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Race and Ethnicity
In this section, I describe the sociological study of race and ethnicity, a subject at the heart of just about everything sociologists care about: equality (and inequality), identity (and lack thereof), social change, and (for better and for worse), social stability.
You can choose your ethnicity, but you can’t choose your race
In sociological terms, race refers to an ascribed status: something determined by others based on the physical characteristics you were born with. Ethnicity, on the other hand, generally refers to an achieved status: a status you choose for yourself by the identity you assume, the groups you associate yourself with, and the behaviors you practice.
Race
Every society has its own set of racial groups that its members understand and react to. In some societies, there are dramatic differences in physical features: Some people, for example, have very light skin whereas others have very dark skin. In other societies, the differences may not be so dramatic to an outsider but are easy to recognize for those who are raised in those societies: Relatively subtle differences in skin shades or facial features can lead to just as much bias and discrimination as differences that are objectively much more marked.
In fact, the exact same physical appearance can mean different things in different societies. As an example of this, consider what it means to be “black.” That’s a widely-understood racial category in the United States, the West Indies, and many other areas; it’s associated with having particularly darkpigmented skin, and in both the United States and the Dominican Republic has been (in fact, often still is) associated with negative discrimination.
In the United States, though, “black” people have historically been people of African descent, their families often brought unwillingly to America as slaves. Many Americans assume that an individual with dark skin is of this heritage. If they discover that a “black” person is actually an immigrant from the West Indies, Americans often treat that person differently.
Sociologist Mary Waters has described the frustrations of dark-skinned American immigrants from the West Indies, who can find themselves excluded by both non-black Americans — who regard the newcomers as “black” and discriminate against them on that basis — and by African-Americans, who regard
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the immigrants as outsiders who are — despite the color of their skin — not “really” black. Some of these immigrants, in some contexts, consciously adopt the dress and speaking styles of African-Americans to fit in with that group; others, in other situations, emphasize their West Indian heritage through their accent and their dress to avoid the discrimination faced by African-Americans.
This example shows the complexities of race, and the frustration that can be experienced by both racial minorities and members of a racial majority as they try to gain acceptance and avoid discrimination.
Ethnicity
I explained at the beginning of this section that sociologists use the term “ethnicity” to describe a status that a person chooses for himself or herself, an identification with a group of people. In common usage, the term “ethnicity” is often used to refer to a national or cultural heritage that isn’t necessarily associated with distinctive physical features. It’s worth remembering, though, that in the English language some social categories that are today called ethnicities — for example, Italian or German or Russian — were often called “races” 100 years ago, when they were generally seen as being more fundamental and were more often used as the basis of discrimination. (American newspapers from the turn of the 20th century are full of derogatory references to, for example, “the Irish race.”)
Even if the terms “race” and “ethnicity” are sometimes used interchangeably by non-sociologists, in sociological terms they refer to very different types of social groups. As I noted earlier in this chapter, your race is something others decide for you, whether you like it or not. It mainly describes your physical features. Your ethnicity, on the other hand, refers to the cultural group with which you consciously identify. A person’s ethnicity often includes the following features:
A historical narrative, generally associated with a place of origin. When I say that my ethnicity is “German-American,” that means that I identify with a group of people who lived in one area in Europe for many generations, then crossed the Atlantic to the United States.
Cultural customs, such as food, holiday celebrations, a language. My grandmother grew up in New Ulm, Minnesota, speaking German, eating German food, and celebrating German-Catholic holidays. I’ve never learned German, but I’ve eaten more than my share of sauerkraut and dumplings.
Symbols and distinctive styles of dress. Ethnicities are often associated with flags and colors, and especially at times of celebration, unmistakable outfits. (No, I’ve never worn lederhosen — but if you saw me in a pair, you’d certainly know what my ethnicity is!)
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Although ethnicities are often associated with races, they are by definition more free-floating — spouses often adopt one another’s ethnic practices, and people may embrace ethnicities that have nothing to do with their parentage or biological characteristics, becoming indistinguishable from someone who grew up in a particular ethnic culture. In cases where ethnicities are not closely associated with a set of obvious physical characteristics, or where
a certain physical appearance might plausibly be associated with any of a number of ethnicities, ethnicity may become almost entirely elective.
Mary Waters — the same sociologist mentioned earlier for her study of West Indian immigrants — wrote a book about European-Americans called Ethnic Options. The title refers to the fact that although African-Americans or AsianAmericans or Hispanic-Americans are typically obviously identifiable as such, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, or Norwegian-Americans are not. Their ethnicity is something they can choose to play up with flags and anthems, or completely ignore if that’s what they prefer.
