UCONN Marcus. W. Garcia SOCI 1501 EXAM 2

The concept of Race Dunn and Dobzhansky, Heredity, Race and Society (1952)

"Races can be defined as populations which differ in the frequencies of some gene or genes" There is no such thing as the kind of "race" in which there is an indissoluble association between mental and physical characteristics that make certain "races" superior or inferior

The concept of Race Julian Huxley and A.C. Haddon, We Europeans (1936)

"The existence of ... human sub-species is purely hypothetical. Nowhere does a human group now exist which corresponds closely to a systematic sub-species in animals." "All that exists today is a number of arbitrary ethnic groups, intergrading into each other." Huxley and Haddon argue that "for all existing populations, the non-committal term ethnic group should be used"

The concept of Race Joseph Deniker, The Races of Man (1900)

"We have presented to us Arabs, Swiss, Australians, Bushmen, English, Siouan Indians, Negroes, etc. without knowing if each of these groups is on an equal footing from the point of view of classification" These are the common language, religion, social institutions, etc. that have the power to unite people Therefore, ethnicity might be a better term instead of race

the diversity of experience approach

- Allows for the possibility that not all men are enemies and that men and women can unite in struggle

Ethnicity

1) identification of particular cultures as ways of life or identity based on a historical notion of origin (the ways you walk through life, things you experienced and learned) 2) The idea of ethnicity is also linked to liberal notions of multi-ethnic societies and multi-culturalism. (White, black, Hispanic, and Latino can all be part down to different ethnic groups. ) 3. Ethnicity can provide the grounds for inferiorization, oppression, subordination, and exploitation in addition to constituting the basis for racism. (certain types of culture are related to specific races, which reify race structure by describing student by race without actually saying it)

Advantages of racialization framework

1.

"Difference"

1. "Difference" can only be told through experience. 2. Gender difference has an overlap with racial difference. ( Black female vs. White female) 3. race plays an important part in their social and economic positioning 4. We need race, class, and gender to build out society, there is no way to think outside the box 5. Race is not a coherent category and those usually classified together under the label "black" can be very different. (I want to define black identity as following: a constitute identity in the following setting) 6. Need to reformulate outmoded notions of identity -Difference imposes essentialist, narrow, and constricting ideas of blackness, womanhood, and femininity often related to colonial and imperialist paradigms. 7. Suggesting alternative subject formulation to label white women other than white women. Caucasian?

Intersectionality moves to engage Black Man

1. Butler, "counters intersectionality" Black Man < Black Woman 2. Harris, she was not helping & selfish

Intersectionality moves to encourage black women

1. Criticized of focusing "too much" on Black -Rose, Black women changed an address for education face penalty. -segregation, tracking -Carbado & Gulati, credentials vs. people's look

Dictatorship, Democracy, Hegemony

1. European colony, US has been a racial dictatorship. 2. Three consequences: - - Color line in fundamental division in U.S. society. - 3. Slow transition 4. Race, Class, and Gender constitute regions of Hegemony where certain political projects take shape

Evolution of Modern Racial Awareness

1. Evolution "Discovered" people who looked different 2. Pre-supposed that European are the children of god. Lead to the introduction of domination and slavery. 3. The

Intersectionality moves across national boundries

1. Intersectionality come from other places. 2. Bilge, cross section of different fields. Rally differences. 3. Robinson, marriage as a mirror of inequality of intersectionality.

Intersectionality moves within & across disciplines

1. McCall and Clarke "need to look at more areas" 2. Goff & KHAN "institutionalized place lead tp sexism & racism".

Three major characteristics of Intersectionality

1. No prior place 2. Happens outside the US 3. Have a potential of social movement

Racialized social system

1. Racialized social system are societies that allocated differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines; lines that are socially constructed. 2. 3. On the basis of this structure, there develops a racial ideology. 4. Most struggles in a racialized social system contain a racial component, but sometimes they 5.

