Race and Ethnicity

1
Race and Ethnicity
2
Race

• Prior to the 18th century, race was an uncommon
  idea in Western society but it became enormously
  popular in scientific circles in the 19th century
  and underwent many changes.
• At present, the idea of race has been discarded
  by most of the scientific community because as a
  scientific concept it did not work very well,
  particularly as a device for classifying people.
  But it worked too well as a justification for
  persecuting and exterminating millions of people
  in this century.

3
Definition

• Race is not a valid scientific concept, but that
  it is a folk taxonomy-popular way of naming or
  classifying things in terms of our perceived
  differences.
• These are an important part of our understanding
  of the world, and form the basis of our
  judgments.
• A near "universal" is that every society refers
  to itself as "the humans" or "the people" or some
  variant, and outsiders are known as "others".

4
History of the Race Concept

• Anthro has elaborated as well as condemned racial
  thinking, they used it at one time to look at
  human variation (Physical), but others denounced
  it.
• Great Chain of Being (taken from Early Greek
  Philosophers- 5th and 6th centuries)
• Age of Exploration-15th and 16th centuries.
• Classification systems
• Linnaeus-binomial nomenclature that we know
  today.
• Johann Blumenbach (early 19th c)- German
  physician who proposed racial classifications
  based on geography and skin color black, brown,
  red, white, yellow.
• Gloddon and Nott (mid 19th c)-concept of
  Polygenism-that races were the result of
  different creation events.
• Darwin (mid 19th c)-Evolutionary theory showed
  the changing and antiquity of the earth-mechanism
  of change was natural selection. Should have been
  the end of racism.
• Summary-The history of the race concept is
  pre-Darwinian, should have ended but had taken
  hold in churches and people like to feel
  justified in their actions so it stuck.

5
What is race?

• the distinction that an ethnic group has a
  supposed biological basis.
• breeding populations that differ from other
  people in their frequency of one or more gene
  traits.

6
Problems with these definitions

• members of a breeding population sometimes breed
  outside the group.
• which physical or genetic traits do you look at?
  Not all traits vary the same.
• Physical traits used in racial classifications
  are continuous
• i.e. vary on a curve with no clear delineations
• Hair color, eye color, skin color, body shape

7
So if not race, what?

• Alternate to race-the cline, a biological term
  for variation in people.
• Cline-regular variation in a trait over
  geographic space and is maintained by natural
  selection.
• Skin color is not so much a racial trait as a
  clinal trait, varies according to amount of solar
  radiation.
• Solar radiation-dark skin to avoid too much
  radiation (equatorial populations), light skin to
  get as much solar radiation as possible (northern
  populations).
• This has no relationship to how smart people are,
  or how fast or slow or anything.
• If we think in differences in people as clinal
  (ever-changing) rather than racial (unchanging)
  then we might have a chance at promoting
  understanding between people.

8
Clinal Distribution of Blood Type
Clinal distribution of the B blood allele in
Europe
9
Ethnicity

• Ethnic groups are formed around virtually the
  same features as cultures common beliefs,
  values, customs, history, and the like.
• Ethnicity entails identification with a given
  ethnic group, but it also involves the
  maintenance of a distinction from other groups.

10
Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities

• Nation-States Defined.
• Nation and nation-state now refer to an
  autonomous, centrally organized political entity.
• Ethnic groups are not necessarily so formally
  politically organized.
• The majority of all nation-states have more than
  one ethnic group in their constituent
  populations, and the multi-ethnicity of all
  countries is increasing.

11
Nationalities and Imagined Communities

• Nationalities are ethnic groups that aspire to
  autonomous statehood (regardless of their
  political history).
• The term imagined communities, coined by
  Benedict Anderson, has been used to describe
  nationalities, since most of their member
  population feel a bond with each other in the
  absence of any real acquaintance.
• Colonialism refers to the political, social,
  economic, and cultural domination of a territory
  and its people by a foreign power for an extended
  period of time.

12
Peaceful Coexistence

• Assimilation.
• Assimilation occurs when a minority group adopts
  the patterns and norms of a more powerful
  culture, as when a migrant ethnic group conforms
  itself to its host culture.
• Assimilation is not uniform it may be forced or
  relatively benign depending on historical
  particularities.
• Brazil (as opposed to the United States and
  Canada) is cited as a highly assimilative society
  wherein ethnic neighborhoods are virtually
  unknown.
• The Plural Society.
• Plural society refers to a multiethnic
  nation-state wherein the subgroups do not
  assimilate but remain essentially distinct in
  (relatively) stable coexistence.
• Barth defines plural society as a society
  combining ethnic contrasts and the economic
  interdependence of the ethnic groups.

