Sociology 3945: Outline--Week Four--

I. Life Happens

II. Race and Social Class: Census (http://www.census.gov/).

III Tables from Sernau relating to race and class: overview

IV. Video: "The Two Nations of Black America

V. Race and class

A. Race as a social construct: definition

UMD library DVD: "Race: the Power of an Illusion." See especially part III, which shows how the drastic differences in wealth between black and white have developed in the U.S. (Martin Luther King in "Two Nations" talking about the contrast between the treatment of white immigrants and freed black slaves.)

Massey and Ferguson: American Apartheid. The hypersegregation of the black community in America was created in the 20th century by white Americans.

B. The variability of racial definitions in the United States over time

New York Times describing the Jewish Lower East Side of New York City in the early 20th century: "This neighborhood, peopled almost entirely by the people who claim to have been driven out of Russia and Poland, is the eyesore of New York and perhaps the filthiest place on the western continent. It is impossible for a Christian to live there because he will be driven out, either by blows or by the stench. Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people. They cannot be lifted up to a higher plane because they do not want to be."

C. Theories of racialization and resistance to racialization. This is an area where conflict theories seem to predominate.

1. Remember Max Weber's concept of status groups.

a. Status groups involve restrictions on social relationships and therefore normally take the shape of a "community"(unlike social class).

b. Status distinctions may be mutual, with each group maintaining its honor and superiority, or may be transformed into caste distinctions, which is actually the most normal form taken by ethnic distinctions. A racialized society is the result.

c. As people and groups struggle to enhance their power and privilege, they engage in strategies of monopolization if they are at the top.Groups that have power often use racialization as a way to gain access to land, resources, or cheap labor. (Note: the internal colonialism theory that Sernau emphasizes is a variant of this approach)

1). The development of slavery in the United States

2). Getting Indian land

3). Insuring a supply of farmworkers

4). Maintaining a supply of cheap labor for railroad building, mining, factories.

d. In the United States, at the turn of the 20th century, one of the strategies of monopolization mixed race, class, and religion, as White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) found ways to maintain their dominance.

1) Core constitutive myth : that the American nation is composed only of white men and women (and Protestants at that)

"In this myth, the alternatives available to nonwhite and variously alien 'others' has been to whiten themselves or to be consigned to an animal-like underclass unfit to exercise the prerogatives of citizenship."Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America

2) Assignment (how others see us) and Identity (how we see ourselves)

e. Those at the bottom pursue strategies of inclusion. For many (but probably not all) stigmatized groups, the favored strategy, pursued by Irish, Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, and others, was to promote your group as part of the "white" majority. Some students of race in America suggest that Hispanics and Asian Americans may eventually be able to pursue this option, but probably not African Americans (why not?).

Intermarriage perhaps the ultimate test: At the end of the 19th century, less than 5% of American Jews married outside their group. By 2004, around 50%.