soc23 race and ethnicity

Part A assignemnt2
Legth: 250-350 words (please note word count at bottom)
Prompt
In the video that you watched (link in Module 2 Overview), anti-racist activist Tim Wise employs a number of very specific strategies to engage the attention and emotions of his audience. After viewing his talk, please respond to the following questions:

Who exactly is Wise’s target audience?
What strategies does he use to draw them in?
To what extent (and why?) do you think these strategies are effective (or less effective)?
What aspects of his practices as a speaker make him compelling (or not compelling)?
What specific points that he makes stick out to you?

Link: https:https://youtu.be/eNBUThZsAf8//youtu.be/eNBUThZsAf8
https://youtu.be/eNB
Part 2
Discussion 1
Length of original posts: 250-300 words; length of response posts: 125-175 words. Please include word count at bottom.
Prompt
In her now-famous essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,”
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feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh shows how the continuity of white supremacy is helped along by a “toolbox” of invisible privileges (unearned benefits) that white people mostly donâ€t see because they donâ€t have to. In some cases, people of color are keenly aware of their lack of access to these privileges; in others, they may have been exposed for so long to the dominant white supremacist paradigm that they may not be aware of the extent of the inequalities (this phenomenon is a key component of internalized racism and internalized colonization).
After reading the list, please select 3 items on the list that either surprised you (i.e., you had not given them a lot of thought before) OR that you were seriously unsurprised by (i.e., you have been repeatedly confronted with having or lacking this form of privilege). How has having/not having each of the privileges you selected either negatively or positively impacted your ability to navigate life? How do you think your own racial and/or ethnic identity contributed to what surprised or didnâ€t surprised you?
Part 3 Reading log1-2
QRSTUV Reading Log Chart Soc 23 for first log
Blank QRSTUV Reading Log Chart
Pedagogy
The purpose of this assignment is to give you a structure for completing the readings in a thoughtful and timely fashion. Reading logs are required only for readings that are NOT in Race in America. Log entries can also be completed for any assigned films listed. Every two weeks, you will submit your log with three entries total — you can choose any three from the list at the bottom of each reading log prompt. Please note that you are still expected to complete all of the readings, even the ones you do not opt to use for your log.
You will find this assignment to be not terribly time consuming if you complete your logs as you are going along; if you wait until the last minute, it will be quite a lot of work.
Logs will be graded on effort and completion: clear evidence of having meaningfully engaged with the assignment will earn you 80-100%; incomplete or inadequate work with some effort still in evidence will earn you 50-70%; low quality or missing work will earn you 0-40%, depending on the level of completion. If you are not earning scores you are happy with and are not sure why, please check in with me to find out my specific recommendations for improvement.
You must use the chart provided above. We have an enormous class and this helps me to more quickly identify whether you have hit the main points of the exercise. For the first week, I have filled out both instructions and the first reading (Golash-Boza) for you. You do not need to redo the Golash-Boza – it is a free gift
To add a line in a Word chart, click on the “Tables” menu, then “Insert,” then “Rows Below.” Please begin a fresh chart for each bi-weekly submission (I will always provide a link to the empty chart).
Required Readings for Reading Log Modules 1 and 2 (all are from BBW unless noted)
For this week, you’ll complete a log entry for the three bottom readings since I have already completed the first one for you as an example.

Golash-Boza (no need to redo, but please read carefully as an example of how to complete the log)
Bonilla-Silva
Mueller et al.
Hannon et al.

Required reading
Module 1 – Welcome to the Course – The Centrality of Race and Ethnicity to the Social World

Hi everyone!
Welcome to Sociology 23: Race and Ethnic Relations. My name is Megan, and Iâ€ll be your instructor for the next ten weeks as we explore sociological theories of gender and look at how our lives are informed by the social construction that we call “race” – and how it, along with ethnicity, produce and reproduce social inequality. In this lecture, Iâ€m going to start by introducing a few key ideas about sociology in general. These ideas arenâ€t so much about race and ethnicity as they are about how we think about things from a sociological perspective, and theyâ€re an important part of setting the context for this course, especially if you have not yet taken an Introduction to Sociology course.
In order to proceed with our discussions for this class, we need to start with a shared understanding of what race is and what race is not. As you will learn in your readings for this week, there is no biological basis for the notion of race. Percentage-wise, there are more within-group genetic variations (e.g., genetic variations between people of say, Australian aborigine origin) than there are genetic variations between groups (e.g., between a given person in Bogota and a given person in Denmark).
So we are operating under the sociological understanding that race is a social construction – that is, race has social meaning, but no biological meaning. Despite having no meaningful biological significance, however, it has very real social consequences. In this sense, itâ€s a perfect example of the Thomas Theorem, which essentially says, “if people define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences.”
If people define race as real – and itâ€s clear that they do – then race, and its perceived differences, are real in their consequences. We don’t have to search very hard to see the consequences of racial “difference.”

