and inclusive. - It was restrictive because it granted naturalization only to free whites, thereby coloring American citizenship. - Yet it also set up an initially broad understanding of "whiteness," an umbrella term that in common parlance could include not just Anglo but also Slavic, Celtic, and Teutonic (German) Europeans. - However, as millions of immigrants surged to the shores of America—25 million European immigrants arrived between 1880 and World War I—the notion of "free white persons" was reconsidered. With an Irish-born population of more than 1 million in 1860, - Americans began to theorize racial differences within the white populace. Questions arose in the popular press and imagination, such as "Who should count as white?" "Whom do we want to be future generations of Americans?" "Who is fit for self-governance?" - The inclusiveness of "white persons" splintered into a range of Anglos and "barbarous" others, and Americans began to distinguish among Teutons, Slavs, Celtics, and even the "swarthy" Swedes.
The Effect of The Civil Rights Movement
- In 1968, under President Lyndon B. Johnson's initiative, the Kerner Commission reported that despite the civil rights movement sweeping the nation, America was split into two societies: "one black, one white—separate and unequal." - The main reason for the fissure was residential segregation what sociologist Lawrence Bobo (1989) has termed the "structural linchpin of American racial inequality." - Residential segregation, scholars argue, maintains an urban underclass in perpetual poverty by limiting its ties to upwardly mobile social networks, which connect people to jobs and other opportunities. - When you live in the ghetto, your chances of landing a good job through your social network are indeed slim
National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP)
- In 1980, before white studies got under way in universities, the white supremacist David Duke left his position as the grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), attempting to sugarcoat his racist movement with a seemingly more politically correct approach. In this new framework, Duke presented whites as a besieged minority, writes sociologist Mitch Berbrier (2000), defining the NAAWP's mission as a pro-white heritage movement as opposed to an antiblack one. - Sociologist Abby Ferber has analyzed the clever appropriation of civil rights language in Duke's white supremacist discourse. - For example, in an article by Duke in the White Patriot, Ferber finds the rhetoric of reverse discrimination, victimhood, and the right to cultural difference: [O]ur race and all others should have the right to determine their own destiny through self-determination and rule. ...[E]very people on this planet must have the right to life: the continued existence of its unique racial fabric and resulting culture.
Multiracial March (Multiracial Population)
- In 1996, there was a Multiracial March on Washington in which multiracial activists demanded a separate census category to bolster their political claims and recognition. - Although the movement did not result in a multiracial identity category, for the first time ever, the 2000 Census allowed respondents to check off more than one box for racial identity. - The resulting multiracial population is currently estimated to be about 9 million, and those are just the self-identified people who checked more than one race box in 2010. - The latest census also asks separate questions about race and ethnicity, which means that census data can now be used to examine some of the racial diversity within the Hispanic population, as well as some ethnic diversity among African American and white populations
Anti-Semitism and Nazis
- In Nazi Germany, for example, race posed certain key questions: How can Jewishness be detected? Are Jews a race or a religious group? - Both, actually: They are a religious group that has been racialized. - Scholars have pointed out that the seeds of racism may be traced to anti-Judaism among early Christians, who forced Jews to convert. - Anti-Semitism grew in the eleventh century and was based on the belief that getting rid of Jews was preferable to converting them. - But Jewishness was still a social identity at this point—a matter of having religious beliefs that differed from the norm. - Anti-Semitism did not turn into racism until the idea took hold that Jews were intrinsically inferior, having innate differences that separated them from their Christian neighbors. - In Nazi Germany, where Jews were believed to have such innate and inherited differences, the problem remained: How can a person be identified as Jewish? - This became an obsession during the Nazis' program of racial purification. - They devised a "scientific" way to detect Jewishness by measuring ratios of forehead to nose size to face length, but they had little luck in nailing down a reliable strategy for making such a determination (hence, Jews in Nazi-occupied countries were forced to wear a yellow Star of David as a marker of their identity).
Asians as the "model minority"
- In recent years, Asians have been applauded for their smooth assimilation as the "model minority," the implication being that if only other ethnic groups could assimilate so well, America would have fewer social problems. - Such a view, however, effaces the rather unsmooth history Asian immigrants have faced in this country as well as the continuing poverty and discrimination faced by some Asian ethnics. - Furthermore, "positive" stereotypes of high achievement are not always beneficial and can place enormous pressure on Asian youths to measure up to an impossibly high ideal. - Not only can the model minority myth be damaging to Asians themselves but it can be used by those with an extremist agenda. - For example, the president of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank, Richard Spencer, routinely cites data claiming that East Asians have the highest IQs on average, followed by those of European descent. - This placement of whites second to another group paints a patina of scientific objectivity onto the claims that so-called alt-right race rabble-rousers like himself are merely "race realists." - How biased can he be, after all, if he's not even listing his own group first? - Of course, the real point is to pave the way for claims that other nonwhite groups are intellectually inferior. - Even back in the 1960s, the case of Asian American assimilation and upward mobility was used to blame other groups for their failures to achieve success—ignoring the circumstances minority groups faced and inherited
The Rise of Awareness of White Privilege
- In recent years, however, awareness of whiteness has been on the rise, as evidenced by the profusion of scholarship on whiteness, the goal of which is to call attention to the social construction and ensuing privilege of the category. - Calling attention to whiteness helps whites understand how slanted the playing field really is. - It also helps rectify something wrong with the way we study race in America: By traditionally focusing on minority groups, the implicit message that scholarship projects is that nonwhites are "deviant," to borrow from the Comte de Buffon, and that's why we study them. - Even popular culture has caught on with memes like "stuff white people like," "columbusing," and "if black people said the stuff white people say," which offer humorous
In the 1960s, how did many whites in America try to distinguish themselves from Native Americans?