Ethnicity is so flexible, in fact, that in the modern world, people might choose to identify with groups and traditions that you wouldn’t necessarily think of as “ethnic” but are used that way. Think of alumni of certain universities who wear their college shirts and proudly declare their membership in that college community, or people who grew up in a certain state or city or neighborhood and take that fact as an essential aspect of their identity. In this way, being “a Domer” (an alumnus of the University of Notre Dame, which has a building with a golden dome), a Californian, or a New Yorker can be a person’s primary “ethnicity.”
Racial discrimination: Conscious and unconscious
Race remains relevant around the world for many reasons, but first and foremost because in virtually every society, the color of your skin and other physical features — the color of your eyes, whether your hair is curly, you name it — are likely to affect the way people perceive you and the way they treat you.
Obviously this is illogical in the sense that a person’s physical features tell you nothing about their abilities, personality, or background. People know better than to judge the quality of a car’s engine by the color it’s painted, and similarly they should know better than to judge a person’s mind or heart by the color of their skin. And yet, they do — and they do, and they do, and they do, again and again and again.
It isn’t right, and in most countries today discrimination by race is illegal . . .
but it happens, consciously and unconsciously. In this section, I explain these two types of racial discrimination.
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Caste in stone?
“Caste” is not a concept that most people today are very familiar with, but it’s something that has virtually defined the lives of many millions of people throughout history. A caste is an inherited class status, one you’re born into if you live in a society that subscribes to the idea of caste. Other ascribed class statuses — including race and sex — are also inherited, but in societies with caste systems, caste transcends race and sex, and is associated with cultural practices as an ethnicity might be.
Societies around the world have had castes of one sort or another. Many societies have had priestly castes, where people seen as especially holy or having important spiritual roles descend from one another. An inherited monarchy or aristocracy is another form of caste, with ruling power being passed on from mothers and fathers to sons and daughters. Some societies — for example, traditional societies in India — are divided up into many inherited castes, sometimes including an “untouchable” caste at the bottom of the social ladder.
Castes share some features of races and ethnicities: Biological inheritance is central to caste membership, as it is to membership in all racial groups and many ethnic groups. Castes are different, though, in that they’re explicitly tied to a society’s power structure. Because a caste system means that power (or lack thereof) is inherited rather than earned, most people today see strict caste systems as unfair and undesirable. Around the world, caste systems have been challenged and have lost a great deal of their influence — the queen of England, for example, still nominally has power over all of Great Britain, but as a practical matter the position is largely symbolic. (You wouldn’t normally hear the term “caste” used to describe the British aristocracy, but in a sociological sense it is indeed a caste: Like any other caste status, royalty is a class position one is born into and cannot lose.)
Still, caste systems are far from gone or forgotten: Hundreds of millions of people in the world today have faced discrimination based on the caste that they were born into.
Conscious
Through the course of human history, many — in fact, probably most — people have consciously discriminated by race. That is, they have deliberately chosen to treat people differently based on skin color or other attributes. This has been so widespread that the unfortunate tendency to interpret physical appearance as being a significant predictor of a person’s abilities and personality seems to be a basic feature of human nature. Look at kids in a schoolyard: Whether they’re in a big multicultural city or a homogeneous rural community, they always find something about each other’s appearance to pay attention to, and in many cases make fun of or ostracize each other based on appearance. It’s not pretty, but there it is — there’s no mystery about why racism started in the first place.
Over time, ideas about race become institutionalized and formalized: they’re written down and sometimes passed into law. Today, biological anthropologists understand that there’s really no such thing as “race” in the sense of
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an objective set of biological categories into which humans might be placed (yes, there are differences in skin color and other features, but they fall along a continuum and have no relevance for people’s intellect or abilities). For centuries, though, it was widely believed — and documented in highly questionable texts — that there were fundamental differences among the “races of man,” and that those differences made it only logical to treat different races differently. At worst, these completely mistaken ideas justified slavery and genocide.
Without excusing the millions of people who have actively participated in outright and unapologetic racial discrimination around the world, it’s worth pointing out that the example of racism illustrates the power of society to influence people’s beliefs and actions. When you grow up in a society where racial discrimination is completely embedded in the social fabric, it can be very difficult to see beyond what you’re taught from early childhood and what is taken for granted by everyone around you. And, of course, if you’re a member of a group that benefits from racial discrimination, it can be very convenient not to question this received wisdom.
Unconscious
If all racial discrimination was conscious, it wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem today as it continues to be. In societies where racism has been scientifically debunked and socially deplored, it should end . . . right? Well, yes, it should . . . but it doesn’t.
