Racism, Sociology of - Harvard University

1 racism , Sociology ofMatthew Clair, Harvard University , Cambridge, MA, USAJ effrey S Denis,McMaster University , Hamilton, ON, Canada 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights article is a revision of the previous edition article by Van Den Berghe, volume 19, pp. 12720 12723, 2001, Elsevier Sociology of racism is the study of the relationship between racism , racial discrimination, and racial inequality. Whilepast scholarship emphasized overtly racist attitudes and policies, contemporary Sociology considers racism as individual- andgroup-level processes and structures that are implicated in the reproduction of racial inequality in diffuse and often subtleways. Although some social scientists decry this conceptual broadening, most agree that a multivalent approach to the studyof racism is at once socially important and analytically useful for understanding the persistence of racial inequality ina purportedly postracial root, racism is an ideology of racial domination (Wilson,1999: p.)

2 14) in which the presumed biological or culturalsuperiority of one or more racial groups is used to justify orprescribe the inferior treatment or social position(s) of otherracial groups. Through the process of racialization (see SectionRacism as a social Process), perceived patterns of physicaldifference such as skin color or eye shape are used todifferentiate groups of people, thereby constituting them as races ; racialization becomes racism when it involves thehierarchical and socially consequential valuation of is analytically distinct from racial discriminationand racial inequality. Racial discrimination concerns theunequal treatment of races, whereas racial inequality concernsunequal outcomes (in income, education, health, etc.). Whileracism is often implicated in both processes, contemporaryracial inequalities and forms of discrimination are not alwaysthe immediate result of contemporary racism (Pager andShepherd, 2008). The Sociology of racism investigates therelationships between these three phenomena, asking when,how, why, and to what extent they reproduce one another.

3 Inthe post-Civil Rights era, with (overt) racism now widely con-demned, one challenge for social scientists is to conceptualizeand measure its more subtle and diffuse manifestations andlasting cannot be defined withoutfirst defining race. Amongsocial scientists, race is generally understood as a socialconstruct. Although biologically meaningless when applied tohumans physical differences such as skin color have nonatural association with group differences in ability or behavior race nevertheless has tremendous significance in structuringsocial reality. Indeed, historical variation in the definition anduse of the term provides a case in term race wasfirst used to describe peoples and societiesin the way we now understand ethnicity or national , in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Euro-peans encountered non-European civilizations, Enlightenmentscientists and philosophers gave race a biological applied the term to plants, animals, and humans asa taxonomic subclassification within a species.

4 As such, racebecame understood as a biological, or natural, categorizationsystem of the human species. As Western colonialism andslavery expanded, the concept was used to justify and prescribeexploitation, domination, and violence against peoples racial-ized as nonwhite. Today, race often maintains its natural connotation in folk understandings; yet, the scientificconsensus is that race does not exist as a biological categoryamong humans genetic variation is far greater within thanbetween racial groups, common phenotypic markers exist ona continuum, not as discrete categories, and the use andsignificance of these markers varies across time, place, and evenwithin the same individual (Fiske, 2010).For most social scientists, race is distinct from ethnicity .A major distinction is the assumption of a biological basis inthe case of race. Races are distinguished by perceived commonphysical characteristics, which are thought to befixed, whereasethnicities are defined by perceived common ancestry, history,and cultural practices, which are seen as morefluid andself-asserted rather than assigned by others (Cornell andHartmann, 2006).

5 Thus, Asian is usually considered a race ,whereas Tibetans and Bengalis are considered ethnicity and nationality often overlap, a nationality,such as American, can contain many ethnic groups ( ,Italian-Americans, Arab-Americans). Yet, all three categories race, ethnicity, and nationality are socially constructed, and,as such, groups once considered ethnicities have come to beseen as races and vice versa. Moreover, some groups who arenow taken for granted as white , such as the Irish, Italians, andJews, were once excluded from this racial category. The defi-nitional boundaries of race and ethnicity are shaped by the tugand pull of state power, group interests, and other social a sociological perspective, it is this social constructionof race not its natural existence that is the primary object ofinquiry in the study of racism . Bundled up with eighteenthcentury classifications of various racial groups were assertionsof moral, intellectual, spiritual, and other forms of superiority,which were used to justify the domination of Europeans overracialized others.