- In the 1960s, many whites in rural parts of America similarly failed in trying to distinguish themselves from their mixed Native American and black neighbors by searching for distinguishing signs on the body, such as differences in fingernails, feet, gums, and lines on the palm of a hand. - In exasperation, some whites reported having to rely on good, old-fashioned "instinct" to distinguish themselves from nonwhites
Anti-Muslin Rates in America
- In the first year after the events of 9/11, the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes shot up 1,600 percent (Read, 2008). - And though reported crimes dropped over the following decade and a half, such backlash has resurged after the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, which some see as linked to his tendency to retweet incdendiary remarks or memes. - In the first six months of his administration, anti-Islamic hate crimes rose by a quarter from the prior year (which was already higher than the previous period). - Most notable were mosque torchings, cemetary vandalism, and an incident in Bloomington, Minnesota, when a bomb was thrown into a mosque in an act Governor Mark Dayton called terrorism
Racialization of Muslims
- In the wake of terrorist anxiety, and several years into the war on terror, Muslims in America have undergone what scholars call racialization, the formation of a new racial identity by drawing ideological boundaries of difference around a formerly unnoticed group of people. - These days, any brown-skinned man with a beard or woman with a headscarf is subject to threats, violence, and harassment. - And men with turbans bear some of the worst discrimination, although nearly all men who wear turbans in the United States are Sikh, members of one of the world's largest religious groups, which originated in India. - Four days after 9/11, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh living in Mesa, Arizona, was shot five times and killed in the gas station he owned. He was the first victim of an anti-Muslim epidemic, and he wasn't even Muslim. - In one Harvard study, 83 percent of Sikhs interviewed said that they or someone they knew personally had experienced a hate crime or incident, and another 64 percent felt fear or danger for their family and themselves. - Even more striking is what happens to Caucasian Americans who convert to Islam. - One woman, despite having fair skin and green eyes, has been categorized by people as Palestinian when she wears the Muslim headscarf, called the hijab. - She's even been told, "Go back to your own country," although she was born and raised in California. - The frequency of such incidents is likely to increase as more people convert to Islam in the United States
Residential Segregation and Poverty
- It has also been suggested that residential segregation inflicts poverty through a "culture of segregation". - According to this argument, you live in a ghetto that's extremely isolated from the outside world—no family restaurants like the Olive Garden, no mainstream bank branches, not even a chain grocery store that sells fresh vegetables. - You're surrounded daily by the ills that accompany poverty: poor health, joblessness, out-of-wedlock children, welfare, educational failure, a drug economy, crime and violence, and in general, social and physical deterioration. - In the ghetto, the most extreme form of residential segregation, you come to believe that this is all there is to life; the social ills become normative. - It's no big deal to sell drugs, drop out of school, depend on welfare, or run with a gang. - You slide into the very behaviors that, in turn, reproduce the spiral of decline of your neighborhood.
How has America tried to offer aid in regards to equity inequality?
- Japanese Americans still alive at the time after internment were paid reparations in 1988. - Some have argued for a similar policy to compensate African Americans for the institution of slavery (and racially unequal asset policies since Emancipation). - Each year, until his retirement in 2017, Congressman John Conyers introduced a bill to study the issue; so far, even the creation of a commission to assess the issue has been blocked. Meanwhile, the tax reform bill known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 raised the amount of an estate not subject to taxes to 11.2 million dollars. - Because the number of African Americans and Hispanics who would benefit is extremely small, it will serve to widen the already large racial wealth gap - In summary, policies intending to address disparities between nonwhites and whites must take into account the extreme wealth gap and its historical trajectory. - Affirmative action aimed at improving wages and increasing job openings for blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans can address only a piece of a larger cycle of wealth inequality. - Income from work provides for the day-to-day, week-to-week expenses; wealth is the stuff long-term upward mobility is made of.
Statistics About African Americans
- Just before the American Revolution, slaves made up more than 20 percent of the colonial population. - Today about 12.7 percent of the American population is black. - Like the Japanese Burakumin, this minority group has high rates of poverty, health problems, unemployment, and crime. - According to the US Census Bureau, the median income of African Americans as a group is roughly 62.8 percent that of whites. - In 2015, more than 6.7 million people in the United States were on probation or parole, in jail, or in prison—that's 2.7 percent of all US adult residents, or 1 in every 37 adults. - Among men ages 25 to 39, blacks are imprisoned 2.5 times and 6 times as often as Hispanics and whites, respectively;. overall, just 0.5 percent of white men are imprisoned
According to Lee, who are the biggest losers in the new configuration of race?
- Lee points out that the biggest losers in this new configuration of race in America are likely to be—no surprise—blacks, who may be blamed for their own poverty when compared with successful Latino and Asian immigrants. - Lee cautions, "Someone will look at African Americans who have been here longer and who aren't attaining certain levels of mobility and say, why can't they make it? - If race isn't an issue for Asians and Latinos, it shouldn't matter for blacks. - What I argue is that the stigma attached to blackness because of the history of blackness is so different; they are not immigrants. - To compare African Americans to immigrants is never fair."
