Crash Course: Race & Prejudice - Ch 12

Why are many Hispanic Americans counted as White in the census?

'Hispanic' is considered an ethnicity, not a race, for Census purposes, so in the 2010 Census, 52% of Hispanic Americans identified themselves as white, while 36.7% identified themselves as 'some other race,' and smaller percentages identified themselves as one of the other racial groups.

What does the term Latino mean?

'Latino' is a shorter version of the Spanish word 'latinoamericano,' and it refers to someone whose heritage originates from nations in the Americas that are south of the United States, including Mexico, all of South America, and the Caribbean.

What is an ethnic group?

A group that has a shared cultural heritage. Language, traditions, religion - these are all types of culture that can determine your ethnic background.

What is discrimination?

A matter of action. Discrimination is simply described as any unequal treatment of different groups of people.

What is prejudice?

A rigid and unfair generalization about an entire category of people. A prejudice assumes that something you think to be true for a whole group applies to every individual member of that group, too, with little or no evidence.

What is pluralism?

A stat in which all races and ethnicities are distinct, but have equal social standing. This isn't a society that's color blind per se - because people still have different racial heritages that are recognized in society. But in terms of how social and economic resources are distributed, the color of one's skin plays no role.

What is the authoritarian personality theory?

A theory that was proposed in the 1950s by German sociologist Theodor Adorno and his colleagues, who were trying to understand how fascism and anti-Semitism took hold in Germany before and during World War II. The authoritarian personality theory sees prejudice as the outgrowth of a certain personality profile - one that's associated with authoritarianism, or the desire for order, tradition, and strong leaders who will maintain the status quo.

What is scapegoat theory?

Also known as frustration-aggression theory, Scapegoat theory frames prejudice as a defense mechanism on the part of frustrated people who blame another, more disadvantaged for the troubles that they face, even when those troubles stem from structural changes.

How do sociologists define a minority?

Any category of people, who are distinguished by physical or cultural difference, that a society sets apart and subordinates.

What does the category White refer to in the census?

Anyone who reports their origins as being from Europe, the Middle East, or Northern Africa. So, Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Iranian, Moroccan - they're all ethnicities that go under the heading of white.

What does the category American Indian or Alaska Native refer to in the census?

Anyone whose origins are indigenous to the contiguous United States and Alaska.

Who is the second largest racial group in the United States?

Black or African Americans.

What is an example of the difference between overt and institutionalized racism?

Bombing black churches is an overt act of racism, motivated by racial hatred, so it's easy to understand as racism. By contrast, elevated rates of sickness and death - which stem from structural disadvantages - aren't the fault of any one individual's racial animus. But it still results in discrimination on the basis of race. And it's much more likely to go unnoticed, because there's no single person to blame.

What is an example of ethnicity not being based on physical traits?

Both Cameron Diaz and Rosario Dawson are Cuban Americans, which means they are both Hispanic, but Cameron Diaz is white and Rosario Dawson is Black.

How are race and ethnicity used by society as a way to organize people and distribute power?

Both race and ethnicity play a role in how people are perceived and, therefore, the opportunities that are available to them. A person's race influences a whole host of social outcomes, from their education to their income to their experiences with the criminal justice system.

Who highlighted the concept of institutional racism?

By civil rights activists Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in the 1960s, who argued that institutional racism is harder to identify and therefore less often condemned by society.

What five states are already minority-majority states?

California, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Hawaii.

How did Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton describe institutional racism?

Carmichael and Hamilton compared society's response to the suffering caused by white terrorists bombing black churches, to the lack of attention given to thousands of black children who suffered for different reasons - like from the lack of access to quality housing, food, healthcare, or schooling.

What is seen as a common trigger for scapegoating?

Economic anxiety - fear of losing jobs leads to blaming immigrants for taking jobs, rather than looking at how globalization and automation have changed the economy.

Is Hispanic a race or ethnicity?

Ethnicity.

What are stereotypes?

Exaggerated and simplified descriptions that are applied to every person in a category. Negative stereotypes are often directed at people who are different from yourself, which means that people who are a minority in a population are more likely to be negatively stereotyped.

What are two important parts of being considered a minority?

First, minorities share a distinctive identity based on physical traits. Second, minorities occupy a lower status in society and have less access to the levers of societal power.

Where does what's become know as White originate from?

From a term to refer to people of Indo-European descent: the 'Caucasian' race. The term Caucasian started as a reference to the Caucus Mountains, which run through the modern day countries of Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

Where do we get the term Latino?

From the term Latin American. The de-gendered term 'Latinx' also came from this.

Is Hawaii a minority-majority state?

Hawaii is one of the states where a minority race is the majority race for the state - and in fact, it's the only state that has always been minority-majority.

What is an example of culture theory?

History textbooks tend to be written from a Euro-Caucasian perspective and focus mainly on the contributions of White people, rather than other cultures.

Does a group have to be a certain size to be a minority group?