13
Ethnic Nationalism

• The breakup of Yugoslavia along ethnic lines in
  the early 1 990s is outlined to provide an
  example of the interplay between history, ethnic
  identity, and nationalism.
• Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Slavs are divided into
  various groups based on religion, culture, and
  political and military history (particularly,
  Serb retaliation for actions taken against them
  by Croats during the Second World War).
• The (largely) Serbian practice of ethnic
  cleansing, the policy of killing or driving out
  non-Serbs, is described.
• The highly blended nature of former Yugoslav
  society reduced the possibility for ecological
  specialization and the concomitant economic
  interdependence that supports peaceful pluralism.

14
The word "Balkan" comes from Turkish it means
mountain and has been applied to the area since
the early 19th century. The Ottoman Turks invaded
the region at the end of the 14th century and the
Turkish rule lasted for some 500 years. The
Austro-Hungarian empire grew stronger in the
north and loosened the grip of the Turks at the
end of the 17th century. A major redefinition of
the Balkan political boundaries was enacted by
the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. Serbia, Montenegro
and Romania became independent, and the
principality of Bulgaria was created. Slovenia,
Croatia stayed under the rule of Austria-Hungary
which also took control of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
15
After Austria-Hungary was defeated in World War
I, the Versailles peace treaties defined a new
pattern of state boundaries in the Balkans. The
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was
founded. In 1929 King Alexander I changed the
name of the state to Yugoslavia - land of the
southern Slavs. The Serbs still dominated the
government, which combined with an authoritarian
monarchy gave rise to an anti-Serb movement. Many
Croats in particular would have preferred
independence and resentment led to Alexander's
violent death in 1934.
16
Socialist Yugoslavia was declared by Marshall
Tito in 1945. The communists were able to deal
with national aspirations by creating a
federation of six nominally equal republics -
Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia. In Serbia the
two provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina were given
autonomous status. Communist rule restored
stability and good relations with the west
ensured a steady stream of loans. Later,
however, national and ethnic tensions increased
due to unequal development and a growing burden
of debt. When Tito died in 1980 many expected the
federation to break up but Yugoslavia was to
survive for another ten years.
17
BY 1992 the Yugoslav Federation was falling
apart. Nationalism had once again replaced
communism as the dominant force in the Balkans.
Slovenia and then Croatia were the first to break
away but only at the cost of renewed conflict
with Serbia. The war in Croatia led to hundreds
of thousands of refugees and re-awakened memories
of the brutality of the 1940s. By 1992 a
further conflict had broken out in Bosnia, which
had also declared independence. The Serbs who
lived there were determined to remain within
Yugoslavia and to help build a greater Serbia.
They received strong backing from extremist
groups in Belgrade. Muslims were driven from
their homes in carefully planned operations that
become known as 'ethnic cleansing'.
18
In 1998, nine years after the abolition of
Kosovo's autonomy, the Kosovo Liberation Army -
supported by the majority ethnic Albanians - came
out in open rebellion against Serbian rule. The
international community, while supporting greater
autonomy, opposed the Kosovar Albanians' demand
for independence. But international pressure grew
on Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, to
bring an end to the escalating violence in the
province. Threats of military action by the
West over the crisis culminated in the launching
of NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia in March
1999, the first attack on a sovereign European
country in the alliance's history. The strikes
focused primarily on military targets in Kosovo
and Serbia, but extended to a wide range of other
facilities, including bridges, oil refineries,
power supplies and communications.
19
Roots of Ethnic Conflict

• Prejudice and Discrimination.
• Prejudice is the devaluation of a given group
  based upon the assumed characteristics of that
  group (see the description of the first Rodney
  King beating trial).
• Discrimination is disproportionately harmful
  treatment of a group it may be dejure or
  defacto.
• Attitudinal discrimination is discrimination
  against a group based only upon its existence as
  a group.
• Genocide, the deliberate elimination of a group
  through mass murder, is the most extreme form of
  discrimination.
• Institutional discrimination is the formalized
  pursuance of discriminatory practices by a
  government or similar institution.

20
Multiculturalism

• Multiculturalism is the view of cultural
  diversity in a country as something good and
  desirable.
• This is opposed to assimilationism, which expects
  subordinate groups to take on the culture of the
  dominant group while abandoning their own.
• Basic aspects of multiculturalism at the
  government level are the official espousal of
  some degree of cultural relativism along with the
  promotion of distinct ethnic practices.
• A number of factors have caused the United States
  to move away from an assimilationist and toward a
  multicultural model.
• Large-scale migration has brought in substantial
  minorities in a time span too short for
  assimilation to take place.
• An ethnic consciousness may take root in reaction
  to consistent discrimination.
• Studies have demonstrated that closely maintained
  ethnic ties have been a successful strategy for
  recent immigrants.