For one thing, there are people who continue, despite all evidence, to consciously believe that there are fundamental differences among races — and they’re not just the few extremists who praise Hitler and burn crosses. When I was growing up as a middle-class kid in St. Paul, Minnesota, I knew people who genuinely believed (though they would say so only privately) that interracial love affairs were improper.
Beyond that, though, unconscious racism continues to be widespread. This is when someone takes another person’s race into consideration without even knowing it. This continues to happen for at least three different reasons: the weight of history, the self-fulfilling prophecy, and basic human nature.
The weight of history
Even someone born in the 21st century in one of the world’s most progressive societies is going to come across a huge amount of explicitly or implicitly racist material. The world’s history of racism is too vast to be completely wiped out — and in fact most people would say that the past must be remembered to avoid repeating it.
Books, movies, art, and stories that propagate racist stereotypes are still widely available, and no one can completely escape the influence of this material. In some cases, these influences and others may lead people to act or think in a racist manner without even realizing it.
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The self-fulfilling prophecy
In Chapter 8, I cite the sociologist W.I. Thomas, who said that a situation defined as real is real in its consequences. When a group of people face systematic discrimination based on their physical appearance, the hurtful effects of that discrimination add up over time and can’t be easily erased.
In the United States, for example, African-Americans were initially enslaved and then subjected to many decades of explicitly discriminatory practices and policies. That meant lost opportunities for education and employment experience, and today black Americans are still catching up to white Americans in these areas. There is a persistent gap between the average academic achievement of African-Americans and white Americans, and blacks — especially black men — are incarcerated at a significantly higher rate than are white Americans.
The fact that these actual disparities say nothing about differences of ability does not stop many white Americans from unconsciously discriminating against blacks, every day across the country. This is one reason for the widespread adoption of pro-diversity policies: Undoing centuries of conscious discrimination may require an equally conscious effort.
The unpleasant truth is that people seem to need no excuse to treat one another differently based on appearance. This doesn’t make it okay, but it does mean that fighting racism is probably going to require constant vigilance as long as people are people.
The myth of the “model minority”
One of sociologists’ most important contributions to the understanding of race and racism has been to debunk the myth of the “model minority.”
The “model minority” is an idea that’s been used to underplay or dismiss the continuing significance of racism. The proponents of this idea point to the fact that some racial minority groups have been exceptionally successful at quickly achieving equality — or better than equality — with a majority group in terms of education and career success. The example most often mentioned is Asian-Americans, a racial minority in the United States who, despite the fact that many families initially arrived as immigrants with few resources, are now on average as comfortably situated financially as are white Americans — and are, on average, now better educated.
Some observers have looked at the achievements of Asian-Americans and called them a “model minority,” a group that proves racism isn’t really a deterrent for people who are willing to work hard and try to get ahead. If Asian-Americans did it, they say, so can African-Americans and HispanicAmericans.
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Sociologists, though, have pointed out that there are vast differences among minority groups, and though there are some patterns and similarities in minority groups’ experiences, in no way is it accurate to say that one group can be a “model” for another. As much credit as Asian-Americans deserve for their success in the United States, it’s wrong to say that they can serve as “models” for other minority groups in the sense that a “model student” can inspire other students to study harder. Here are a few specific reasons the “model minority” concept is misguided:
Not all racism is the same. It is absolutely true that Asian-Americans have faced, and continue to face, racism and discrimination. Immigrants from East Asia have had to fight hateful stereotypes and have been denied jobs, housing, and schooling on the basis of their physical appearance. It does Asian-Americans no discredit, though, to say that not all racism is the same, and that other racial groups may have faced and may continue to face discrimination that is even more hurtful, based on different sets of (equally misguided) ideas about differences in ability or intellect.
Different groups come from different circumstances. Although all immigrants face challenges acclimating to a new country (see next section), people don’t arrive as blank slates. Compared to, say, AfricanAmericans, Asian-Americans are on average relatively recent and relatively well-educated arrivals to the United States. Further, upon arrival they were often able to live in communities of similar immigrants who were able to support each other. Not all immigrant groups have had these advantages.
Any “minority group” is actually many minority groups. AsianAmericans come from many different countries, and came for many different reasons; this is true of any racial or ethnic minority group. It’s difficult, and is often misleading, to make any general statement about “Asian-Americans” as a group. Hmong-Americans, for example, are by and large recent arrivals who fled their homelands in the wake of violent conflicts. They’ve faced tremendous challenges immigrating to the United States, including some discrimination from all racial groups, fellow Asian-Americans included. To sweep Hmong-Americans under the “model minority” rug and deny that their circumstances are exceptional and might require exceptional support would be to do them a serious injustice.
