RACE AND ETHNICITY

Race and Ethnicity

Race and Ethnicity

Introduction

Racism has manifested itself in myriad ways, such as Hitler's plan to exterminate Jews and glorify the “Aryan race” in Nazi Germany, tribal genocide in Africa, oppression of the Indians in the Americas, the “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Bosnia, Jim Crow laws in the United States, and the massacres of Chinese and Korean people by the Japanese Empire, to name only a few from a depressingly long list of examples (Steele, 2008).

Historians have traced back the origins of the term race to the sixteenth century when it was used as a general category similar to kind, type, sort, or breed. It was in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries that it came to refer to the social categories of American Indians, blacks, and whites, and to signify “a new ideology about human differences and a new way of structuring society that had not existed before in human history” (Smedley and Smedley 2005: 20).

Later in the nineteenth century, various thinkers, who were influenced by the theoretical advances in zoology and biology, used race to classify the varieties of human populations on grounds of racial descent and physical appearance. They also attempted to link racial attributes to moral and cultural traits of populations, while demonstrating the racial superiority of white groups. In addition, their attempts aimed at conferring scientific respectability on the ideology of race, which provided justification for the institution of slavery and rationalized the violence and harm that the European colonization of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Americas inflicted on the peoples of these continents (Sniderman, 2006).

Discussion

Within the racialization process of the United States, Blacks are at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, Whites are at the top, and other groups are in the political process of managing their positions away from Blacks and closer to Whites. Max Weber, who equated ethnic group identification to a group's belief in a shared historical origin and common ancestry, developed the historical sociological definition of ethnicity.

In his definition, the emphasis is on belief (Banton, 2006). An ethnic relationship is believed to be equivalent to a blood relationship among the members of the ethnic group; that is, members of an ethnic group believe they share a common ancestry with members of the same ethnicity. This definition of ethnicity has been broadened to include the belief that a shared culture can determine an ethnic identity. Looking at ethnic identity as a process of a shared culture makes ethnic identity a process of the present-day connections between members of an ethnic group. Specifically, it is the culture that they share today that helps to determine their shared ethnic group identity (Bereczkei, 2007).

However, even though cultural interpretations of ethnicity have grown in prominence, the belief in a common ancestral original history clearly distinguishes it from other sociocultural groups found in society, such as motorcycle riders, Goths, or even social class. Ethnicity may be less salient, but the meanings of ethnic identity are still important for members of the ...