1. What is Culture and its Influence on Socialization?
H607: Ethnicity, Context & Family Dynamics

2. The plan Conceptualizing Ethnicity Conceptualizing Culture
Defining & Orienting Concepts
Cultural influences in parenting

3. Plausible Origins of Race Differences
Geographic
Isolation
Time
Genetic
Distinctiveness
Suited for Context
Racial
Differences +
Time
Mobility
Sustained
Cultural
Practices

4. What is Ethnicity? Origins of word
Ethnos—nation or tribe
Ethnikos—nationality
Euphemism for “race”
What are the prevailing definitions?
Common ancestry/history;
Shared language, beliefs, norms, religion & behaviors
How is it used?
Levels of analysis: Individual vs. societal levels
Race/ethnicity dependent on context or population
Comparative work on ethnicity results in conclusions based on culture

5. Conceptualizing Ethnicity (Sollors)
Ethnicity and Class
The role of power and oppression
Ethnicity as a substitute for class?
Content and Meaning of Modern Ethnic Identification
Why do we need it? Why does it persist?
Ethnic Boundaries and Nuclei
Do we really want to be a melting pot?

6. Impact on families
“Outer ring” societal conceptualizations change microsystems within families
The luxury of being silent on race
Doing nothing is not neutral
Undoing the negative messages on race
Congruence between “outer ring” culture & microsystem culture
Negotiating race
Across settings (economic, demographic, representation)
Within families (colorism; marriage patterns, differential socialization)
Across developmental stage
With opportunity (skin color & income; racial profiling)
Negotiating Ethnicity
Practices for maintaining group identity and practices, while navigating broader society
When is assimilation possible, desirable, and avoided

7. My definitions…with Burton et al.
Race—both biologically and socially constructed based on physical characteristics and biological reactivity,
“involves assumption that individuals can be divided based on phenotype or genotype and that those groups have meaningful differences.”
Ethnicity—group membership based on nationality and/or collective history/ancestry; individual and group conceptualizations
“a subset of people whose members share a common national ancestral, cultural, immigration or religious characteristics that distinguish them from other groups”

8. Important future directions
Explore race as a context and how it stratifies rather than solely as a binary category
Understand colorism as it impact “within group” and “within family” socialization
Understanding the intersection of racial stratification of immigrants cultural experiences and US stratification
And how immigrants navigate it as part of acculturation

9. What is culture? Orienting concepts for understanding culture…
It isn’t just what other people do
Understanding one’s own cultural heritage, as well as others, requires taking the perspective of people of contrasting backgrounds
Cultural practices fit together
Cultural communities continue to change, as do individuals
There is not likely to “One Best Way.” (but not every way is good)

10. Cultural frameworks
4 Dimensions that frame a cultural implicit ideologies
Time (oriented to past, present, future)
Perspective on Human Activity (being, doing, becoming)
Social Relationships (hierarchical, lateral, individualist)
People-Nature Relationships (subjugation, harmony, mastery)
Implicit ideologies form the foundation of belief systems
They are psychologically efficient!!