When did the first Asian Americans arrive in the US?
- Like Latino, the term Asian American is very broad, encompassing diverse and sometimes clashing peoples from China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. - The first wave of Asians to arrive in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century were predominantly laborers of Chinese, then Japanese, then Korean and Filipino origin. - A second large wave of immigration is currently under way, mostly made up of well-educated and highly skilled people from all over Asia.
The Diversity Among Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans
- Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans all have diverse phenotypical traits that make racial distinctions of a unified Latino type nearly impossible. - Mexicans are generally classified as "mestizos," a term referring to a racially mixed heritage that combines Native American and European traits. - And for instance, Puerto Ricans are often a mixture of African, European, and Indian backgrounds. - So ambiguous is the Latino label that at various times the US Census has classified them as part of the white race and as a separate race. - At the moment, being Hispanic or Latino is considered an ethnic identity, not a racial identity
Middle Eastern Immigration to the US
- Middle Easterners come from places as diverse as the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Iran, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories. - They established communities in the United States as far back as the late 1800s, but their numbers have swelled since the 1970s as part of the rising tide of non-European immigration. - Middle Easterners in this second wave of immigration often arrive from politically tumultuous areas to seek refuge in the United States—such as the many refugees who have recently fled from wartorn Syria. - Today about 2 million Americans report Arab ancestry, and even more Americans have a Middle Eastern heritage, because not all Middle Easterners are Arab, despite the fact that most Americans regard anyone from the Middle East as Arab and Muslim. - In fact, the largest Middle Eastern population in the United States today is from Iran, and they are Persians, not ethnic Arabs, and do not generally speak Arabic. - Similarly, although the majority of new Middle Eastern Americans are Muslim, many of them are Christian, and a small number are Jewish
Milton Gordon Tweak of Straight-line assimilation
- Milton Gordon (1964) tweaked Park's model by suggesting multiple kinds of assimilation outcomes. - For Gordon, an immigrant population can pass through (or stall in) seven stages of assimilation: cultural, structural, marital, identificational, attitude receptional, behavior receptional, and civic assimilation
Race in the Early Modern World
- Modern racial thinking developed in the mid-seventeenth century in parallel with global changes such as the Protestant Reformation in Europe, the Age of Exploration, and the rise of capitalism. - For example, European colonizers, confronted with people living in newly discovered lands, interpreted human physical differences first with biblical and later with scientific explanations, and race proved to be a rather handy organizing principle to legitimate the imperial adventure of conquest, exploitation, and colonialism. - To make sense of what they considered the "primitive" and "degraded" races of Africa, Europeans turned to a biblical story in the book of Genesis, the curse of Ham. - According to this obscure passage, when Noah had safely navigated his ark over the flood, he got drunk and passed out naked in his tent. - When he woke from his stupor, Noah learned that his youngest son, Ham, had seen him naked, whereas his other sons had respectfully refused to behold the spectacle. - Noah decided to curse Ham's descendants, saying, "A slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers". - European Christians and scientists interpreted this tale to mean that Ham was the original black man, and all black people were his unfortunate, degraded descendants. For an expanding Europe and America, the Hamitic myth justified colonialism and slavery.
Were humans a united species, or did we come from separate origins? (monogenism versus polygenism)
- Monogenists, including religious traditionalists, believed that humans were one species, united under God. - Polygenists believed that different races were, in fact, distinct species. - Darwin sided with the monogenists, claiming that the notion of different species was absurd. (Politics, it is said, makes for strange bedfellows. It certainly did in this case, as Darwinists and religious traditionalists, usually opposed, became allies in arguing that all humans were one species.) - Even though the monogenists won the debate, the notion of separate roots and distinct reproductive genetic histories has had a lasting impact on how we think of human difference. - Under the model of natural selection, human difference must have evolved over tens or hundreds of thousand of years (if not millions), not just over a few generations in relative sun or shade. - Such a vast time frame was used as evidence that races were very different (and not simply superficially so).
ehtnocentrism
- Scientific racism sought to make sense of people who were different from white Europeans—who constituted the norm, according to the French scientist Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). - This way of thinking, called ethnocentrism, the judgment of other groups by one's own standards and values, has plagued scientific studies of "otherness." - In Buffon's classification schemes, anyone different from Europeans was a deviation from the norm. - His pseudoscientific research, like all racial thinking of the time, justified imperial exploits by automatically classifying nonwhites as abnormal, improper, and inferior.
Cubans and Immigration
- Most Cubans consider themselves Hispanic whites, although their immigration status has changed drastically in recent years. - Following the Communist revolution led by Fidel Castro, the first large wave of Cuban immigrants arrived in southern Florida in the 1960s. - These immigrants were upper or middle class, were educated, and were perceived as the victims of a Communist regime that came to power during the Cold War. - As such, they were welcomed enthusiastically to this country, and their assimilation started smoothly. - By 1995, however, that warm welcome had faded. - The US federal government terminated its 35-year open-door policy toward Cuban refugees, and the heavy media coverage of Cubans arriving since then in small boats has led to stereotypes of a desperate "wetback" invasion. - Arrivals since the 1970s—who generally are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in Cuban society—have met more resistance from their host society, consequently experiencing higher rates of unemployment, low-wage work, and dependence on welfare and charity than native whites and previous Cuban émigrés. - More recently, with the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba, the special status that Cubans had with respect to immigration (essentially a fast track to American citizenship) has been terminated, and as a result, deportations have increased. - Some 37,000 Cubans face deportation orders as of 2018. - The Trump administration is revising Obama's policies so limbo and uncertainty may continue for a while.
