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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
This chapter introduces students to the concepts of
ethnicity and race. It discusses how both concepts are
cultural constructions. It shows how the biological and
social categories of race are largely unrelated, and
demonstrates this by discussing the construction of
race in Brazil, Japan, and the United States.
Fourth Edition
McGraw-Hill
CONRAD PHILLIP KOTTAK
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
• Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity
– Ethnic Markers, Identities, and Statuses
• Ethnic groups are formed around virtually the
same features as cultures: common beliefs,
values, customs, history, and the like.
• Ethnicity entails identification with a given
ethnic group, but it also involves the
maintenance of a distinction from other groups.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
• Status refers to any position in a society that can be
filled by an individual.
– Ascribed status is status into which people enter
automatically without choice, usually at birth or
through some other universal event in the life cycle.
– Achieved status is status that people acquire through
their own choices and actions.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
– Status Shifting
• Adjusting or switching one's status in reaction to
different social contexts is called the situational
negotiation of social identity.
• Within complex societies, ascribed status can describe
large sub-groups: minority groups, majority groups, and
races are all examples of ascribed statuses.
• Differences in ascribed status are commonly associated
with differences in social-political power.
• When an ethnic group is assumed to have a biological
basis, it is called a race.
• Discrimination against a race is called racism.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
• Race
– Race is a cultural category rather than a
biological reality because it is based on
contrasts perceived and perpetuated in
particular societies, rather than from scientific
classifications based on genes.
– Most Americans fail to distinguish between
races and ethnicities.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
• Social Race
– Wagley: social races are groups assumed to have a
biological basis but that are actually defined in a
culturally arbitrary, rather than scientific manner.
– Hypodescent: Race in the United States
• In the United States, race is most commonly
ascribed to people without reference to genotype.
• In extreme cases, offspring of genetically mixed
unions are ascribed entirely to the lower status
race of one parent, an example of the process
called hypodescent.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
– Not Us: Race in Japan
• Despite the presence of a substantial (10%), minority
population, the dominant racial ideology of Japan describes
the country as racially and ethnically homogeneous.
• Dominant Japanese use a clear us-not us dichotomy as the
basis for their construction of race.
• While dominant Japanese perceive their construction of race
to be based upon biology, the burakumin construct provides
evidence to the contrary.
– Burakumin are descendants of a low-status social class.
– Despite the fact that burakumin are genetically
indistinguishable from the dominant population, they are
treated as a different race.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
– Phenotype and Fluidity: Race in Brazil
• While it has some historical and social similarities with the
United States, race in Brazil is very different from race in the
United States and Japan.
• The Brazilian construction of race is attuned to relatively
slight phenotypic differences.
– More than 500 distinct racial labels have been reported.
– Brazilian race is flexible in that an individual’s racial
classification may change due to achieved status,
developmental biological changes, and other irregular
factors.
– The multiplicity and overlap of Brazilian race labels
allows one individual to be more than one race.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
• Stratification and “Intelligence”
– There is no conclusive evidence for biologically based
contrasts in intelligence between rich and poor, black and
white, or men and women.
• The best indicators of how any individual will perform
on an intelligence test are environmental, such as
educational, economic, and social background.
• All standard tests are culture-bound and biased because
they reflect the training and life experiences of those
who develop and administer them.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
– Jensenism asserts that African-Americans are hereditarily
incapable of doing as well as whites.
• Named for Arthur Jensen, the educational psychologist
who observed that, on average, African-Americans
perform less well on intelligence tests that EuroAmericans and Asian-Americans.
• An environmental explanation acknowledges that, for
many reasons, both genetic and environmental, some
people are smarter than others, however these
differences in intelligence cannot be generalized to
characterize whole populations or social groups.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
• Intelligence tests reflect the experiences of the people
who write them.
– Middle- and upper-class children do well because
they share the test makers’ educational expectations
and standards.
– The SATs claim to measure intellectual aptitude but
they also measure the type and quality of high
school education, linguistic and cultural
background, and parental wealth.
– Studies have shown that performance on the SATs
can be improved by coaching and preparation,
placing those students who can pay for an SAT
preparation course at an advantage.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
• Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities
– Nation-States Defined
• Nation and nation-state now refer to an autonomous,
centrally organized political entity.
• The majority of all nation-states have more than one
ethnic group in their constituent populations, and the
multiethnicity of all countries is increasing.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
– Nationalities and Imagined Communities
• Nationalities are ethnic groups that aspire to autonomous
statehood.
• The term imagined communities, coined by Benedict
Anderson, has been used to describe nationalities, since most
of their member populations feel a bond with each other in
the absence of any real acquaintance.
• Mass media and the language arts have helped to form such
imagined communities by becoming the means of
establishing a commonalty of values, motivations, language,
etc.
• Colonialism helped create imagined communities as different
ethnic groups under the control of the same colonial
administration often pooled resources in opposition to the
colonial power.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
• Ethnic Tolerance and Accommodation
– Assimilation
• Assimilation occurs when a minority group adopts
the patterns and norms of a more powerful culture, as
when a migrant ethnic group conforms itself to its
host culture.
• Assimilation is not uniform: it may be forced or
relatively benign depending on historical
particularities.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
– The Plural Society
• Plural society refers to a multiethnic nation-state
wherein the sub-groups do not assimilate but remain
essentially distinct, in (relatively) stable coexistence.
• Barth defines plural society as a society combining
ethnic contrasts and the economic interdependence of
the ethnic groups.
• Such interdependence tends to be structured by
ecological specialization.
• Barth argued that cultural differences were part of the
natural environment of ethnic groups, and thus peaceful,
egalitarian coexistence was a possibility, particularly
when there was no competition for resources.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
– Multiculturalism and Ethnic Identity
• Multiculturalism is the view of cultural diversity in a country
as something good and desirable.
• This is opposed to assimilationism, which expects
subordinate groups to take on the culture of the dominant
group while abandoning their own.
• A number of factors have caused the United States to move
away from an assimilationist model and toward a
multicultural one.
– Large-scale migration has brought in substantial
minorities in a time span too short for assimilation to
take place.
– An ethnic consciousness may take root in reaction to
consistent discrimination.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
• Roots of Ethnic Conflict
– Prejudice and Discrimination
• Prejudice is the devaluation of a given group based
upon the assumed characteristics of that group.
• Stereotypes are fixed ideas about what members of a
group are like.
• Discrimination is de jure when it is part of the law.
• Discrimination is de facto when it is practiced, but
not legally sanctioned.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
– Chips in the Mosaic
• Despite the fact that the 1992 Los Angeles riot began as a
reaction to the first Rodney King verdict, much of the
violence played out along ethnic lines: prosperous, culturally
isolated Korean merchants were targeted for looting and
violence.
• Subsequent public discussion indicated that much of the
enmity was due to culturally based miscommunication.
• There is some suggestion that miscommunication and
noncommunication between successful Korean store owners
and the surrounding African American population made it
more likely that the Koreans would be subjected to such
leveling mechanisms as looting and boycotts.
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CHAPTER 4
Ethnicity and Race
– Aftermaths of Oppression
• The Politics of Cultural Oppression
– Ethnic differentiation sometimes interferes with the
dominant group's consolidation of power.
– Such conditions, perceived or real, have resulted in brutal
discrimination: forced assimilation, ethnocide, ethnic
expulsion, and cultural colonialism.
• Colonialism
– Colonialism refers to the political, social, and cultural
domination of a territory and its people by a foreign
power for an extended time.
– Cultural colonialism refers to internal domination by one
group and its culture/ideology over others.
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