Module 13 Lectures - Lecture notes 13 PDF

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clarence gravlee...

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Audrey Smedley ◦ Race in North America • Central thesis ▪ Race is culture-bound: racial worldview is uniquely American and the result of slavery and use of race as a mechanism of oppression ▪ Analytic constructs must transcend cultural boundaries Rethinking Racial Democracy ◦ Classic North American scholarship on "race relations" contrasts Latin America with the US ◦ Imposition of race as analytic framework fostered belief in so-called racial democracies Eduardo Seda Bonilla ◦ "one drop rule" ◦ "real" racial prejudice does not exist in Latin America "Ambiguity" ◦ Way Brazilians think about race is characterized by maximization of noise and ambiguity ◦ People could not agree upon who is black and who is brown because the language they used was ambiguous • Could not enforce racial segregation ◦ Duany, J. ◦ Isar Godreau • Slippery semantics ▪ Recurrent linguistic inconsistency in racial identification processes that takes place when people use different systems or logical grids

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Shared way of attributing meaning to differences Implications: ◦ Recognizing consensus enhances understanding of how people manipulate shared meaning of color ◦ Imposing race where it is not culturally salient hampers measurement and interpretation

! ! Comparative Slave Systems and "Race" ! • English have historical penchant toward extreme ethnic chauvinism • Marvin Harris- Patterns of Race in the Americas ◦ Contrast between the US and Brazil ◦ Harris originated cultural materialism • Theoretical paradigm and research strategy • Seek to explain cross- cultural differences and similarities • Proposes that material factors shape culture change ◦ Race in the US vs Latin America • US ▪ Black/ white binary ▪ Rule of hypodescent (one drop rule)- if you get 2 people who have a child that don’t belong to the same race, the child will be assigned to the race with the lower social status ▪ Exclusive, distinct social categories • Latin America

▪ Proliferation of phenotypic labels (reflect gradations of color on the gradient from black to white) ▪ No hypodescent rule ▪ No distinct social groups ◦ Problem of labor • As English colonists arrived in the Americas, they had a shortage of labor (insufficient native populations), so rise of slavery dependent on Africans • Demographic and economic factors • Different patterns of settlement in English and Iberian settlements • English had abundant population surplus due to decline in agriculture • Spain and Portugal had few potential colonists ◦ Explaining US vs Latin America • White planters in both places benefited from different ways of social thinking • De-emphasized race and emphasized class ! !...