What group of people does Harper's Weekly Magazine refer to?
- Most people would guess that the minority group in question here is African Americans. - This passage was written, in fact, about Irish immigrants, who in late-nineteenth-century America struggled to assimilate amid fierce and widespread racism. - It was believed that the Irish were a distinct category of people who carried innate differences in their blood, differences that made them permanently inferior to their white American neighbors
Active Bigot (Merton)
- One who holds prejudice and discriminates is an "active bigot." - This is the prototypical racist who puts his money (or burning cross) where his (or her) mouth is. - Active bigots are rarer to come by, because prejudicial viewpoints are largely unacceptable in most of the ostensibly antiracist West. - But don't be fooled into thinking that race doesn't matter anymore. It does, and racism is still alive and going strong, although it's veiled in different terms. - You just have to know how to look for it. - Old-fashioned, overt racism tended to convey three basic ideas: Humans are separable into distinct types; they have essential traits that cannot be changed; and some types of people are just better than others. Not many people openly make such claims in America today, as they tend to be frowned on
Criticism of Park's Model
- Park's model was useful in shifting attention away from essentialist explanations of the so-called innate differences among immigrants, but it suffers from several shortcomings. - Most obviously, it does not apply to nonwhite immigrants, many of whom are not fully accepted into all areas of American society. - Park's model also does not apply to involuntary immigrants, notably African Americans and some refugee
What is race?
- Race refers to a group of people who share a set of characteristics—typically, but not always, physical ones—and are said to share a common bloodline. - People obviously have different physical appearances, including eye color, hair texture, and skin color, so it's perhaps puzzling to hear that (biological) racial differences somehow do not exist. - To speak of the myth of race is to say that it is largely a social construction, a set of stories we tell ourselves to organize reality and make sense of the world, rather than a fixed biological or natural reality. - In this sense, it resembles the socially constructed notions of childhood and adolescence. - We tell the set of stories over and over and, collectively, believe in it and act on it, therefore making it real through practices such as largely separate marriage and reproductive communities. - But we could organize our social distinctions a different way (for example, based on foot size or hair color), and indeed, throughout history, we have told this set of stories in myriad ways.
The Rachel Dolezal Case
- Rachel Dolezal, a Washington woman whose parents say she is Caucasian, maintains that "from my earliest memories I have awareness and connection with the black experience, and that's never left me. - It's not something that I can put on and take off." - Her controversial self-identification as a black woman caused her to lose her local leadership position in the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and her job teaching in the Africana Studies department at Eastern Washington University
Franz Boas and Robert Park on Race
- Scientific racial thought slowly passed out of vogue as theories of cultural difference gained momentum among American intellectuals from the 1920s to the 1940s. - Anthropologist Franz Boas dismissed the biological bases of discrete races, and sociologists such as Robert Park advanced new ideas about culture's importance in determining human behavior. - Race, these thinkers argued, was less about fixed inherited traits than about particular social circumstances. - Furthermore, when World War II exposed the kind of atrocities to which scientific racism could lead, it became socially and scientifically inappropriate to discuss race in biological terms, and eugenics came to be considered a dangerous way of thinking. - With the decline of scientific racism and the shift toward cultural theories of race and ethnicity, the Immigration Act of 1924 was gradually chipped away at starting in 1959 and then completely repealed in 1965. - Don't let the formal denouncement of racial thinking fool you, however. - Cultural explanations of race often reflect a disguised racist ideology just as much as biological ones do.
What are ways that America has promoted equity inequality among Native Americans and Japanese Americans?
- Similar processes and policies have decimated the wealth of Native Americans, who went from living off the land (the entire US territory) to being disproportionately impoverished and dispossessed over the course of a century by exploitative US policies. - One of the most telling examples of this sort of institutionalized dispossession happened to Japanese Americans. - As skilled farmers, Japanese immigrants accrued enough wealth in the early twentieth century to attract resentment, culminating in the 1924 Alien Land Act, which prohibited noncitizens from owning land. Japanese immigrants then found success in business, running nurseries and selling cut flowers, and amassed considerable wealth by 1941, about $140 million cumulatively (Lui, 2004). - When World War II broke out and panic spread over the possibility of a treacherous Japanese population in America, the Roosevelt administration mandated a program of internment by Executive Order 9066. - Japanese American citizens were placed into camps in the western part of the United States. - They were given only a week to dispose of all their assets, forcing them to sell their homes and businesses to whites at scandalously low prices (Lui, 2004). - The result was a huge forced transfer of wealth from Japanese to whites under discriminatory government policy
New Black Immigrants in America
- Sociologists and demographers today are beginning to study how new black immigrants are fracturing the holistic conception of "African American." - For the first time, more Africans are entering the country than during the slave trade. - More than 9 percent of the black population is foreign born. - Afro-Caribbeans such as Cubans, Haitians, and Jamaicans resent being unilaterally categorized as African American, because each of these immigrant groups enjoys a unique history, culture, and language that do not correspond to the American stereotypes of black skin. - For this reason, new black immigrant groups would rather not assimilate, but instead retain their distinctive immigrant status, setting themselves apart from the lowest status group in America, blacks
Segregation in the form of the criminal justice system
- Some scholars argue that a new form of segregation has emerged in America: the criminal justice system. - During the 1960s, blacks were slightly overrepresented in the nation's prisons, but in absolute numbers there were many more white felons, because whites made up a larger percentage of the total US population. - Today the racial distribution in jails and prisons is the reverse. - Blacks and Latinos now make up the majority of incarcerated people. - Recent studies estimate that nearly half of all black men will be arrested before the age of 23 (Brame et al., 2014). - Is imprisonment just another means of confining the black population away from whites? Several scholars make this case, based on changes in drug laws that seem to affect minorities disproportionately
Effects of The Immigration of 1924
- The Immigration Act of 1924 formalized the exclusive definition of whiteness by imposing immigration restrictions based on a quota system that limited the yearly number of immigrants from each country. - The law set an annual ceiling of 18,439 immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, following the recommendation of a report stating that northern and western Europeans were of "higher intelligence" and thus ideal "material for American citizenship"
Conflict Relations and Race
- The final paradigm of race relations is conflict relations, when antagonistic groups within a society live integrated in the same neighborhoods, hold the same jobs, and go to the same schools. - This was the volatile scenario in Rwanda in 1994, when roughly 800,000 Tutsi were murdered by Hutu, mostly by machete, in the span of 100 days. That's about 333.3 killings per hour, or five and a half lives every second. - The killings, as well as the maiming and systematic rape of Tutsi women, were the culmination of more than a century of racial hostility that began with the Belgian colonization of Rwanda.
