How do you define race?
If you had to describe why you think you’re a member
of one race and someone else was a member of a
different one, you’d probably focus on appearances –
your skin, your hair, maybe even the
structures of your bodies and faces.
But most of the time, those physical criteria
mean different things, depending on the culture
you’re a part of.
An obvious example is skin color.
We use the words White and Black to describe
two races, but the distinction in skin color
between those races isn’t as clear cut.
A White person who’s spent the summer at
the beach might come home with brown skin,
but getting a tan doesn’t change their race.
And light-skinned Black people may have skin
that’s not all that darker than that tan.
Clearly, race is about more than just the
literal color of someone’s skin.
So let’s talk about race, and why it’s
a topic that goes more than skin deep.
[Theme Music]
Much like gender, race is a socially constructed
category.
In this case, it’s used to categorize people
who share biological traits that a society
thinks are important.
So, you might be wondering: how can race be both
a social construct and something based on biology?
Well, the key part of that definition of race
is the last part: what a society thinks is important.
Sure, skin color varies widely across regions
of the world.
But so does eye color, and we don’t consider people with
blue eyes a different race than people with brown eyes.
And while physical traits are often used to describe or
identify a race, they’re not always applied consistently.
Take for example, the so-called ‘one-drop’
rule in the United States,
where even the smallest amount of
African American ancestry is enough to classify
someone as Black rather than White.
The opposite, however, isn’t true – someone
with one Black parent and one White parent
is almost never considered white.
Plus people from different places or different
time periods have defined racial groups differently.
Nowadays, light skinned people of European descent
are typically considered `White’ in the United States.
It doesn’t matter whether your heritage
is British or Irish or Italian or Polish or
German – you’re just ‘White.’
But that wasn’t the case a century ago.
In the early 1900s, anyone who wasn’t a White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant was considered ‘ethnic’ –
so for example, if you were Italian or Irish,
you weren’t considered white.
Likewise, today, being Jewish is often seen
as an ethnicity in the United States.
But Europeans are more likely to think of
being Jewish as a race.
So, that raises the question: What’s the
difference between ethnicity and race?
Well, ethnicities are socially constructed categories
based on cultural traits that a society finds important,
rather than strictly biological traits.
Essentially, an ethnic group is a group that
has a shared cultural heritage.
Language, traditions, religion – these are
all types of culture that can determine your
ethnic background.
Two people of different races might share an ethnicity
– and conversely, two people of the same race might
be of totally different ethnicities.
Japanese and Vietnamese people are both considered
Asian, but they come from different cultural backgrounds.
In fact, a term that many people think refers
to race – `Hispanic’ – actually refers to ethnicity.
To explore this a little more, let’s go to the
Thought Bubble to talk about the differences between
the terms Hispanic, Latino, and Latin American.
The term “Hispanic” first appeared as
a racial category in the US Census in 1970,
as a way of describing those whose heritage
originated in a Spanish-speaking country.
Before then, the Census referred to those
people as Spanish-Americans –
even though tracing back their origins to Spain would
mean going way, way back for many of them.
And for others, it’d be totally inaccurate.
But in day-to-day conversation, most people
from Spanish-speaking backgrounds were usually
referred to by the country of their heritage,
like Mexican American or Cuban American, or
sometimes more broadly as ‘Latin American.’
This last term is also where we get the word
`Latino’ – and the de-gendered latinx.
It’s a shorter version of the Spanish word
‘latinoamericano,’
and it refers to someone whose heritage
originates from nations in the Americas
that are south of the United States,
including Mexico, all of South America,
and the Caribbean.
Now, not all Hispanics are Latino.
Being from Spain for example, makes you Hispanic
but not Latino – and not all Latinos are Hispanic.
Brazilians speak Portuguese, meaning that
they are not considered Hispanic.
But regardless of which term you’re using,
Hispanic or Latino, neither of these distinctions
are based on physical appearance.
Unlike race, which is based on observable,
physical traits, ethnicities aren’t.
And in fact, two people of the same ethnicity
can be entirely different races.
For example, both Cameron Diaz and Rosario
Dawson are Cuban Americans, which means they
are both Hispanic, but Cameron Diaz is white
and Rosario Dawson is Black.
Thanks Thought Bubble!
Though race is more commonly used by society
as a way to organize people and distribute power,
both race and ethnicity play a role in how people
are perceived and, therefore, the opportunities that
are available to them.
A person’s race influences a whole host of social
outcomes, from their education to their income to
their experiences with the criminal justice system.
But which races or ethnicities are advantaged
or disadvantaged depends on when and where
we’re talking about.
For example, in the United Kingdom, there’s
been a lot of unrest about immigration from
Eastern Europe, especially Poland.
Incidents of hostility and violence against
Polish immigrants have increased in the wake
of the UK’s exit from the European Union.
But while Eastern Europeans are
considered an ethnic minority in the UK,
people in the US are much more likely to think
of Eastern European immigrants as just White –
they’re not thought of as a minority.
And that’s because what constitutes a minority
is more complex than you might think.