Theories and paradigms: the stuff that makes up Sociology

Now for the general Sociology stuff.
First off, I want to extend an invitation to you. Hereâ€s the invitation: throw yourself wholeheartedly into the ideas presented in this course! Sociology, like all social and natural sciences, consists of a set of theories. A theory is an idea about how the world works, or about how things could or should be done. Most physicists subscribe to the Theory of Relativity, for example, and in the late 19th Century, the practice of medicine was transformed by Germ Theory, which led to physicians and nurses washing their hands between patient contacts (something we now take very much for granted as something “obvious”!). In the social sciences, theories about how things could or should be done can include ideas about right/wrong or moral/immoral, for example.
Like any idea, sociological theories are ideas about how the social world works and what should be done to change it. The main difference between a sociological theory and the theories my crazy uncle goes off on at Thanksgiving (awkward!) are that sociological theories are grounded in scientific research. They are not “common knowledge” or “popular wisdom,” any more than the theory of relativity is just an unscientific pet theory of a group of bored physicists. Sociology is the *scientific* study of human social groups. That’s what makes it different and that’s what gives it such potential to alter the world in positive ways.
You may encounter some theories in this class that you find upsetting, or that you think are just plain wrong. By contrast, you may also encounter some theories that you find deeply gratifying, and that seem to explain some aspect of your own experience that you never had words for before. In either case, I invite you to remember this image:

Theory is like a shoe. Either it fits or it doesnâ€t. If it fits, and you want to keep it because it helps you explain something, great. If it doesnâ€t work for you, throw it out. My invitation is for you to put a strong effort into trying on each theoretical “shoe” that I (or the readings) throw out at you in this course. If, at the end of the course, you want to jettison one or all of them, you can certainly do that. I just ask that you make a good faith effort to work with them during the course.
One of our goals in examining theory is to question our paradigms. Itâ€s worth stopping for a moment to review what we mean by paradigm. A paradigm is a way of thinking or seeing something that has a real effect on our attitudes or actions. One of the easiest ways to think about paradigms is to think about how long human beings perceived the world as flat. If you didnâ€t know better, it kind of makes sense to think the world is flat, right? It looks flat, it seems flat…if it quacks like a duck, we tend to believe itâ€s probably a duck (or a flat earth).
Human beings saw the earth as flat until we learned to think in new ways – for example, with mathematics, physics, and astronomy. But this was a process that took tens of thousands of years, and in the meantime, we operated as if the world were flat, even planning ocean navigation around avoiding the inevitable fall off the edge. In a very real way, the world might as well have actually been flat since our reality was constructed around it being so.
We can see paradigm shifts in our own time as well, and some of them are progressing quite rapidly. A great example of this is with social movements. Until 1973, homosexuality was still listed as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the reference book that mental health professionals use to label mental health conditions. So at that time, everyone “knew” that queer women and men were mentally ill. They were pathologized – made out to be diseased. Many states had laws against homosexual sex (even consensual!) and gay men and lesbians could not adopt children. I doubt anyone in this class is unaware of how rapidly the movement to ensure equal rights for queer people has progressed. It is one of the fastest-moving social movements of the modern age. Nobody thinks of being gay as a mental illness today. Thatâ€s a paradigm shift.

Why is the study of race and ethnicity so important?

Race and ethnic relations is one of the most heavily studied and talked-about topics in Sociology. The reasons for this arenâ€t difficult to surmise. If you look around you, itâ€s obvious that the society we live in – and most societies with which we are familiar – is pretty unequal. Some people have more money than others, some people have more social prestige than others, some people seem to get better jobs and go to better schools than other people, and some people are treated with more respect and deference than others.
These types of social inequalities permeate our society at every level. For example, white people outnumber people of color by quite a lot in higher-prestige occupations like medicine, law, and…academia (that means being a college professor and university researcher). In the media, we are bombarded constantly with images that reinforce derogatory and destructive stereotypes of different racial at ethnic groups. Men of color are incarcerated for drug offenses at a disproportionate rate that no rational person could attribute to coincidence or race-neutral policies after considering the decidedly non-race-neutral ways that the system operates.
I will be making two central arguments in this course. The first is that we do not live in a post-racial society – and indeed, that covert racism has the potential to be more insidious than overt racism. Second, I will argue that society, as a whole, benefits from the presence of more (rather than less) equality – even taking into consideration those who benefit from the current system of white supremacy. I invite you to try on these two theoretical shoes for the next ten weeks, even if they seem counterintuitive to you now. If we are going to do something as a society to address the consequences of racism and ethnocentrism (the privileging of oneâ€s own ethnic group or perspective over othersâ€) we have to acknowledge the degree to which a social construction like race can have power.