Limitations of mainstream idealist views

1. Racism has an ideological component but we should not reduce it because it shapes life chances. 2. Rather than viewing racism as an all-powerful ideology that explains all racial phenomena in society, Racism describes the racial ideology of a racialized social system. 3. racism is excluded from the foundation or structure of the social system. 4. Racism is ultimately viewed as a psychological phenomenon to be examined at the individual level. 5. Racism is treated as a static phenomenon 6. Analysts defining racism in an idealist manner view racism as "Incorrect" or "Irrational Thinking;" Thus they label "Racists" as irrational and rigid 7. Racism is understood as overt behavior 8. Contemporary racism is viewed as an expression of "Original sin," a remnant of the past historical racial situation. 9. Racism is analyzed in a circular manner.

Rethinking Racism

1. Racism should be study from the viewpoint of racialization. 2. Race is a social construct like class and gender, but has independent effects in social life. 3. Different races experience positions of subordination and superordination in society and develop different interests.

Intersectionality as a work-in-progress

1. Roberts and Joesuason, "Various power structure realization" 2. CHI, race &gender, if you have access to one power, not having all power. 3. Sexuality is the new oppressed subject "Gay is new black" no enough discussion.

Why is Common sense understanding of race concentrates on skin color, country of origin, religion, nationality, and language problematic?

1. Same skin color doesn't mean same race. 2. Defining race with COO creates stereotypes. 3. People with same phenotype can have different nationality and language.

From religion to science

1. Scientific approach provide a more subtle and nuanced account of human complexity in the "enlightened" age. 2.

From science to politics

1. Take a century to realize that race is more social than biological. 2. Racial horrors prove it is a political problem 3.

The Racial Contract is an Exploitation Contract

1. The racial contract creates global European economic domination and national white racial privilege(The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property) 2. The point of bringing society into existence is to protect what you have accumulated (The equality of beings of the state is supposed to carry over into the economy of the created sociopolitical order) 3. The racial contract is calculatedly aimed at economic exploitation (The whole point of establishing a moral hierarchy and juridically partitioning the polity according to race is to secure and legitimate the privileging of those individuals designated as white and the exploitation of those individuals designated as non-white) 4. The world is essentially dominated by white capital The global economy is essentially dominated by the former colonial powers, their offshoots, and their international financial institutions, lending agencies, and corporations. 5. In the U.S., whites think they have "done enough" despite the fact that the country continues to be massively segregated, black family incomes continue to fall, the black underclass has been written off and reparations have never been paid or discussed. (The centrality of racial exploitation to the U.S. economy and the dimensions of the payoff for white beneficiaries from the racial contract makes it taboo)

Social contract vs. Racial contract

1. The social contract is a theory that founds government on the popular consent of individuals taken as equals 2. The racial contract is not a contract between everybody (we the people) but between just the people who count (we the white people)

Racial formation

1. The socio-historical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. 2.

What does racial contract explain

1. how society was created or crucially transformed 2. how individuals in society were reconstituted 3. how the state was established 4. how a moral code/psychology is created

(Omi and Winant) Race

An unstable and de-centered complex of social meanings CONSTANTLY being transformed by political struggle.

Discussing Race and Gender together

Analyses of race often disregard gender. Same thing happens the other way. Family, Citizenship, and State mean different things to women in "third world" situations than to white European or North American context. (For a white European, family means nuclear family, and social security is taken for granted. Whereas for a third-world woman, family can be more extended and social security is something to be achieved). Race does not simply make the experience of women's subordination greater, it changes the nature of that subordination. (add some complication)

The nation's two fastest growing populations:

Asian/Pacific American = Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Asian Indian, Samoan, Guamanian, etc. Latinx = Internally divided along multiple race lines rooted in colonialism in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere in Latin America Asian/Pacific American or Asian/Pacific Islander is a panethnic racial designation encompassing approximately 50 different national and ethnic origins that only came into use in the past few decades

Race is socially constructed

Because race is socially constructed without biological validity, how and where racial boundaries are constructed is open to question and the possibility of reconstruction exists

What is racism? Before 1960, 1960---- Today

Before the 1960s, Racism was understood as a matter of prejudiced attitudes or bigotry on one hand, and discriminatory practices in the other. Post 1960s Racism recognized that racial inequality and injustice has deeper roots. Today, the absence of a clear, "Common Sense" Understanding of what racism means has become a significant obstacle to efforts aimed at challenging it.