In sociology, a minority group's relative size isn't important. For example, women are considered a minority, even though they make up about 51% of the United States. And a group that's a minority in terms of size can still be a majority in terms of power.

What is the social distance scale?

In the 1920s, American sociologist Emory Bogardus developed this scale, which measures how closely people are willing to interact with people from different races and ethnicities. Social distance is a kind of proxy for how much of an 'other' you see members of another race.

What is an example of how race and ethnicity can play a role in how people are perceived?

In the United Kingdom, there's been a lot of unrest about immigration from Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Incidents of hostility and violence against Polish immigrants have increased in the wake of the UK's exit from the European Union.

What is culture theory?

It claims some prejudice can be found in everyone, because people are products of the culture they live in - and we live in a prejudiced culture. We learn racial prejudice and stereotypes through a kind of cultural osmosis.

What is assimilation?

It describes the process by which minorities gradually adopt patterns of the dominant culture. By adopting the modes of dress, values, religion, language, and lifestyles of the majority culture, minorities are sometimes able to avoid prejudice or discrimination. But assimilation is much easier for some groups than others. And it's easier if you look and sound like the group that you're trying to assimilate to.

What is segregation?

It describes the process by which minorities gradually adopt patterns of the dominant culture. By adopting the modes of dress, values, religion, language, and lifestyles of the majority culture, minorities are sometimes able to avoid prejudice or discrimination. But assimilation is much easier for some groups than others. And it's easier if you look and sound like the group that you're trying to assimilate to.

Where did the term Hispanic come from?

It first appeared as a racial category in the US Census in 1970, as a way of describing those whose heritage originated in a Spanish-speaking country.

What is race-conflict theory?

It focuses on how social inequality develops as the result of power conflicts between different racial and ethnic groups. Under this theory, prejudice is a tool for maintaining the power of the majority.

What is racism?

It includes beliefs, thoughts, and actions based on the idea that one race is innately superior to another race. Some take this definition further and argue that racism is inherently tied up in structures of power, meaning that racism specifically refers to the belief that a race with less societal power is inferior to other races.

What is race?

It is a socially constructed category. In this case, it's used to categorize people who share biological traits that a society thinks are important.

What does the category Asian refer to in the census?

It refers to anyone with origins in Eastern Asia, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including China, India, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

What does the category Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander refer to in the census?

It refers to people whose origins are from Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.

What is an explicit bias?

It refers to the attitudes or beliefs we have about a group that we're consciously aware of.

What is an example of different races being able to share an ethnicity - and conversely being of the same race, but being different ethnicities?

Japanese and Vietnamese people are both considered Asian, but they come from different cultural backgrounds.

How does the social distance increase prejudice?

Just like how geographic distance makes you more likely to generalize about a group of people who are different from yourself, social distance increases the likelihood that you might hold stereotypical or prejudiced views about another racial group.

What is de jure segregation?

Much of the segregation under the law - it has been prohibited through court cases and laws such as Brown v. Board of Education. But De Facto segregation, or segregation due to traditions and norms, still remains.

Are all Hispanics Latino?

Now, not all Hispanics are Latino. Being from Spain for example, makes you Hispanic but not Latino - and not all Latinos are Hispanic. Brazilians speak Portuguese, meaning that they are not considered Hispanic.

How did people from different places or different time periods define racial groups differently?

Nowadays, light skinned people of European descent are typically considered 'White" in the United States. It doesn't matter whether your heritage is British or Irish or Italian or Polish or German - you're just 'White.' In the early 1900s, anyone who wasn't a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant was considered 'ethnic' - so for example, if you were Italian or Irish, you weren't considered white. Likewise, today, being Jewish is often seen as an ethnicity in the United States. But Europeans are more likely to think of being Jewish as a race.

What is an example of de jure segregation?

People live in neighborhoods, attend schools, and work mostly with people like themselves. This self segregation has led to high levels of racial stratification. About one-quarter of black students attend public schools that have more than 90% students of color - and those schools tend to have less resources available to them.

What are ethnicities?

Socially constructed categories based on cultural traits that a society finds important, rather than strictly biological traits.

What is an example of a minority groups size not being important?

South African apartheid is an example of this. From 1948 to 1994, a white minority maintained a system of racial segregation and discrimination against Black South Africans.

How were Hispanic people referred to before 'Hispanic' was a term?

The Census referred to those people as Spanish-Americans - even though tracing back their origins to Spain would mean going way, way back for many of them. And for others, it'd be totally inaccurate. But in day-to-day conversation, most people from Spanish-speaking backgrounds were usually referred to by the country of their heritage, like Mexican American or Cuban American, or sometimes more broadly as 'Latin American.'

Is the United States pluralistic?

The United States is pluralistic by the letter of the law. But in a practical sense, there's still a lot of racial and ethnic stratification, and despite having equal legal standing, all races do not have equal social standing.

What is an example of race-conflict theory?