Module2
Module 2 Written Lecture
Getting on the same page: vocabulary for talking about race
I hope that our readings earlier this week gave you a sense of why the study of race is such a central part of sociological inquiry, and in particular, why social constructions of all persuasions – race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, etc. – are such a big deal in understanding Sociologyâ€s underlying concern for struggling toward justice and equality.
In this module, we begin to explore some key foundational concepts in the study of race and ethnic relations. Our readings ask questions like, “What is racism?” and “What does racism look like in the real world?” Letâ€s begin this lecture by reviewing some important vocabulary.
First things first: what is race, and what is the difference between race and ethnicity?
You may have noticed that itâ€s hard to have a coherent conversation about race out in the world because everyone seems to be working off a slightly different definition. A working definition for race in Sociology would go something this: race is a hierarchical classification system based on arbitrary physical differences.
Letâ€s break that definition down for a moment. Race is a hierarchical system in the sense that people get afforded greater or lesser social privilege based on where they get classified in the system. The system is based on arbitrary physical differences in the sense that there is nothing inherently meaningful about the tiny number of body parts about which we have created a sense of shared social meaning.
Typically, when we are trying to classify someone according to race, we are using characteristics like skin color, hair color and texture, and facial features. How come we donâ€t use kneecaps, or knuckle wrinkles, or belly buttons? Facial features and skin color have a certain convenience factor – theyâ€re easy to see. But that does not make them inherently meaningful. We made the meaning up; it is socially constructed.
As crazy as it seems, the fact that body parts have no inherent meaning is basically irrelevant. Recall last week in lecture when I talked about the Thomas Theorem: if people describe their situation as real, it is real in its consequences. If we describe physical differences as having real meaning, that meaning becomes real in its consequences.
It doesnâ€t matter that there is no inherent difference between humans with one skin color and humans with a different skin color. Because we operate as if that difference is real – because we give it meaning, in other words – it becomes real in its consequences. We treat some people better or worse than we treat other people, and the people we treat worse experience suffering as a result.
This is Point #1: Race (and racial “differences”) is a made-up story that nonetheless has powerful effects in peopleâ€s lives.
Now for ethnicity.
The simplest way of thinking about ethnicity is as a shared set of cultural practices. It could include things like language, beliefs, values, national identity, food practices, rituals, dress, body modifications, religion, etc.
Ethnicity can, in a very real sense, be hidden. Consider the following thought exercise: imagine that you were in a room with 100 people wearing identical simple hospital gowns. All of them had shaved heads and no one was talking. Would you easily be able to assess their ethnicity? Probably not – because ethnic identity is something that one must communicate to others (either verbally or through practices like dress and hairstyle).
In this same scenario, though, you would still automatically categorize the other people according to the version of racial categorization that you were brought up in. The categorization system is absolutely not the same everywhere (another way that we can see how made up it is!). People in Brazil learn a system that is much more nuanced than the system in the United States, and if you didnâ€t grow up there, you would not categorize people accurately in accordance with that system. All societies are similar. Wherever you grew up, you learned how to make racial categorizations as a child. Itâ€s automatic, whether or not you want to participate in it.
This brings us to Point #2: we have some choice about how people interpret our ethnicity, but we have virtually no choice in how they categorize us in terms of race. This is one of the reasons why race – as an imaginary, made-up story – has such real consequences in peopleâ€s lives. For the most part, you cannot do much to control others†perception of you.
Now for racism. Before you read any further than this sentence, stop for a moment and think about your own personal definition of racism. If you are like most people, you may find that itâ€s hard to put into words. Is it discrimination? Prejudice? Being mean to people because of their skin color? Things we say or do? Seriously – what is racism, anyway?
You can actually raise the same question about any “ism.” And for the purposes of this class, Iâ€d like you to think about “isms” in the larger context of power, and specifically, in the context of systems of power, hierarchy, and domination. Systems like these allow some people to maintain more social, financial, and political power while preventing others from accessing such power.
Itâ€s particularly important to understand these inequalities as systems, because it helps explain why societal racism (and all “isms”) arenâ€t the result of a single personâ€s behavior, nor can they be addressed or fixed by a single person. So placing racism within such notions of power and hierarchy, we can define it something like this: racism is a system of power and domination that reinforces white privilege. In a system of white privilege, people who are white tend to enjoy more social, economic, and political power than people who are not white.