What does Black originally mean?

Black initially used as a political category to signify a common experience of racism and marginalization and the gulf(深渊）this creates between white people and those whom oppress on both an institutional and personal basis (to signify a group that is other to create space for what was and what was not whiteness) (Government's definition of white has adapted over time to include and exclude certain groups, which strengthen the definition of other groups like Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Latino)

A Black Feminist Statement

Commitment to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression The only people who care enough about us (Black Women) to work consistently for our liberation is us The situation as Black people necessitates solidarity around the fact of race The psychological toll of being a black woman presents difficulties in reaching political consciousness and doing political work major systems of oppression are interlocking No racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely on

Conceptual claim

Conceptual claim = white supremacy should be thought of as a political system

The concept of Race Cultural factors in producing race variation:

Ever-increasing degrees of mobility, Hybridization, and Social selection People's cultural activities have introduced elements into the process of human race variation

Everyday experience vs. Experience as social relation

Everyday lived experience = individual biography Experience as social relation = collective histories and the ways groups are positioned in social structures

What does Feminism Analysis framework include?

Everything from race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and disability to historical context and geographical location need to be a part of a feminist analysis framework

Three claims of the racial contract

Existential Conceptual Methodological

Existential Claim

Existential claim = white supremacy, both local and global, exists and has existed for many years

Rethinking difference

Feminist analyses concerned with race and gender as subjects of study and the power relations they give rise to need to be actively challenged -Material/Cultural dimensions of social life -Problematize the label "White"(1. It is not necessary to be black to experience racism. the inclusion of oppression of other races) 2. Meanings of black and white are not constant) -Continual splitting of racial and gender identities and positions(they are not splittable)

Asian/Pacific Americans People vs. Hall (1853),

George Hall's murder conviction based on evidence provided by Chinese witnesses was overturned due to a law disallowing testimony from Blacks, mulattos, and American Indians Court decided American Indians were racially akin to the Chinese, and the term "black" at the time was used to describe all non-whites

Race is about how people come to look at the world, themselves and others

How people being taught to see the world and how you think people would think of you and put you in a category

Asian/Pacific Americans (Barrett and Roediger)

If the power of the national state gave new European immigrants both their firmest claims to whiteness and their strongest leverage for enforcing those claims, the inverse was the case for Asians in the U.S. prior to the 1950s In 1790, U.S. Congress restricted naturalization to free white persons, which remained in force until 1952 In every racial prerequisite case involving the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, or Filipinos, scientific knowledge and common knowledge about race were not in conflict, so the courts ruled that these groups were not white and therefore not eligible for naturalized citizenship

In 1950 and 1960, Latina/os appeared on the census as an "ethnic" category with the designation "Persons of Spanish Mother Tongues" What happens in 1970 1980-1990? 2000?

In 1970, the category changed to "Persons of both Spanish surname and Spanish mother tongue" In 1980 and 1990, Hispanic category emerged Amended in 2000 to become Hispanic or Latino

Office of Management and Budget's Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 (1977)

In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget's Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 standardized racial categories for the entire federal government, explicitly defining Asian/Pacific Islander as a person having origins in any of the original people of the Far East, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, or the Pacific Islands

Intersectional framework Relationality

It is not either or. It is both.

The concept of Race Operationalization of Race

It would be better for people to say, "here is a group of people, let me find out what their internal likenesses and differences are, and how it resembles and differs from other populations, then let me operationally describe what I have found"

Ethnic Groups

May be defined as one of a number of breeding populations, which together comprise the species homo sapiens, and which individually maintain their physical, genetic, or cultural differences by means of isolating mechanisms such as geographic and social barriers

Methodological claim

Methodological claim = as a political system, white supremacy can be theorized as based on a "racial contract" between whites

How useful is the notion of difference for feminism when dealing with issue of race and ethnicity?

