Social science organizations including the American Association of Anthropologists, the American Sociological Association, and the American Psychological Association have all taken an official position rejecting the biological explanations of race. Over time, the typology of race that developed based on phenotype or physical characteristics has fallen into disuse in social and behavioral sciences (although examining melanin is still important in natural sciences), and the social construction of race has become the primary lens through which sociologists examine race. Race is a socially constructed category that produces real effects on the actors who are racialized ^[2] and refers to physical differences that a particular society considers significant, such as skin color. In other words, a physical marker such as skin color, eye shape, hair type, or cheekbone shape, when paired with some other element(s) of social significance, could become a social cue for inclusion or exclusion in a certain group.

Using the sociological imagination, we can delve into how racial categories were arbitrarily assigned, based on pseudoscience, and subsequently used to justify racist practices (Omi and Winant, 1994; Graves, 2003). Elliot’s classroom exercise is not too far from what happened in American history. Science and religion were both used to create and justify racial categories and racist ideologies. The “One Drop Rule,” which states that someone is black if they have “one drop” of African blood is uniquely American (no other country defines race in this way) and a way to illustrate the social construction of race. For example, many people who appeared white and could “pass” as such in a social setting, could not pass in a legal sense because of the rule of hypo-descent, which meant that racially mixed people were automatically assigned the minority group status. There were strict prohibitions against miscegenation (or mixed offspring) in spite of centuries of white men raping enslaved black women. During slavery, this allowed intergenerational slavery to persist irrespective of skin color, and after slavery was abolished, segregationist Jim Crow laws were applied to many mixed-race Americans.

The social construction of race is reflected in the way names for racial categories change over time. It’s worth noting that race, in this sense, is also a system of labeling that provides a source of identity; specific labels fall in and out of favor during different social eras. For example, the category “negroid,” popular in the nineteenth century, evolved into the term “negro” by the 1960s, and then this term fell from use and was replaced with “African American.” This latter term was intended to celebrate the multiple identities that a black person might hold, but the word choice is a poor one, as it lumps together a large variety of ethnic groups regardless of geographical origin.

For example, Jamaicans, Haitians, and other dark skinned Caribbean groups living in the U.S. are Black but they are not African American. Calling any person with dark skin African American highlights the importance of language while at the same time illustrating the challenges of racial categorization. We do not refer to Lupita Nyong’o (Nakia in Black Panther 2018), who has Kenyan parents but was born in Mexico City and has dual citizenship in Kenya and Mexico, as African American. The U.S. Census includes “Black” or “African American” as a racial category to include “any person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.”^[3]. 

If race is a social construction, doesn’t collecting information on artificial racial categories through the U.S. Census perpetuate the notion of biologically distinct racial categories? Why do we continue to categorize Americans based on race? Collecting information on race informs policy decisions related to civil rights, including voting and redistricting procedures at the state level; furthermore, “race data also are used to promote equal employment opportunities and to assess racial disparities in health and environmental risks” (U.S. Census, 2018). 

What is Ethnicity?

Ethnicity is a term that describes shared culture—the practices, values, and beliefs of a group. This culture might include shared language, religion, and traditions, among other commonalities and is often based on country of origin.

The largest ethnic group in the United States, Latinos or Hispanics, are more likely to identify by their country of origin (i.e., Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican) than by an overarching ethnicity like “Latino” or “Hispanic.” If you recall, language is one of the most important components of culture, and Spanish unifies many different ethnic groups within the Latino category. However, distinctive cultural practices and very different histories result in unique ethnic identities and strong ties to countries of origin that may warrant a hyphenated identity (i.e., Mexican-American, Cuban-American) or a new term altogether such as Nuyorican (New Yorker and Puerto Rican). These examples illustrate the complexity and overlap of these identifying terms.

Individuals may be identified or self-identify with ethnicities in complex, even contradictory, ways. For example, ethnic groups such as Irish, Italian American, Russian, Jewish, and Serbian might all be groups whose members are predominantly included in the “white” racial category. Depending on when they immigrated to the United States, many of these ethnic whites were treated as minority groups and were not afforded the same status as the White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs), who were typically the privileged whites throughout American history. For example, Irish immigrants were “white” in appearance and spoke English, but they were also predominantly Catholic, and made this made them suspect in terms of their prospective allegiance to the Pope in preference to the United States government. Italian immigrants were often olive-skinned, Catholic, and did not speak English, all of which made them seem even more foreign and, perhaps, unassimilable.

If we consider the British or the French as ethnicities with a common culture and geographic boundary, we see many ethnic groups within each country. Both countries have struggled with national identity as globalization and immigration, often originating in formerly colonized nations, change their demographics. For example, France won the 2018 World Cup with the help of star player Kylian Mbappe, a teenager born in Paris, whose father is from Cameroon and whose mother is Algerian.

Review the ideas about race and ethnicity in the following Khan Academy video:

What are Minority Groups?

Sociologist Louis Wirth (1945) defined a minority group as “any group of people who, because of their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from the others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment, and who therefore regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination.” According to Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris (1958), a minority group is distinguished by five characteristics:

1. unequal treatment and less power over their lives
2. distinguishing physical or cultural traits like skin color or language
3. involuntary membership in the group
4. awareness of subordination
5. high rate of in-group marriage

Additional examples of minority groups might include the LGBTQ+ community, religious practitioners whose faith is not widely practiced where they live, and people with disabilities.

Subordinate group can be used interchangeably with the term minority, while the term dominant group is often substituted for the group that’s in the majority. These definitions correlate to the concept that the dominant group is that which holds the most power in a given society, while subordinate groups are those who lack power by comparison.

When we hear the word “minority” we often think of a group with a smaller number of members than the dominant group, but in some cases the “minority” is not a numerical minority. Women have been treated as a minority group even though they outnumber men in the U.S. What differentiates a minority group is that its members are disadvantaged in some way by the dominant group, such as when women are paid less than men for the same job even though they may have similar qualifications and levels of experience as their male co-workers. Consider apartheid in South Africa, in which a numerical majority (the black inhabitants of the country) were exploited and oppressed by the politically dominant white minority.

In the contemporary United States, the elderly might be considered a minority group due to a diminished status that results from popular prejudice and discrimination against them. Ten percent of nursing home staff admitted to physically abusing an elderly person in the past year, and 40 percent admitted to committing psychological abuse (World Health Organization, 2011).

Scapegoat theory, developed initially from psychologist John Dollard’s (1939) Frustration-Aggression theory, suggests that the dominant group will displace its unfocused aggression onto a subordinate group. History has shown us many examples of the scapegoating of a subordinate group. An example from the last century is the way Adolf Hitler was able to blame the Jewish population for Germany’s social and economic problems. In the United States, recent immigrants have frequently been the scapegoat for the nation’s—or an individual’s—woes. Many states have enacted laws to disenfranchise immigrants; these laws are popular because they let the dominant group scapegoat a subordinate group.

Prejudice and Racism

Prejudice refers to the beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes someone holds about a group. A prejudice is not based on experience. Instead, it is a prejudgment, originating outside actual experience.