Sociologists define a minority as any category of people,
who are distinguished by physical or cultural difference,
that a society sets apart and subordinates.
Now, notice that there are two important parts
of that definition:
First, minorities share a distinctive identity
based on physical or cultural traits.
Second, minorities occupy a lower status in
society and have less access to the levers
of societal power.
Notice how that definition doesn’t say anything
about the size of the group.
In sociology, a minority group’s relative
size isn’t important.
For example, women are considered a minority, even
though they make up about 51% of the United States.
And a group that’s a minority in terms of
size can still be a majority in terms of power.
South African apartheid is an example of this.
From 1948 to 1994, a white minority maintained
a system of racial segregation and discrimination
against Black South Africans.
Right now, non-Hispanic Whites are the majority
group in the United States in terms of sheer size,
making up 61% of the US population.
But that’s rapidly changing.
As of 2015, babies of color being born now
outnumber non-Hispanic white babies.
And five states are already minority-majority states:
California, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Hawaii.
How can a state or country be minority-majority?
Isn’t that, like, an oxymoron?
Well, for one thing, even if non-Hispanic
white Americans no longer make up more than
half the country,
they’ll likely remain a larger group than any
other single race.
But also, to be a minority in the sociological
sense of the word, a group must be in a position
of disadvantage.
And as we’ve discussed many times before,
non-Hispanic White Americans tend to have
higher incomes,
live in better neighborhoods, and are more likely
to have more prestigious jobs and better educations
than racial and ethnic minorities.
But before we can make comparisons between
different racial groups in the US, we should talk
about the races that make up the United States.
The US Census uses six different
categories of race when collecting data about
the demographics of the country.
White refers to anyone who reports their origins as
being from Europe, the Middle East, or Northern Africa.
So, Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Iranian,
Moroccan – they’re all ethnicities that go
under the heading of white.
Yes, you heard me right.
People of Middle Eastern descent are categorized
as White by the Census, even if they often aren’t
treated as if they’re white.
Why? Well, what’s now become known as ‘White’
originates from a term to refer to people of
Indo-European descent: the ‘Caucasian’ race.
The term Caucasian started as a reference to the
Caucus Mountains, which run through the modern day
countries of Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
Back when race was understood as a purely biological
phenomenon, everyone from Europe all the way down
to India was lumped into one ‘Caucasian’ group.
So yesterday’s ‘Caucasian’ contained most
of the people who count as today’s ‘white’,
but also captured groups that nowadays get
labelled as Asian, such as Indians or Pakistanis.
Now, many Hispanic Americans are also counted
as White in the Census.
‘Hispanic’ is considered an ethnicity, not a race,
for Census purposes, so in the 2010 Census,
52% of Hispanic Americans identified
themselves as white,
while 36.7% identified themselves as ‘some
other race,’ and smaller percentages identified
themselves as one of the other racial groups.
Black or African Americans are the second largest
racial group in the United States and are defined
as individuals with African heritage, including
those who are Afro-Caribbean.
Since many African Americans’ ancestors were
forcibly brought to the United States as slaves,
the countries that their ancestors
originated from are often unknown.
To this day, the remnants of slavery and the Southern
plantation systems can be seen in the geographic
distribution of Black Americans around the country.
Though many Black Americans moved to
Northern cities during the Great Migration
of the early 20th century,
most remained in the South, in a region that has come
to be known as the Black Belt of the United States.
The third racial category used in the Census
is ‘American Indian or Alaska Native,’
which refers to anyone whose origins are indigenous
to the contiguous United States and Alaska.
Though Native Americans numbered in the millions
when Europeans first arrived in the 15th century,
today, they control only 2% of the country’s
land area, make up just 0.2% of the US population,
and remain severely disadvantaged in terms
of access to education and income.
The fourth Census category for race, Asian,
refers to origins in Eastern Asia, Southeast Asia,
or the Indian subcontinent, including China, India,
Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
The largest subgroup of Asian Americans are
those of Chinese ancestry, who make up a little less
than ¼ of the total Asian American population.
The fifth Census category is Native Hawaiian
and Other Pacific Islander,
which refers to people whose origins are from
Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.
As I mentioned before, Hawaii is one of the states
where a minority race is the majority race for the state –
and in fact, it’s the only state that has
always been minority-majority.
The last Census category is just a catch-all
‘Some Other Race.’
You might remember that about a third of
Hispanic Americans fall into this group;
if a person lists a country of origin that doesn’t fit
one of the other categories, they get stuck in this group.
You might be thinking that these categories
don’t seem like the racial groups you typically think of.
And that’s ok!
In all likelihood, the way that the government
defines races will continue to change,
to incorporate our society’s changing notions
of race and ethnicity.
And something that should be clear from everything
we talked about today is that races aren’t fixed
immutable categories – they are defined by societies.
Today we learned the difference between races
and ethnicities.
We discussed how definitions of races and
ethnicities have changed over time and across places.
We also discussed the terms minority and minority-majority.
And we finished up by discussing how races
are defined in the United States.
Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C.
Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and it’s
made with the help of all of these nice people.
Our animation team is Thought Cafe and Crash
Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud.
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