How do racism and ethnocentrism operate in the social world?
There are many different ways that racism manifests in the social world. One of these ways is through prejudice, or pre-judgments that people make about other people based on certain characteristics such as skin color, appearance, or belonging to a particular ethnic group. By definition, prejudice removes peopleâ€s individuality because it assumes that a single person can be a valid representative of a group. Prejudice relies heavily on stereotyping, or oversimplified beliefs about groups of people, eg., “women are bad drivers” or “all gay men love musical theater.” Stereotypes, like prejudice, de-individualize human beings and turn them into two-dimensional caricatures.
People often excuse their use of stereotyping by insisting that the stereotypes are based in reality…therefore, theyâ€re at least partially true and excusable for that reason. But what doesnâ€t get acknowledged in these instances is the degree to which the situations that force stereotypes are themselves the result of structural inequalities. We canâ€t see these structural inequalities unless we keep our Sociology glasses on…unless, as it were, we are constantly striving to use our Sociological Imaginations
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.
A perfect example is the stereotype of South Asian people (typically men) as owners of convenience stores or taxi drivers. While a large number of South Asian people may do those jobs in some areas, the stereotype suggests that their prevalence is due to some inherent quality on the part of South Asian men that makes them “suited” to those jobs and not to other (maybe “better”) jobs. What it does not include, however, is the analysis of occupational networks – exhaustively documented by labor sociologists, historians, and demographers – that funnels people into occupations and industries in which they know other people.
Most new immigrants end up in jobs that previously-arrived family members and friends help them to get…in much the same way that members of the wealthy elite benefit from networks that position them for high-power jobs. Understanding the root cause for these “job queues” is a fundamental goal of Sociology, as well as a way to understand the formation of stereotypes from a sociological perspective.
Distinct from prejudice and stereotyping – which are both mental processes – is discrimination, or treating people differently based on their perceived membership in a racial or ethnic category. The easiest way to think about the difference between prejudice and stereotyping on the one hand, and discrimination on the other, is that the former are thoughts, while discrimination is the result of taking action based on those thoughts. Discrimination, in other words, is the behavior.
Is it possible to be colorblind? What is colorblind racism?
There are both overt (open and obvious) and covert (hidden and subtle) forms of discrimination. Overt discrimination is far less common than it used to be, and it is very easy to recognize because the person discriminating does not attempt to hide it. Examples of overt discrimination include things like posting signs (“Irish need not apply,” common in early 20th Century America), or telling a potential home-buyer to look elsewhere because “this is a whites-only neighborhood.”
If youâ€re a little taken aback by those examples, there is a good reason for it: we simply donâ€t see much overt racism anymore. It isnâ€t cool and it hasnâ€t been since the Civil Rights movement. On the increasingly rare occasions that a public figure says something overtly racist (say, on live TV or on their Twitter feed), they are quickly castigated in a very public way. By and large, though, overtly racist comments and behaviors are no longer acceptable in mainstream society.
But…and this is a big “but”….racism is very much alive and well, as youâ€ve learned through the many different perspectives you can find in your readings for this week. Our society exhibits deep inequalities based on race, and it is crystal clear that race and ethnicity are significant predictors of financial, political, and social success in the United States (donâ€t believe me? Start by looking up how many people of color occupy seats in the U.S. Senate or are state governors…then look up how many of them can be found in the CEO spot at Fortune 500 companies). And yet, all of that overt discrimination that was so common prior to the Civil Rights movement seems to have gone away. So whatâ€s up?
Whatâ€s up is covert racism, or in sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silvaâ€s terms, color-blind racism. It is racism that is masquerading as race neutrality, as the denial of the continued existence of racial inequality under the pretense that “racism is over.” The idea that we live in a post-racial world is not only pure fallacy – again, youâ€ll see this explained from multiple angles in your readings this week – but much more insidious than overt racism because it is harder to see.
Aside from dealing with whatever hesitation you might have to get into active confrontations with people, it really isnâ€t too difficult to call out overt racism because it is in your face. Covert racism – color-blind racism – hides behind a very pleasant and ostensibly innocent story, like “Itâ€s over” and “People just need to get over what happened in the past and move on with their lives.” You can deal with what you can see, but itâ€s harder to deal with what you canâ€t (or wonâ€t) see.