The argument that Whites are a superior race was used as a justification for slavery and the racial discrimination that continued long after slavery ended.

What are institutional prejudice and discrimination?

The biases that are built into the operation of society's institutions, like schools, banking systems, and the labor force.

What is an example of how race can be both a social construct and something based on biology?

The so-called 'one-drop' rule in the United States, where even the smallest amount of African American ancestry is enough to classify someone as Black rather than white. The opposite, however, isn't true - someone with one Black parent and one White parent is almost never considered white.

What is genocide?

The systematic killing of one group of people by another. Whether we're talking about the attacks on indigenous populations by colonizers starting in the 1600s, the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the Holocaust during World War II, or modern examples in Rwanda and Darfur, genocide represents some of the worst of humanity. And it is usually motivated by racism. We can't talk about race without talking about how people have used racist attitudes as an excuse for violence and subjugation.

What is an implicit bias?

They are a little bit more insidious. These are the unconscious biases that we have about other groups. While we might easily recognize an explicit act of racism, like calling someone a racial slur, we often don't consciously recognize how implicit biases affect how we interact with each other.

Why are people of Middle Eastern descent categorized a White by the census?

They are categorized as white even if they often aren't treated as if they're white. Why? Back when race was understood as a purely biological phenomenon, everyone from Europe all the way down to India was lumped into one 'Caucasian' group. So yesterday's 'Caucasian' contained most of the people who count as today's 'white', but also captured groups that nowadays get labelled as Asian, such as Indians or Pakistanis.

What does the category Black or African American refer to in the census?

They are defined as individuals with African heritage, including those who are Afro-Caribbean. Since many African Americans' ancestors were forcibly brought to the United States as slaves, the countries that their ancestors originated from are often unknown.

What percent of non-Hispanic Whites make up the population?

They are the majority group in the United States in terms of sheer size, making up 61% of the US population.

How do authoritarian personalities tend to see society?

They tend to see society as hierarchical, with people who are naturally superior having the right to power over others.

What is the second step of the cycle of prejudice and discrimination?

This prejudice then motivates discrimination against the minority group, both at an individual and institutional level, which forces the group into a lower position in society.

What is the final step of the cycle of prejudice and discrimination?

This social disadvantage means that the minority group is seen as less successful and therefore inferior to the majority group, seemingly justifying the original prejudice - and the cycle continues.

What is the largest sub-group of Asian Americans?

Those of Chinese ancestry, who make up a little less than 1/4 of the total Asian American population.

What percent of American Indian or Alaska Natives make up of the US population?

Though Native Americans numbered in the millions when Europeans first arrived in the 15th century, today, they control only 2% of the country's land area, make up just 0.2% of the US population, and remain severely disadvantaged in terms of access to education and income.

How do the revenants of slavery and southern plantation systems still shown in geographic distributions of Black Americans across the country?

Though many Black Americans moved to Northern cities during the Great Migration of the early 20th century, most remained in the South, in a region that has come to be known as the Black Belt of the United States.

What is an example of a stereotype?

Two common stereotypes of people who use government assistance are that they're A) African-American -and- B) gaming the system. The majority of people on welfare are White, and people who use social services like welfare are also likely to need the extra help. But these stereotypes lead people to claim that Black Americans, particularly single mothers, are lazy or untrustworthy. This example is a specific type of prejudice: racial prejudice.

Are ethnicities based on physical appearance?

Unlike race, which is based on observable, physical traits, ethnicities aren't. And in fact, two people of the same ethnicity can be entirely different races.

How can a state or country be minority-majority?

Well, for one thing, even if non-Hispanic White Americans no longer make up more than half the country, they'll likely remain a larger group than any other single race. But also, to be a minority in the sociological sense of the word, a group must be in a position of disadvantage.

How can race be both a social construct and something based on biology?

Well, the key part of that definition of race is the last part: what a society thinks is important. Sure, skin color varies widely across regions of the world. But so does eye color, and we don't consider people with blue eyes a different race than people with brown eyes. And while physical traits are often used to describe or identify a race, they're not always applied consistently.

According to authoritarian personality theory, when is racial prejudice heightened?

When an authoritarian personality feels there's some moral or physical threat to their way of life. Both this theory and the scapegoat theory see prejudice as a reaction that certain types of people have - people who are frustrated or people who have a certain personality type.

What is an example of what constitutes a minority being more complex than you might think?

While Eastern Europeans are considered an ethnic minority in the UK, people in the US are much more likely to think of Eastern European immigrants as just White - they're not thought of as a minority.

What are the six different categories of race that the US Census uses when collecting data about the demographics of the country?

White, Black, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, and Some Other Race.

How does the cycle of prejudice and discrimination start?

With prejudice taking hold in a society, often as a strategy for consolidating economic or social power for a certain group.

What does the category Some Other Race refer to in the census?

You might remember that about a third of Hispanic Americans fall into this group; if a person lists a country of origin that doesn't fit one of the other categories, they get stuck in this group.