How did African Americans Arrive To America?
- The first black people in North America arrived not as slaves but as indentured servants contracted by white colonialists for set periods. - They were in the same circumstances as poor, nonfree whites such as those from Ireland or Scotland. - The system of slavery, however, evolved to meet colonial labor needs, and the slave trade was a fixed institution by the end of the seventeenth century. - African Americans have been, all in all, on the bottom of the racial hierarchy ever since.
The Idea of Race in Ancient Egypt and China
- The idea of race, some scholars have claimed, did not exist in the ancient world. - Well, it did and it didn't. It did in the sense that the ancients recognized physical differences and grouped people accordingly. - In ancient Egypt, for example, physical markers were linked to geography. - Believing that people who looked a certain way came from a certain part of the world, the Egyptians spoke for instance of the "pale, degraded race of Arvad," whereas their darker-skinned neighbors were designated the "evil race of Ish." - The Chinese also linked physical variation to geography, as laid out in a Chinese creation myth. - As the ancient tale goes, a goddess cooked human beings in an oven. Some humans were burned black and sent to live in Africa. The underdone ones turned out white and were sent to Europe. Those humans cooked just right, a perfect golden brown, were the Chinese.
The "New Immigrants"
- The new immigrants, largely from Hispanic and Asian countries, are racialized as nonwhites—even though Asians are widely considered a "model minority." - They therefore are subject to a different set of conditions for assimilating and face greater obstacles to their upward mobility. - For example, Portes and Zhou (1993) report that the children of Haitian immigrants living in Miami's Little Haiti are at high risk for downward mobility because they face social ostracism from their own ethnic community if they choose to adopt the outlook and cultural ways of native-born Americans. - Among Haitian youth, a common message is the devaluation of mainstream norms, and anyone who excels at school or abides by mainstream rules runs the risk of being shunned for "acting white." - This picture of assimilation is much more complex than Park's initial formulation
Genocide in Rwanda
- When Rwanda was granted independence in 1962, after a century of hatred brewing between the two groups, the Hutu took power under a dictatorship masked as a democracy, and their long-standing animosity simmered into an explosion in April 1994 after three years of failed crops. - The result was genocide, the mass killing of a particular population based on racial, ethnic, or religious traits. - The genocide, backed by the government and media, turned neighbors into murderers overnight: Friends killed friends, teachers killed students, and professionals killed co-workers. - The Rwandan genocide was a stark reminder that when we speak of the myth or fiction of race, we cannot deny its reality in social life
How did the one drop rule influence miscegenation?
- The one-drop rule developed out of the laws passed in many US states forbidding miscegenation, or interracial marriage. - By 1910, most whites in the United States had accepted this doctrine. - The one-drop rule was integral in maintaining the Jim Crow system of segregation upheld in the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. - In the American South, it was clear that anyone of black lineage fell on the unfortunate side of the racial divide, and the rule essentially cleaved America into two societies: one black, one white. - This meant again clumping together all "white ethnics" into one united category. - As F. James Davis notes, the one-drop rule was highly efficient, not least because it completely erased stratification within the black community that had previously been based on skin tone
Flawed Assumptions of The Racialization of Muslims
- The racialization of Muslims operates on several flawed assumptions. - First, people make stereotyped assumptions based on appearance (turban = Osama bin Laden), even if in their own personal experience they know better (most people wearing turbans in the United States are Sikhs, not Muslim extremists). - Second, making snap judgments about Muslims requires a gross caricaturization of Islam's followers. Remember, two-thirds of Arabs in the United States are not Muslim but Christian
How do the differences between race and ethnicity underscore the privileged position of whites in America?