More than just gender. As seen in the second wave feminism. Adaptation of race and ethnicity account for the experience of men and women in society.

The concept of Race Evolutionary factors in producing race variation:

Mutation, Natural selection, Drift, Isolation Evolutionary factors similar to those that have been operative in producing race variation in animals have also been operative in people with on significant difference: Culture

The Racial Contract is Epistemological

Natural law provides us with a moral compass and an idealized consensus about cognitive norms (It could be said then, that people have an agreement to misinterpret the world under the assumption that this mistaken perception will be validated by white authority) The requirements of "objective" cognition, factual and moral, in a racial polity are more demanding in that officially sanctioned reality is divergent from actual reality.(White people live in an invented, delusional world; a racial fantasyland; a "consensual hallucination" located in real space) The racial contract prescribes an inverted epistemology of ignorance producing the ironic outcome that whites will generally be unable to understand the world they have made(All mental phenomena (folk myths, fiction, movies, etc.) are prescribed by the terms of the racial contract, which requires a certain schedule of structured blindness in order to establish and maintain white polity) e.g. money and flag

Racial contract White supremacy is the unnamed political system

Need to recognize racism itself as a political system, a power structure, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties shifting "racial" criteria as "white" to categorize the remaining subset of humans as "nonwhite" and of different/inferior moral status

Are all racism the same?

No

Black Female Sexuality

Queer studies are particularly guilty for making black lesbians doubly invisible. Look at the white dominant group. Female body is a two-sided coin: White Non-White (Black) Question of self-chosen identities Race is often reduced to biology instead of a social construction Race is rarely used as "the ultimate trope of difference, arbitrarily contrived to produce and maintain relations of power and subordination" Categories like "lesbian," "gay," "butch," "femme," "sexuality," and "subjectivity" are defined with white as the normative state of existence

Terminology disputes

Race needs to be understood in context. Person and institution can be variables. Denying the existence of race obscures the way it has real material and representational effects (e.g. research for a music festival's effect on different areas of a city didn't discuss the impact of race has little value and is not complicated enough) The issue of how racial logics and racial frames of reference are articulated and deployed

How does state ensnare race in a more refined, "correct" classification scheme

Racial categories are unstable and embody the state's necessarily elusive attempts to ensnare race in a more refined, "correct" classification scheme

Impact of race means chief sites of oppression are not the same for black and white women

Relation with police. Appearance seen as unprofessional.

Core ideas of intersectional framework

Social inequality Power -Interpersonal Domain -Disciplinary Domain -Culture Domain -Structural Domain

Race is so familiar so people tend to take it for granted. (T/F)

T

Competition often takes place on the basis of race rather than, or in addition to, class, skill, gender, etc.( T/F)

T Western society are so heavily dependent on race that they can almost push all other things aside

The state (Haney-Lopez)

The State translates ideas about race into the material societal conditions that confirm and entrench those ideas State decisions regarding race, whiteness, and citizenship have had material consequences on who could run for public office, legally vote, testify in court, join labor unions, and get married

Markers and Signifiers of racism

The markers and signifiers that racism uses need not be those of biology and physiognomy but can be those of language, territorial rights, or culture

The Racial Contract is Moral

The moral contract is the foundation of the moral code established in society by which citizens are supposed to regulate their behavior (The moral contract constrains the terms of the political contract, meaning there is an objective moral code in the state even if there are no policemen and judges to enforce it) A distinction between interpretations of the relationship between the moral contract and the state-of-nature morality (Political contract creates morality as a conventionalist set of rules, so there is no independent objective moral criterion for judging one moral code to be superior to another.) The political contract codifies a morality that already exists. (What is right and wrong, just and unjust, in society will be determined by what is right and wrong, just and unjust, in the state of nature) (We should be superior, others should be taught)

The Racial Contract is Political

The political contract is an account of the origins of government and our political obligations to it Distinction made between the contract to establish society and the contract to establish the state Crucial metamorphosis is the partitioning of human populations into "white" and "nonwhite" Purpose of the state is to maintain or and reproduce racial order

