Race and Ethnicity: Class 6

• Class 6 focuses on race and ethnicity, and plans to cover race and theories of racial categorization, ethnicity and ethnic conflict, and practical applications.

Race as Categorization

• Race is a category of people believed to share inherited physical characteristics like skin color, facial features, hair texture, and stature.
• It's presented as "objective" with genetic differences, linked historically to eugenics.
• 99.9% DNA is shared among all humans, therefore race has no genetic basis.
• Racism involves prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism toward a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.
• Racism is social, general, and tragically effective.

Racism as Ideology

• Racial hierarchization was intensified with colonialism and exploration to justify domination in the 18th century.
• The slave trade incentivized categorizing people to justify slavery.
• Carolus Linnaeus divided homo sapiens into four continental varieties with deeply racist characteristics.

Social Category

• Race is often arbitrary.
• "One drop of blood" in one's ancestry meant being considered "colored" rather than white.
• 1924 Racial Integrity Act in the U.S. offered two options: white and black.
• This act was in force until 1967.

Critical Race Theory

• Framework developed in the 1980s by legal scholars to understand enduring racial disparities in societies.
• Race in inequality.
• Race is an everyday experience.
• Behaviors attached to race (stereotypes) change as needed.
• Oppression is intersectional through law, healthcare, education, services, ethnic socialization, social norms, and biases.
• Critical Race Theory may be considered a U.S. problem.

From Race to Ethnicity

• Ethnicity replaced race for a social group sharing cultural, linguistic, religious, or ancestral characteristics.
• There has been intensive academic interests since the late 1960s and decolonization.
• Ethnicity is an umbrella that includes groups differentiated by color, language, and religion. Its cover tribes, races, nationalities, and castes.
• It concerns human populations with shared ancestry myths, histories, cultures, territory, and solidarity.
• Racial discrimination still exists.

Understanding Ethnicity

• Primordialism: ethnic identities defined by birth through blood relation (descent), religion, shared language, or customs..
• Constructivism: ethnic groups are categories of ascription and identification by interacting people, which is defined by the "other".
• Instrumentalism: ethnicity used for individual or collective social/economic/political benefit as an instrument of elites.

Kanchan Chandra

• Kanchan Chandra questions existing definitions of ethnicity relating to ancestry, culture, language, and history.
• Descent-based attributes are characteristics associated with or perceived as linked to lineage.
• Ethnic identity is a subset of social identity categories determined by descent-linked attributes.

Politics of Race and Ethnicity

• Small differences are converted into "objective" gulfs between people used instrumentally, potentially leading to the Holocaust or ethnic conflict.
• Monopolistic closure is the use of an externally identifiable characteristic to exclude competitors.
• Viewing society as binary rift is actually a single race split into a super-race and sub-race.
• Race is a product of the state’s biopower. Even non-colonial states have racism and racist policies such as in Eastern Europe.

W.E. Du Bois

• There are parallels between oppression based on skin color and religion.
• Call for solidarity and human empathy for all suffering.
• Systems of racial and ethnic hatred are interconnected, as opposed to "competition of victimhood."

Anti-Roma Discrimination

• Roma, Travellers, and Sinti are are discriminated against today in Europe.
• Slavery, WW2 Porajmos, and forced sterilization of women until 2012 occurred.
• Children go through "re-education" and segregation, often living in poor housing.

Ethnic Conflict

• Conflict is tied to the political mobilization of diverging interests and identities.
• Actions are taken to achieve power, security, and resources.
• Ethnicity can become a political and military tool.
• Ethnicity is a tool that reduces uncertainty and insecurity in everyday interactions, which evoking notions of kinship/shared experience.
• Ethnic politics can use separatism to increase security against "other" groups, such as Ex-Yugoslavia and the USSR.
• Difference-eliminating strategies include downsizing, partition, assimilation, genocide, and forced expulsions.

Discursive Stereotyping

• Discursive stereotyping builds on Orientalism.
• It is linked to time rather than space,
• It is concrete not vague.
• It is intra-racial focusing on ethnicity.
• Nesting orientalism exists.
• Anti-Muslim attitudes involved the 2015 refugee crisis in which populations hijack Islam as a defining feature for racism which is based on orientalism and Islam.

Take Aways

• Race uses genetics and biology but it is used as a power play
• Ethnicity categorizes ancestries and origins, but also promotes othering
• Constructs are used in politics to create categorizations which create political and real world conflicts
• Eastern Europe is silent on race, though similar to how it is practiced in the rest of the world specifically to the Roma population.