6 In the North American context, racist ideol-ogy served as justification for land appropriation and colonialviolence toward indigenous peoples as well as the enslavementInternational Encyclopedia of the social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 19 Africans starting in the sixteenth century. It was later used tojustify the state-sanctioned social , economic, and symbolicviolence directed at blacks and other minorities under JimCrow laws. In the mid-twentieth century, the American CivilRights Movement, global anticolonial movements, andincreasing waves of non-European immigration to the Westchanged how individuals, groups, and nation-states talkedabout, viewed, understood, and categorized race. A major taskfor sociologists has been to assess these changes and theirimplications for racial discrimination and HistoryThere are at least two distinct phases in the Sociology of Racism, demarcated by the changing nature of race and racism as con-structed by social actors and social forces after World War phase from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentiethcentury typically considered racism as a set of overtindividual-level attitudes; the second phase from the mid-twentieth century to the present considers racism as notsimply explicit attitudes but also implicit biases and processesthat are constructed, sustained, and enacted at both micro- andmacro-levels.

7 While thefirst phase focused on the direct rela-tionship between racism and racial inequality, the secondphase considers diffuse relationships between these conceptsand the ways in which historical, unconscious, institutional,and systemic forms of racism interact with other social forces toperpetuate racial the late nineteenth century, as Sociology emerged asa social scientific discipline, few scholars studied racism . (Onenotable exception was Du Bois, who analyzed thepolitical economic roots of racism and its perverse impacts onWestern institutions and psyches.) Instead of studying racismas a social problem, many social scientists truly products oftheir time maintained racist attitudes and incorporated racistassumptions into their explanations of racial group differencesin social outcomes. racism pervaded society, including soci-ology, and was legitimated by dominant scientific discoursessuch as social Darwinism, which misapplied the concept ofnatural selection to the social world to account for why some(racial, class, etc.)

8 Groups excel more than in the 1920s, when the scientific validity of race came under closer scrutiny, some sociologists primarilyassociated with the Chicago School began to view racism asa distinct social problem worthy of study. The issue took ongreater urgency during and after World War II when thedevastating consequences of racism reached their ugly period can be characterized as thefirst phase in thesociological study of racism , in which dominant theories,drawing on psychology s emphasis on individual prejudice,conceived racism as a set of explicit individual-level beliefs andattitudes that were a historical relic (as opposed to a systemicsocial process) that would inevitably fade with time. Thisassumption of inevitable attenuation was most evident intheories of immigrant assimilation, which proposed an inex-orable straight-line process, whereby ethnic Europeanimmigrants originally racialized as other would graduallyassimilate into the American mainstream as full-fledged white thisfirst phase, defining racism as prejudicial beliefs andattitudes provided little difficulty for the social scientist, asindividuals, organizations, and the state were explicit abouthow race mattered for the distribution of material andsymbolic resources.

9 For example, income inequality betweenwhites and blacks could be readily explained by workplacediscrimination and policies excluding blacks from well-paidjobs; differences in educational attainment could beexplained by legally segregated schools; etc. The 1950s and1960s, however, witnessed a shift in how individuals, groups,and nation-states used race in everyday life and social the West, the confluence of the Civil Rights Movement,increasing immigration, the fall of colonialism abroad, and theeconomic rise of developing nations coincided with theprecipitous decline in overtly racist attitudes, as measured byrepresentative opinion surveys. As racial prejudice declined(unevenly) in the United States and the world (Bobo et al.,1997), theories arose to explain why racism , racial discrimi-nation, and racial inequality persisted, emerged, or changedform in some places more than moment may be characterized as the start of the second(and contemporary) phase in the sociological study of has witnessed the (re)emergence of once-ignored critical andstructural analyses of racism ( la DuBois) as well as manifoldnew theories to account for the subtlety of present-day theories often focus on group-level processes and socialstructures as opposed to, or in interaction with, the example, whereas earlier scholars defined racism asprimarily an individual problem of overt hostility that could bediminished through interracial interaction ( ,Allport, 1954),later sociologists viewed racism as fundamentally rooted inpolitical, economic, and/or status resource competition ( ,Blalock, 1967;Blumer, 1958).

10 Under these conditions, inter-group contact could exacerbate the perceived group threat that,in this view, drives racial prejudice and discrimination (cfNagel, 1995). Building on this latter perspective, other scholarshave examined the intersections of racism with colonialism( ,Blauner, 1969), class conflict ( ,Bonacich, 1972), andgender ( ,Collins, 1990). In the 1980s and 1990s, varioustheories of new racisms (see SectionNew Racisms) andimplicit biases (see SectionImplicit Bias) emerged, suggestingthat racism itself has transformed into more covert have also elaborated theories of institutionalracism (see SectionInstitutional racism ), exploring how racistideologies and discriminatory practices have becomeembedded in taken-for-granted laws, policies, and norms thatsystematically (dis)advantage certain groups. And since theturn of the century, social scientists have turned attention to thesocial processes whereby race, racism , and racial inequalitiesare constructed and challenged at micro-, meso-, and macro-levels (see SectionsRacism as a social ProcessandResponsesto racism ).