- These differences between race and ethnicity underscore the privileged position of whites in America, who have the freedom to pick and choose their identities, to wave a flag in a parade, or to whip up Grandma's traditional recipe and freely show their ethnic backgrounds. - The surge of ethnic pride among white Americans today implies a false belief that all ethnic groups are the same, but in the very way that symbolic ethnicity is voluntary for white ethnics, it is not so for nonwhite ethnic Americans such as Latinos and Asians. - As soon as someone classifies you as different on the basis of your phenotypical (racial) features, you lose the ability to choose your ethnic identity. - It becomes racialized—subsumed under a forced identifier, label, or racial marker of "otherness" that you cannot escape. - Thus, although it is common to use the term ethnicity across the board to refer to Latino, black, Asian, or Irish backgrounds, being Irish in America is something that a person can turn on or off at will. - You can never not be Asian or black: Your body gives away your otherness, no matter how much you want to blend in.
"Equity Inequality"
- This "equity inequality" has grown in the decades since the civil rights progress of the 1960s. - What's more, the wealth gap cannot be explained by income differences alone. - That is, the asset gap remains large even when we compare black and white families at the same income levels. - For many among the growing black and Latino middle classes, the lack of assets may mean living from paycheck to paycheck, being trapped in a job or neighborhood that is less beneficial in the long run, and not being able to send one's kids to college. - Parents' wealth is also a strong predictor of children's teenage and young adult outcomes—everything from teenage premarital childbearing to educational attainment to welfare dependency
Predictions about the future of race
- This brief overview of the history of race and its present-day ramifications allows us to make some guesses about the future of race. - For starters, racial and ethnic diversity in America will tend to increase. - The 2010 Census data show a 134 percent increase in Americans who identify as multiracial—that is, 9 million people. - The number of foreign-born people in the United States surpassed 37 million. - And according to National Research Council projections, by the year 2060, largely thanks to the most recent wave of immigration (along with differential fertility rates), America's Latino and Asian populations will triple, making up about 28.6 percent and 11.7 percent of the US population, respectively. - No longer black and white, America is now a society composed of multiple ethnic and racial groups with an ever-shifting color line marking fuzzy boundaries
Nativism
- This concern about the new and objectionable stock of immigrants, as opposed to "native," more desirable immigrants of an earlier epoch, was the crux of nativism, the movement to protect and preserve indigenous land or culture from the allegedly dangerous and polluting effects of new immigrants. - Madison Grant (1865-1937), an influential writer, epitomized the spirit of nativism when he argued that not restricting the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans was "race suicide" for the white race (1916/1936)
Jennifer Lee and the "browning of America)
- This so-called browning of America brings us to a new crossroads. - The white-black divide may become the white-nonwhite divide or the black-nonblack divide. - Sociologist Jennifer Lee has looked at just this question, and her research shows that the experience of first- and especially second-generation Asians and Latinos indicates the new color line is black-nonblack. What does this mean? - In the simplest terms, it means that the biggest differences in demographic characteristics like income, educational attainment, and interracial marriage will be between blacks and all other groups while the distinctions between these other groups continue to narrow. - Lee notes If you look at rates of educational attainment or interracial marriage or multiracial reporting, Asians and Latinos, their disadvantage stems from their immigrant histories, and so with each generation you see outcomes improving. - For African Americans, you see there's some progress, but it's not nearly at the same speed, and so what I see is [that] the divide is really blacks and everyone else. ... - The one caveat I would add is that those Latinos who have darker skin, who are more mistaken for African Americans or black Americans ...will probably fall on the black side of the divide. - In part because of their skin color, but also because their socioeconomic status is not on par with some of the other lighter skin Latino groups like Cubans
All-Weather Liberal (Merton)
- Those who are neither prejudiced nor discriminatory are "all-weather liberals," not only espousing ideologies of racial equality or talking the talk, but also walking the walk when faced with real choices.
Being Black In America (Race/Ethnic Issue)
- To be black in America is to be just that—black. - Some scholars argue that this is the fundamental issue about race in America. - Blacks were considered, until recently, a monolithic group. - They were unique among racial groups in that their ethnic (tribal, language group, and national) distinctions were deliberately wiped out during the slave trade in order to prevent social organization and revolt. - Alex Haley's landmark novel Roots (1976) raised an awareness among African Americans about tracing their ethnic rather than racial identity. - This is changing now as more African Americans trace their roots to specific places in Africa through genealogical research or DNA testing. - Likewise, immigration from Africa and the Caribbean has created distinctly recognizable national groups of origin among the US black population. - Finally, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama led, perhaps, to a symbolic expansion of who counts as black within the African American community: even the son of a white, Kansan mother and Kenyan father who has half-Asian and fully African half-siblings. - Though some African Americans were initially uncomfortable with embracing Obama and his mixed racial heritage as "black like us," their attitudes would have had little impact on the wider perception of Obama as a black man because of the continuing significance of the one-drop rule in America. - Indeed the white nationalist backlash that followed Obama's inauguration, which has continued through the campaign and election of Donald Trump, suggests that the one-drop rule is alive and well. - That is, the fact that Obama was biracial and not a descendant of US slaves did not seem to matter to Americans who cheered his ascent or those who wished for his downfall.
Racial Realities and The Arabic Community
- To take an example of racial realities closer to home, consider the consequences of being Arab—or perhaps I should say being perceived as Muslim—in post-9/11 America. - In an interview for this book, Jen'nan Read used the image of a Venn diagram to explain that "Arab is an ethnicity; being a Muslim is a religious categorization. - In the US context a lot of Muslims and Arabs seem to be the same group. - In fact, most Arabs in the United States are Christians who immigrated prior to World War One. - And most Muslims are actually not Arab...one-third are South Asian, one-third are Arab, and about a quarter are African Americans who have converted to the religion". - In the United States, Muslims are often identified with Islamic terrorists. - Followers of Islam these days are often lumped into a fixed racial category as a dangerous and undemocratic "other," seen as separate from, and inferior and hostile to, Christians.
The Burakamin People
- Today making up anywhere from 1 to 3 percent of the Japanese population, depending on the estimate, the Burakumin originated as a group of displaced people during fourteenth-century feudal wars. - With no connection other than being Japanese, the Burakumin suddenly shared something undesirable—they were homeless, destitute, and forced to wander the countryside together. - Imagine all the homeless people today in Miami or Los Angeles suddenly uniting. - The Burakumin formed a distinct social category, with complete social closure, their own reproductive pool, their own occupational pool, and so on, although they were not a distinct group genetically. - Today, however, it is commonly believed that the Burakumin "are descendants of a less human 'race' than the stock that fathered the Japanese nation as a whole". - Six hundred years later, the Burakumin still display no physical distinctions from their fellow Japanese citizens. - For those people in Japan wishing to avoid interrelations with the Burakumin, this lack of distinctiveness poses a dilemma. - So for a hefty price, there are private investigators for hire who will confirm the pedigree of your prospective employee, tenant, or future son-in-law. - In Japan, the Burakumin live in ghettos, called burakus, and score lower on health, educational achievement, and income compared with their fellow Japanese citizens. - Yet when Japanese and Burakumin immigrate to America, the scoring gap narrows dramatically. - The distinction between Burakumin and other Japanese is meaningless outside of the significance bestowed on it in their home country. - Again, we see that race is not necessarily just about physical or biological differences
Native Americans in Present Day America
- Today, people claiming at least some Native American ancestry number about 5.6 million. - Only about one-fifth of Native Americans live in a designated American Indian area. - The largest reservation, Navajoland or Diné Bikéyah, covers approximately 16 million acres of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. - Reservations are generally impoverished and rife with health problems, domestic abuse, substance abuse, poor infrastructure, and high crime. In fact, Native Americans as a whole are plagued by the lowest average socioeconomic status. - They rank among the worst in terms of high-school dropout rates and unemployment, which go hand in hand with poor health outcomes such as alcoholism, suicide, and premature death. - Suicide rates are more than double that of the general population and are the second-leading cause of death for Native Americans from ages 15 to 34. - Around 33 percent of Native Americans die before age 45, compared with 11 percent of the US population as a whole. - Though facing many social problems, Native Americans are becoming more politically organized and active as a bloc. - For example, sustained protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline crossing sacred ground—and the reservation's water source—in North Dakota led to a delay and rerouting of the oil conduit. - And recent lawsuits brought by Native Americans in Colorado have successfully challenged the gerrymandering that had concentrated their numbers into a single state district, thereby diluting their power
Wayne Joseph and DNA Testing
- Wayne Joseph, a 53-year-old Louisiana high-school principal with Creole roots, did just that. - Born and raised black, but having light skin, Joseph was mildly curious about the ancestry in his veins. - He received some unexpected results: His genetic makeup is 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian, and zero percent African (Kaplan, 2003). - Despite the findings, Joseph continues to embrace his ethnic identity as black. - As he put it to reporters, "The question ultimately is, are you who you say you are, or are you who you are genetically?"
The Categories of Whiteness
- We have already seen how the category of whiteness is socially constructed—first inclusively defined as all "free white persons" in 1790, then restrictively defined as only northern and western European whites in the early twentieth century, and reformulated back to an umbrella category by the mid-twentieth century. - We know now that this category, which seems so natural and innate, is actually a flexible label that has expanded over time to include many formerly nonwhite groups such as Jews, Irish, and Italians. - Today most white people have little awareness of the meaning of whiteness as a category. - As Nell Irvin Painter, the author of The History of White People, says, "The foundation of white identity is that there isn't any. - You're just an individual"
Peggy McIntosh "White Privilege"
- Whiteness, argues Peggy McIntosh (1988), is an "invisible knapsack of privileges" that puts white people at an advantage, just as racism places nonwhites at a disadvantage. - In her now classic essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1989), McIntosh catalogs more than 50 "Daily Effects of White Privilege," ranging from the mundane to the major. - Here are just a few McIntosh notices: • I can log into Netflix and count on finding movies and TV featuring people of my race represented, go into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, and walk into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair. • I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them. • I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection. • I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group. • I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race. • I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin. - Whiteness, then, is about not feeling the weight of representing an entire population with one's successes or failures. It's about not having to think about race much at all.
