what is races essay

RACE Writing: A Comprehensive Guide + Examples

Welcome to the ultimate guide on mastering the RACE writing method.

Whether you’re a student aiming to ace your essays, a teacher looking to boost your students’ writing skills, or simply someone who wants to write more clearly and effectively, this guide is for you. Let’s transform your writing together,

What Is RACE Writing?

Table of Contents

RACE is an acronym that stands for Restate, Answer, Cite, and Explain .

This structured approach ensures that responses are clear, complete, and well-supported by evidence.

Here’s a quick overview of what each component entails:

• Restate : Begin by restating the question or prompt to establish the context of your response.
• Answer : Directly answer the question or address the prompt.
• Cite : Provide evidence or examples to support your answer.
• Explain : Elaborate on the evidence and its relevance to your answer.

Now, let’s dive deeper into each component of the RACE strategy and see how to apply it effectively.

Restate: Setting the Context

Restating the question or prompt is the first step in the RACE strategy. This ensures that the reader knows exactly what question you are addressing. It also helps you stay focused on the topic.

Tips for Restating

• Paraphrase the Question : Don’t just repeat the question verbatim. Rephrase it in your own words.
• Keep it Brief : Your restatement should be concise and to the point.
• Include Key Terms : Make sure to use key terms from the question to maintain clarity.

Question : How does the protagonist in “To Kill a Mockingbird” demonstrate courage? Restatement : The protagonist in “To Kill a Mockingbird” demonstrates courage through various actions and decisions.

Answer: Direct and Clear Responses

Once you’ve restated the question, the next step is to answer it directly. This is your main response to the question or prompt.

Tips for Answering

• Be Direct : Clearly state your answer without beating around the bush.
• S tay Focused: Make sure your answer directly tackles the question at hand.
• Keep it Simple : Use straightforward language to convey your point.

Answer : The protagonist, Scout Finch, demonstrates courage by standing up for what she believes is right, despite the risks involved.

Cite: Supporting with Evidence

Citing evidence is crucial for backing up your answer. This involves providing quotes, data, or examples that support your response.

Tips for Citing

• