Race in Contemporary Life

Abstract

Ideas and feelings about race are part of the perspectives of all individuals who are aware of racial difference. More than that, although race no longer has the backing in biological science it once did, it is so robust as a social construction tied to human kinship that individuals live out their racial identities in most or all of their relationships and social roles. Both same-race and mixed-race marriages provide examples of these far-reaching effects of race., as do the influences of race on social class, medicine, health, and sport.

Discussion Questions

• 1. Do the low marriage rates for African American women indicate a “preference” for remaining unmarried? Explain the external factors.

• 2. If immigrant Mexican American women marry at younger ages, why is “ethnic culture” not a good explanation?

• 3. What does increasing interracial marriage indicate about white attitudes toward nonwhites, in your opinion? Explain how this is different from past ideas about miscegenation during segregation.

• 4. Why do older, Marxist notions of social class no longer apply?

• 5. If our ideas of social class are expanded to include cultural capital, how does that affect prospects for upward socioeconomic mobility among minorities?

• 6. Explain the difference between race-based and race-targeted medicine in reference to how BiDil was developed.

• 7. It what sense is sickle cell anemia related to racial identity and in what ways is it independent of even social ideas of race?

• 8. What does the difference in health among Pima Indians in Arizona and Mexico indicate about lifestyles and disease, more broadly?

• 9. How are education, wealth/income, and health related? Apart from the statistics can you imagine a concrete example, in narrative form?

• 10. If race in life plays out in comparatively disadvantaged ways for US nonwhites, what can individuals do about this? Give specific examples.

Glossary

Authority

The recognition of power.

Cultural capital

Class status of individuals based on their preferences and practices in consumer society.

Health-wealth gradient

Gradual increase in health as wealth and income increase.

Matriarchy

Family and social structure in which women have the most power and resources, as well as resources and wealth.

Patriarchy

Family and social structure in which men have the most power and resources, as well as resources and wealth.

Power

The ability to do something, influence others, or make things happen.

Race-based medicine

Medicine developed and applied because of hereditary or physiological differences among racial groups.

Race-targeted medicine

Medicine developed for and applied to a specific racial group, based on disease rates within that group.

Racial climate

The degree and extent of hearts-and-minds racism on indi vidual-to-individual levels, in specific contexts.

Social status

A person’s position or rank in any given pecking order or hierarchy that has to do with how others view them.

Stratification

Sociological analysis of “how where we start in life affects where we end up.”