The state The power of the state Barrett and Roediger

The power of the state to legitimate racial categories is borne out of the history of access to citizenship rights in the United States a sustained pattern of the State's conferring and denying citizenship based on "race" provides the best guide to who would be racialized as white and non-white in an ongoing way

The Racial Contract is a Historical Actuality

The racial contract has the best claim to being an actual historical fact(It is historically locatable in the events marking the creation of the modern world by European colonialism and voyages of "discovery" increasingly and appropriately called expeditions of conquest) We live in a world which has been foundationally shaped for the past 500 years by the realities of European domination and the gradual consolidation of global white supremacy(Not only is the racial contract real, it is global and involves the division of the world between "men" and "natives") Europeans emerge as "the lords of human kind"(Europeans emerge as "the lords of human kind" with the increasing power to determine the standing of non-Europeans who are their subjects)

How has race become so ingrained in the constitution of social and political life?

The state allows arbitrary classifications like race to be accepted as "real," naturalized parts of reality The state need race because it reifies race with intention

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)

The war officially ended with the February 2, 1848, signing in Mexico of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty added an additional 525,000 square miles to United States territory, including the land that makes up all or parts of present-day Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

What does black feminists point out?

There are difference between Black women.

United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923)

Thind argued that contemporary scientific evidence classified Asian Americans as "Caucasian," and despite the court having previously ruled that white equals "Caucasian," they went against scientific evidence and claimed that because Asian Indians were treated as non-white by the society at large, they were not eligible for citizenship

More about Ethnic groups

To continue to use the word race is to call in ambiguity of language to promote confusion of thought It raises questions and doubts that lead to clarification and discovery The non-committal general term "ethnic group" meets the realities of the world head-on, whereas race does not The use of any mystical concept of race makes the presentation of facts about geographic and linguistic groups unnecessarily complicated

"The concept of Race"

Written in 1962, Montagu's goal is to demonstrate that the term race as it is currently used, has not changed all that much since the 19th century

Intersectional framework Social context

attending to social context grounds intersectional analysis

Race as used by the layman

combination of physical type, heredity, blood, culture, nation, personality, intelligence, and achievement

rethinking difference (vs. oppression

difference has been politically significant to black peoples in terms of naming their oppressions and forming identities around a collective struggle Need to shift the focus of analysis from difference alone to the social relations that convert difference into oppression

Racial contract explains how society was created or crucially transformed

how individuals in society were reconstituted, how the state was established, and how a moral code/psychology is created

Panethnicity

is a political neologism used to group various ethnic groups together based on their related cultural origins; geographic, linguistic, religious, or 'racial' similarities are often used alone or in combination to draw panethnic boundaries.

The social contract is misleading because

it obscures the realities of group power and domination

Race

notions of biological or cultural immutability(not able to change) of a group that has been attributed to sharing a common origin

Alternative perspectives

orthodox and neo-Marxist perpective Institutionalist perspective internal colonialism perspective racial formation perspective

The state is the preeminent _________ and __________ of racial categories

producer and naturalizer

Alien Land Laws (1913)

prohibited the purchase or lease of land by "aliens ineligible to citizenship"

For almost all of U.S. History, the production of racial categories, and the state's role in it, have been inextricably related to the structuring of _____________

racial domination/white supremacy

The state (Omi and Winant)

racial politics are "the continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria" and the state as equilibrator

Race as used by biologists/anthropologists

subdivision of a species where members resemble each other and differ from other members of the species in certain traits

This pan ethnicity was shaped by three structural factors

the immigrant generation of Asian became outnumbered by second and third generation native-born U.S. citizens of Asian decent, residential segregation of various Asian ethnic groups decreased in the more racially democratic postwar years, increasing their interactions not only with whites but with each other, and more Asian American students were attending colleges

Racial contract The racial contract is a conceptual bridge

the world of mainstream ethics and philosophy on the one hand, and the world of Native American, African American, and Third and Fourth World political thought on the other