Chapter Three - Science and the Sociology of Race

Colonized minority (involuntary minorities)

(involuntary minorities) members of groups that are forced to participate in another society

Conflict perspective

(macro-sociological perspective): conflict between dominant and subdominant groups over scarce and valued resources (education, income, housing, political power). Conflict theories believe that conflict brings out necessary change.

Functionalist perspective - assimilationist paradigm, ethnicity paradigm, melting pot, Anglo-conformity, cultural pluralism

(macro-sociological perspective): emphasizes social order over conflict, consent, and harmony. They see a healthier society as one where everyone gets along. Dominant perspective in the US until the 1960s. Functionalists embrace Assimilationist Perspective (less differences between groups = less conflict)

Symbolic interactionism

(micro-sociological perspective): focus on small-scaled human interactions. (racial identities)

Immigrant minority (voluntary minorities)

(voluntary minorities) members of subordinate groups who willingly choose to immigrate to a country

The Sociology of Race

- humans share same gene structure - more w/in group differences than between group differences -social scientist reject race as a valid way to define a group

Extinction thesis

According to Frederick Hoffman's current death rates, African Americans would eventually go extinct. The problem was that he ignored the effects of poverty and other health problems among African Americans.

President Roosevelt's fear of "race suicide"

He berated white women for their declining birth rates - Compulsory sterilization laws

Compulsory sterilization laws

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court decided, by a vote of 8 to 1, to uphold a state's right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate. The case, known as Buck v. Bell, centered on a young woman named Carrie Buck, whom the state of Virginia had deemed to be "feebleminded."

Forced sterilizations - targets of?

Southern Black Women Puerto Rican Women → (first women that the Birth Control Pill was tested on) Native American Women A lot of women were told sterilization was temporary or just told to sign

assimilationist paradigm

The idea that ethnic minorities should eventually give up their ties to their home countries and become part of the dominant, anglo-american culture of the US

Racialized organizations

This theory argues that race is a constitutive part of American organizations. Race shapes the ways organizations distribute resources, how organizations treat their members, and even people's long-term life prospects.

Current Sociological Research on Race/Ethnicity

We can examine race and ethnicity through three major sociological perspectives: functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism.

Model minority

a minority group that has succeeded in American society, specifically evidenced by their success in educational institutions

Phrenology

a now-defunct branch of science that compared the skull sizes of various racial groups and used those data to try to determine group intelligence, social and cultural characteristics, and the presumed innate group differences between the races.

Ethnic revival

a situation in which racial and ethnic groups clamor for political autonomy and sometimes demand independence

White racial frame

a worldview that includes racial beliefs, racially loaded terms, racialized images, verbal connotations and racialized emotions and interpretations, as well as discriminatory actions that help justify oning racism.

Critical race theory

agrues that ideologies of assimilation and color-blindness actually help perpetrate white dominance rather than eliminate it

symbolic ethnicity

an ethnic identity that emphasizes concerns such as ethnic food or political issues rather than deeper ties to one's ethnic heritage

Internal colonialism (Blauner)

argues that colonialism, which is the process through which one country dominates another by stripping it of its human and economic resources, can actually take place within one country

W.E.B. DuBois and E. Franklin Frazier and the discipline of sociology

both made important contributions to the field of sociology and the study of race WEB DuBois - did not gain the credit he deserved during his lifetime - work remained marginalized from the sociological canon - The Philadelphia Negro (1899) first empirical study on black life and racial dynamics in the US E. Franklin Frazier - - gained attention in sociology during his lifetime - major works: The Negro Family in the United States (1939) and Black Bourgeoisie (1957) - studied black life

Pharmacogenomics

branch of pharmacology that operates on the assumption that there are difference in the ways we respond to drugs based on our race. BiDil - FDA-approved drug that claims it can effectively treat congestive heart failure in African Americans First FDA-approved drug marketed towards one race

Manifest destiny

convinced many white Americans that it was their divine right to claim and occupy all the land from the Atlantic to Pacific Oceans

Status inequalities

differences in the power, prestige, or privileges of two or more persons or groups

Split labor market theory

emphasizes the wats both race and class contribute to inequality Believe that works can be split up into two classes: higher paid and lower paid workers

intersectionality

focuses on the interactions between different systems of oppression

Marxist theories

generally view the world as stratified along class lines

Anglo-conformity

instead of becoming a melting pot, all group coming to the US are expected to drop their cultural identities in favor of an Anglo-American culture

Racialized medicine

race is treated as a genetic fact for medical purposes

Power and Conflict theories

racial and ethnic theories that accent the persisting and great inequalities in the power and resource distributions associated with racial or ethnic subordination in a society

melting pot

the idea that diverse streams of immigrants come to America and eventually merge into another distinct group, that of the "American"

cultural pluralism

the idea that numerous ethnicities are capable of coexisting without threatening the dominant culture

Eugenics

the idea that you could use science to improve society (specifically by breeding the best and brightest of society → or inhibiting breeding among people deemed inferior (what happened in the US)). Eugenics became discredited due to Nazi's taking this idea from the US.

Racial formation perspective

the ways racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed over time.

Scientific racism

using science to prove the innate inferiority of some groups and the superiority of others (emerged out of slavery)

ethnicity paradigm

viewed race as part of ethnicity (but as a less important factor in people's lives than ethnicity) and equated ethnicity with culture.

Racial genomics

we are 99.9% alike to one another

Genome geography

when portions of a genetic sequence are associated with particular regions of the world (compares a sample of a customer's DNA to a database of DNA and links them to population groups. They find where in the world little snips of DNA are clustered that the person has, and then say "you are ___% of this ethnicity")