Sociology 101 - Notes for Chapter 11 PDF

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Notes for Chapter 11 Main Ideas -

Race is a socially constructed category of people who share biologically transmitted traits that members of a society consider important. This includes physical appearances, skin, facial features, hair texture, body shape, and the list of characteristics that go on. The meaning and importance of race vary from place to place and over time. Societies use racial categories to rank people in hierarchy-money power. They can be formed into groups, which is set apart from others because of obvious physical differences. There are some places where race concepts and racial identification are fluid, reflecting changes in economic standing, not skin color.

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Ethnicity refers to nonbiological traits, such as shared cultural heritage, history, language, patterns of behaviors, and beliefs. Members of ethnic categories are based on language, religions, and ancestors. The importance of ethnicity varies from place to place over time and is played up or down depending on the person’s choosing. Society may or may not set categories of people apart based on differences in ethnicity. They can also be formed into groups, which is set apart from others primarily because of its national origin or distinctive cultural patterns.

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Racial and ethnic inequalities have manifested themselves in phenomena such as slavery and fraud, widespread economic, educational, and political deprivation, the violent and nonviolent protests of civil rights movement, and racially motivated hate crimes. Immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East have become popular targets of hostility. For people of color in this country, racial equality has always been elusive.

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Increasing numbers of ethnoracial minorities and an influx of non-English-speaking immigrants are heightening competition and conflict over society’s resources, including various forms of wealth, prestige, and power. Racism can be expressed at the personal level through individual attitudes and behavior, at the cultural level in language and collective ideologies, and at the macrostructural level in the everyday workings of social institutions.

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Personal racism is the expression of racist attitudes or behaviors by individual people. This type of racism takes many obvious forms, such as individuals who use derogatory names when they refer to other ethnoracial groups or those who show clear disdain for and hostility toward members of other groups during face-to-face contact. Quiet discrimination is expressed not directly but rather indirectly through anxiety about or avoidance of minorities.

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Institutional racism exists in established institutional practices and customs that reflect, produce, and maintain ethnoracial inequality. Institutional racism is more difficult to detect

than personal racism and hence is more difficult to stop. Because such racism exists at a level above personal attitudes, it will not disappear simply by reducing people’s prejudices.

Key Terms Affirmative action: Program designed to seek out members of minority groups for positions from which they had previously been excluded, thereby seeking to overcome institutional racism Colorism: Skin color prejudice within an ethnoracial group, most notably between light-skinned and dark-skinned Blacks Discrimination: Unfair treatment of people based on some social characteristic, such as race, ethnicity, or sex Ethnicity: Sense of community derived from the cultural heritage shared by a category of people with common ancestry Implicit bias: prejudiced attitudes or beliefs that operate at a level below conscious awareness Institutional racism: Laws, customs, and practices that systematically reflect and produce racial and ethnic inequalities in a society, whether or not the individuals maintaining these laws, customs, and practices have racist intentions Panethnic labels: General terms applied to diverse subgroups that are assumed to have something in common Personal racism: Individual expression of racist attitudes or behaviors Prejudice: Rigidly held, unfavorable attitudes, beliefs, and feelings about members of a different group based on a social characteristic such as race, ethnicity, or gender Quiet discrimination: Form of discrimination expressed subtly and indirectly through feelings of discomfort, uneasiness, and fear, which motivate avoidance rather than blatant discrimination Race: Category of people labeled and treated as similar because of allegedly common biological traits, such as skin color, the texture of hair, and shape of eyes Racial transparency: Tendency for the race of a society’s majority to be so obvious, normative, and unremarkable that it becomes, for all intents and purposes, invisible Racism: Belief that humans are subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as superior or inferior Stereotype: The overgeneralized belief that a certain trait, behavior, or attitude characterizes all members of some identifiable group...