Ethnicity and Related Forms of Race

Abstract

Ethnicity, including language, belongs to culture, race to biology. But ethnic groups have been treated as races and racial groups have ethnicities. US immigration has resulted in the racialization of different ethnic groups, as well as invention of the idea of ethnic groups. Despite the assimilation of European groups, Anglo-Americans remain dominant and we don’t know if Latinx, Asian, and Middle Eastern immigrants will assimilate, given views of them as “undocumented,” “foreign,” and “terrorist suspects.” Indigenous groups throughout the world continue to base their identities on geographical and ancestral ties. In Brazil, race is intertwined with socioeconomic class, while in India, caste is tied to occupation.

Discussion Questions

• 1. Why has ethnicity has been called an invention?

• 2. How has ethnic experience in the United States been like and unlike nonwhite racial experience?

• 3. In your own experience, how important is the dominance of WASP culture in twenty-first-century America?

• 4. What historical trends suggest that new immigrants will assimilate?

• 5. What trends will work against the assimilation of new immigrants?

• 6. In terms of the universal aspect of ideas of race, explain how indigenous self-descriptions by Umatillas and Australian Aboriginals are matters of identity (how they see themselves) rather than identification (how others see them).

• 7. Explain how DNA studies settled the race of Kennewick man. Would the Umatilla claim have been valid with different DNA results?

• 8. Are the Brazilian government’s methods to determine who qualifies for affirmative action racist? (Give reasons with reference to history or explain how this case is different.)

• 9. How does the history of US ethnic groups who came to be regarded as racially white compare with ideas of race in Brazil?

• 10. How is the Indian caste system like and unlike the US system of race?

Glossary

assimilation

—learning and adoption of the language and customs of the country to which a group immigrates.

caste

—a system that divides society into a hierarchy of hereditary groups based on occupation.

constructivist or instrumentalist

—view of ethnic groups as having characteristics resulting from social factors external to those groups.

diaspora

—scattered ethnic or racial group with a shared homeland or geographical origin.

ethnic enclaves

—neighborhoods where a distinct ethnic group predominates, in residence and small service businesses.

ethnic fractionalization

—formation of an ethnic group occurring when people are excluded or oppressed.

identification

—how a group and its members are described by nonmembers.

identity

—how a group and its members describe themselves.

invention of ethnicity

—view of ethnic groups as the result of a new kind of social technology that was prompted by historical events and imposed on people who would not otherwise have been ethnic groups or viewed as ethnic groups.

morphology

—form or shape of living things and relationships among structures and study of them.

patronage system

—political system in which election winners distribute appointments to those who organized their victories.

phenotype

—observable physical traits of living things, caused by interactions of genes with environments.

pogroms

—violent attacks on Jewish communities in Eastern Europe during the early twentieth century.

primordialist

—view of ethnic groups as having fixed biological traits or deeply historical cultural traits.

racialization

—psychological and social process of viewing members of a group as members of a racial group.

Yiddish

—a language spoken by Jews, based on Middle High German and other European languages, Hebrew, and Aramaic.