1. Race, Ethnicity & Inequality

2. Aren’t Race & Ethnicity the same thing?

3. Ethnicity
People who identify with one another on the basis of common ancestry & cultural heritage.

4. Race
A category of people who are alleged to share certain biologically inherited physical characteristics that are considered socially important within a society.
Shepard

5. Racial Categories Change Through Time & From Culture to Culture
Italians
Mongoloid
Germans
Caucasoid
Koreans
Peasants
Negroid
Jews
Irish
Bluebloods

6. The problems with continuing
Woods says he’s Cablinasian
People of mixed racial/ethnic heritage
Since gene flow is open we can have offspring with any number of racial/ethnic combinations and it/we haven’t created any new races
by recognizing only one, we dismiss their full heritage

7. The Great Racial Myth?
Slightly over half of all biological/physical anthropologists today believe in the traditional view that human races are biologically valid and real.
The other half believes that the traditional racial categories for humankind are arbitrary and meaningless,
or that at a minimum there are better ways to look at human variation than through the "racial lens."

8. Dr. George Gill
“I have found that forensic anthropologists attain a high degree of accuracy in determining geographic racial affinities by utilizing both new and traditional methods of bone analysis. “
Dr. George W. Gill is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. He also serves as the forensic anthropologist for Wyoming law-enforcement agencies and the Wyoming State Crime Laboratory.

9. Dr. C. Loring Brace
“…there is no "biological entity that warrants the term 'race' .”
Dr. C. Loring Brace is professor anthropology and curator of biological anthropology at the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
“…it is perfectly true that the long-term residents of the various parts of the world have patterns of features that we can easily identify as characteristic of the areas from which they come.”

10. DNA
Researchers have unanimously declared there is only one race — the human race.
New York Times “Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows.
99.9 percent of the human genome is the same in everyone regardless of race.
The standard labels used to distinguish people by ‘race’ have little or no biological meaning.

11. What we view as race may be an evolutionary response to the environment.
Morphological characteristics, however, like skin color, hair form, bone traits, eyes, and lips tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones.
For example, more prominent noses humidify air better.

13. The Idea of Race is Real
“If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
W.I. & D.S. Thomas in Essentials of Sociology
and the consequences can be devastating…

14. Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
The Holocaust
Darfur Catastrophe
80,000 people have died in Darfur, 30,000 have been murdered, 50,00 have died from disease and famine”

15. Manifest Destiny (mid 1800s)
95% of all Native Americans died due to destroyed food supply, disease & murder.
Essentials of Sociology, Henslin
Manifest Destiny (mid 1800s)

16. Slavery Lynching Segregation Discrimination

17. Minority & Dominant Groups
Minority group
“People who are singled out for unequal treatment and who regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination.”
Not based solely on quantity
Dominant group
“Have greater power, privileges and social status”.
Essentials of Sociology, Henslin

18. Prejudice & Discrimination
Prejudice is an attitude, either positive or negative, which prejudges a person who belongs to a particular group.
Discrimination is an action, “unfair treatment directed against someone”.
One can exist with or without the other
Essentials of Sociology, Henslin

19. Merton’s Typology of Prejudice and Discrimination
Unprejudiced nondiscriminator
Unprejudiced discriminator
Prejudice nondiscriminator
Prejudice discriminator

20. Global Patterns of Racial-Ethnic Relations
I. Genocide
“A systematic annihilation or attempted annihilation of a people based on their presumed race or ethnic group”
II. Ethnic Cleansing
“A policy of population elimination, including forcible expulsion and genocide”
Essentials of Sociology, Heslin

21. III. Population Transfer
Indirect population transfer
“Achieved by making life so horrible for a members of a minority group that they leave ‘voluntarily’.”
Jews in czarist Russia
Direct population transfer
“A dominant group expels a minority.”
Native Americans
Essentials of Sociology, Henslin

22. IV. Internal Colonialism
“The policy of economically exploiting minority groups”
Slavery in U.S.
Apartheid in South Africa
V. Segregation
“The formal separation of racial or ethnic groups”
The U.S. South until 1960s
Essentials of Sociology, Henslin

23. VI. Assimilation
“Minority group is absorbed into the mainstream culture.”
Forced assimilation
The dominant group refuses to allow the minority group to practice its own religion, speak its language or follow its customs.”
Permissible assimilation
Dominant group “allows the minority to adopt the dominant group’s patterns in its own way and at its own speed.”
Essentials of Sociology, Henslin

24. VII. Multiculturalism/Pluralism
“Permits or even encourages racial and ethnic variations”
Essentials of Sociology, Henslin

25. The United States Are we really a melting pot?

26. Or are we a tossed salad?

27. Which box do I check?
“Race became a factor in the census during slavery when five blacks were counted the same as three whites to determine how many representatives a state could send to Congress!”
Essential of Sociology, Henslin

28. Whose business is it anyway?
The problems with not continuing to ask about race/ethnic heritage
can’t identify which groups need help
Most people of mixed racial/ethnic heritage identify with one race more than another
Most are treated as if they belonged to a single racial category