The achievements of Asian-Americans and members of other groups that might be characterized as “model minorities” are very real and very hardearned, but it’s simply not the case that they’ve figured out some secret trick that other racial minority groups just need to learn in order to overcome the harmful effects of racism.
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Immigration and “assimilation” (or not)
Not all ethnic groups are immigrant groups — most societies have a number of indigenous ethnic groups as well as ethnic groups that have come from elsewhere, plus there are ethnic groups not associated with a place of origin. Still, almost all sociologists interested in race and ethnicity find themselves looking closely at the experiences of immigrants.
The members of the Chicago School were among the first sociologists to really look closely at immigration. The turn of the 20th century saw a wave of immigration to the United States that transformed America’s social landscape, and that transformation was most visible in big cities like Chicago, where the new arrivals went looking for work.
Initially, sociologists thought immigration could be understood in terms of “assimilation.” The word assimilation means to be absorbed into, to become one of. America was seen as a great “melting pot” where people from all different places arrived to be incorporated into one big whole.
The theory of assimilation has it that people arrive speaking their native languages, wearing their native styles of dress, and otherwise practicing the traditions of their home countries; over time, they are “assimilated” into their new community, adopting that country’s language and traditions. If that’s the way it works, the study of immigration is just the study of why some groups assimilate more quickly and peacefully than others.
As sociologists have spent more time studying immigration, though, they’ve come to understand that it’s just not that simple. It’s certainly true that all immigrants choose to, or are forced to, adapt to the ways of their new homes to at least some extent — but it’s not a linear path where they go from being 0 percent assimilated to 100 percent assimilated. Sociologists of immigration today appreciate that there are at least three things wrong with the basic “assimilation” theory:
Assimilate to what? If immigrants are assimilating to something, to what, exactly, are they assimilating? The United States and other countries do have mainstream cultures (see Chapter 5) containing some quintessential features, but modern societies are so diverse that it’s impossible to even describe what a fully “assimilated” person would look like. You’ve heard the phrase “as American as apple pie,” but does that mean that if I don’t like apple pie, I’m not completely assimilated to American culture?
“Assimilation” means many things. Imagine three immigrants to the United States from China. One learns to love hot dogs and Elvis Presley but never learns a word of English. Another learns perfect English but
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continues to dress and eat as she did in China. Another makes several Mexican-American friends and learns fluent Spanish. Which of these three is most “assimilated”? This example shows how absurd the question is. Joining a new society can mean a number of different things, and they don’t necessarily all go together.
Why assimilate? Immigrants vary widely in how much they want to trade their native cultures for the lifestyle of the country they move to. Some immigrants enthusiastically do anything they can to adopt the ways of their new country, but others prefer to keep doing things as much as possible the way they always have. There are many factors — including age, location, and reason for immigrating — that go into these choices, and sociologists have learned not to assume that it’s in any given individual’s interest to “assimilate” to a new way of life. Many immigrants live in ethnic enclaves where they are able to continue speaking their native language and associating with fellow immigrants from their country, and they are perfectly and justifiably happy with that choice.
Does speaking Spanish mean you’re a Latino?
It’s easy to rattle off a list of ethnic and racial groups, and one of them is likely to be “Latino” or “Hispanic.” You have a general idea of what a “Latino” is — they probably are descended from Spanish-speaking people, and may have the skin colors or facial features associated with residents of Mexico or Central America — but you probably don’t know exactly what a Latino is, even if you are one yourself!
That’s because there’s no universal definition of who counts as a Latino. It’s a term of convenience used to describe people with either of the characteristics I mentioned, or who are descended from residents of Latin American countries. Like any term for an ethnicity or race, “Latino” includes a wide range of different people; even wider than most. A man living in Brazil, a woman in Alaska whose grandmother was born in Mexico, a Spaniard whose father came from the Dominican Republic . . . all of these might be considered “Latinos.”
Sociologist Wendy Roth studied Latinos in the United States, in the Dominican Republic,
and in Puerto Rico, and found that many of the people she talked with didn’t identify themselves as “Latinos;” they considered themselves “Dominicans” or “Puerto Ricans.” And, if they immigrated to America, they found that they were often regarded as “black” or “white” simply because of the color of their skin. For all of these reasons, “Latino” would hardly seem to make any sense as a category.
And yet it does, and it’s become widely used and adopted — in part, says Roth, because of international television stations like Univision that promote the idea of a common identity among Spanish speakers. Binding together under one big “ethnicity” also helps Latinos gain visibility and political clout, even if it has little to do with how they actually see themselves. This example illustrates the complexity of race and ethnicity. You may “be” a certain race because people see you that way, and you may “be” a certain ethnicity because you identify with a group of people, but ethnicities and races are always in flux as people and societies change.