Color-blind racism supports the idea of a meritocracy, or a world in which people are rewarded on the basis of merit, skill, deserving, etc. This idea comes to us originally from another one of the founders of modern Sociology, Emile Durkheim, who was a proponent of doing away with familial inheritance. At the time he was writing about that, it was a very radical notion. And while his idea is an interesting one (at least it would start people on relatively equal footing in terms of wealth), it didnâ€t account at all for the other forms of social inequality that allow some people to move ahead while others fall behind.
Color-blind racism reproduces the same blind spots by assuming that an equal playing field is possible through strictly legislative means…in other words, if we outlaw discrimination legally, discrimination will no longer exist. As Michelle Alexander will demonstrate to us in no uncertain terms when we read The New Jim Crow later in the course, nothing could be further from the truth.
What does it mean to have privilege?
The system of racial control in which we now live allows some people to continue enjoying unearned privilege while others are marginalized. Because it is a system, we donâ€t have to actively discriminate against people in order to be complicit in the maintenance of the system. All we have to do, if we have the luxury of being in the dominant group, is nothing.
You can think of racism as a moving sidewalk of sorts. If you walk forward on the moving sidewalk, you are actively engaging in racist behaviors and are causing the system to grow or move more quickly. If you walk backward, you are working actively against it. But if you just stand still and enjoy what privileges you can while taking no action against it, you are part of what enables that system of hierarchy and power to continue. “Race neutrality” is no more real than “post-race society.”
In her now-famous essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,”
(链接到外部网ç«ã€‚)
feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh shows how the continuity of white supremacy is helped along by a “toolbox” of invisible privileges (unearned benefits) that white people mostly donâ€t see because they donâ€t have to. In some cases, people of color are keenly aware of their lack of access to these privileges; in others, they may have been exposed for so long to the dominant white supremacist paradigm that they may not be aware of the extent of the inequalities (this phenomenon is a key component of internalized racism and internalized colonization, which weâ€ll explore more later).
After reading the list, how many of these privileges were obvious to you? How many had you not considered before? How do you think your own racial or ethnic identity contributed to what surprised or didnâ€t surprised you?
Different levels of racism: individual vs. institutional
The final pair of terms that I want to introduce you to this week is individual vs. institutional racism. Individual racism is the sort of racism that most of us are accustomed to thinking about when we hear the word “racism”: individual people refusing to rent their property to non-white renters, individual people using racial epithets, individual people committing racially motivated hate crimes.
The focus of this class, though, is primarily institutional racism. An institution is a stable cluster of norms, values, roles, and practices that all align in the pursuit of a common goal, such as government, education, the housing market, etc. Institutional racism comprises the ways in which institutional practices lead to disparate racial outcomes.
Example: the criminal justice system is a social institution that disproportionately incarcerates people of color for crimes that we know are committed in equal numbers by both nonwhites and whites. There is nothing in criminal law that says “________ is only a crime when committed by a person of color,” and yet the outcome, as evidenced by the overrepresentation of people of color in prisons and jails, is clearly not race-neutral. Understanding how these processes produce unequal outcomes means unpacking the institutional racism that underpins them.
As you move through the readings for this week, look for examples around you of how color-blindness perpetuates racism in your community and in the institutions – educational, legal, medical, etc. – that make up the fabric of your life.
Part 4 Reading log3-4
Blank QRSTUV Reading Log Chart
Pedagogy
The purpose of this assignment is to give you a structure for completing the readings in a thoughtful and timely fashion. Reading logs are required only for readings that are NOT in Race in America. Log entries can also be completed for any assigned films listed. Every two weeks, you will submit your log with three entries total — you can choose any three from the list at the bottom of each reading log prompt. Please note that you are still expected to complete all of the readings, even the ones you do not opt to use for your log.
You will find this assignment to be not terribly time consuming if you complete your logs as you are going along; if you wait until the last minute, it will be quite a lot of work.
Logs will be graded on effort and completion: clear evidence of having meaningfully engaged with the assignment will earn you 80-100%; incomplete or inadequate work with some effort still in evidence will earn you 50-70%; low quality or missing work will earn you 0-40%, depending on the level of completion. If you are not earning scores you are happy with and are not sure why, please check in with me to find out my specific recommendations for improvement.
You must use the chart provided above. To add a line in a Word chart, click on the “Tables” menu, then “Insert,” then “Rows Below.” Please begin a fresh chart for each bi-weekly subm
 
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