The Unfair Portrayal of Middle Eastern Immigrants
- Widespread misunderstandings about Middle Easterners derive, in part, from their negative stereotyping in the mainstream media. - In one study of television portrayals of Arabs, researchers found four basic myths that continue to surround this ethnic group. - First, they are often depicted as fabulously wealthy—as sultans and oil tycoons. - Second, they are shown as uncivilized and barbaric. - Third, they are portrayed as sex-crazed, especially for underage white sex slaves. - Fourth, they are said to revel in acts of terrorism, desiring to destroy all things American. - Little has changed since this study came out over 30 years ago, although after 9/11, the emphasis shifted away from stereotypes of Arabs as extremely rich and toward one of Middle Easterners as terrorists.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1775)
- With the publication of On the Natural Varieties of Mankind in 1775, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), widely considered the founder of anthropology, cataloged variation by race, including differences in head formation, a pseudoscience called phrenology. Blumenbach's aim was to classify the world based on the different types of bumps he could measure on people's skulls. - Based on these skull measurements, he came up with five principal varieties of humans: Caucasian, Mongoloid, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. - Caucasians (named after the people who live on the southern slopes of the Georgian region of eastern Europe), he decided, were the superlatives of the races based on their excellent skull qualities
Hiring Patterns and Institutional Racism
- Yet another example of institutional racism can be found in the case of hiring patterns by employers. - With limited information about job applicants, employers may be rational to use social networks to recruit employees since informal ties (i.e., references) can provide more reliable information about individuals than can be gleaned from paper job applications. - And because whites tend to hold more managerial positions, and social networks tend to be segregated by race, this need for additional information on the part of employers also perpetuates racial disparities with no racially explicit motivation
Merton's Chart of Prejudice and Discrimination (4 categories)
Includes: - active bigot (Prejudiced discriminates) - timid bigot (Prejudiced) - fair-weather liberal (discriminates) - all-weather liberal
How did residential segregation develop?
It didn't just pop up out of nowhere, nor was it always there. - As Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton (1993) have argued, the ghetto was deliberately and systematically constructed by whites to keep blacks locked into their (unequal) place. - Before 1900, blacks faced job discrimination but relatively little residential segregation. - Blacks and whites lived side by side in urban centers. - The index of dissimilarity, the standard measure of segregation, captures the degree to which blacks and whites are evenly spread among neighborhoods in a given city. - The index tells you the percentage of nonwhites who would have to move in order to achieve residential integration - Various structural changes— industrialization, urbanization, the influx to the North of Southern blacks who competed with huge waves of European immigrants— led to increased hostility and violence toward blacks, who found themselves shut out of both white jobs and white neighborhoods. - The color line, previously more flexible and fuzzy, hardened into a rigid boundary between black and white - The black ghetto was manufactured by whites through a set of deliberate, conscious practices. - Boundaries separating black neighborhoods were policed by whites, first with the threat of violence and periphery bombings in the 1920s and then with "neighborhood associations" that institutionalized housing discrimination. - Property owners signed secret agreements promising to not allow blacks into their domain. - When a black family did move to a neighboring block, whites often adopted the strategy of flight instead of fight, and this process of racial turnover yielded the same result: black isolation. - Even today, when a black family moves into a white neighborhood, the property value declines slightly, in subtle anticipation of the process of white flight, which leaves behind a run-down, undesirable black neighborhood—a veritable vicious circle. - On the other hand, the formerly black neighborhood of Harlem in New York City is now no longer majority black, a consequence of the recent in-migration of whites and Hispanic
The Effects of The New Language of White Supremacy
the new language of white supremacy allows racists to move away from explicitly racist language (of biological inferiority, for example). - Duke's NAAWP also co-opts civil rights discourse, as in the organization's original mission statement: "The NAAWP is a not for profit, nonviolent, civil rights educational organization, demanding equal rights for whites and special privileges for none." - Such examples demonstrate one possible outcome of the emergence of white studies: to politically empower extremists by giving them a legitimate language for their racist ends. - Note, however, that this rhetoric does not acknowledge the advantages whites typically enjoy. - The power of whiteness studies is that it exposes the social construction of a seemingly natural (and neutral) category, giving a sense of the unequal footing beneath the labels "white" and "black." (That is, whites can embrace ethnic identity, but blacks are stuck in a racial category.) - But like any new "technology," such discourse can be used for many ends.
"color-blind racism"
the view that racial inequality is perpetuated by a supposedly colorblind stance that ends up reinforcing historical and contemporary inequities, disparate impact, and institutional bias by "ignoring" them in favor of a technically neutral approach
Scientific Racism
what today we call the nineteenth-century theories of race, brought a period of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race. - In 1684, François Bernier (1625-1688) proposed a new geography based not on topography or even political borders but on the body, from facial lineaments to bodily configurations. - Bernier devised a scheme of four or five races based on the following geographic regions: • Europe (excluding Lapland), South Asia, North Africa, and America: people who shared climates and complexions • Africa proper: people who had thick lips, flat noses, black skin, and a scanty beard • Asia proper: people who had white skin, broad shoulders, flat faces, little eyes, and no beard • Lapps (small traditional communities living around the northern regions of Finland and Russia): people who were ugly, squat, small, and animal-like
Today's understanding of race is that it is:
• Externally imposed: Someone else defines you as black, white, or other • Involuntary: It's not up to you to decide to which category you belong; someone else puts you there. • Usually based on physical differences: Those unreliable bumps on your head. • Hierarchal: Not white? Take a number down the ranks. • Exclusive: You don't get to check more than one box. • Unequal: It's about power conflicts and struggles. ** This last point is important for making sense of the Burakumin and Muslim Americans. Racial groupings are about domination and struggles for power. They are organizing principles for social inequality and a means of legitimating exclusion and harassment
Ethnicity, one's ethnic affiliation, is by contrast:
• Voluntary: I choose to identify with my one-eighth Irish background (it makes me feel special, so why not?). • Self-defined: It is embraced by group members from within. • Nonhierarchal: Hey, I'm Irish, you're German. Great! • Fluid and multiple: I'm Irish and German. Even better! • Cultural: Based on differences in practices such as language, food, music, and so on. • Planar: Much less about unequal power than race is.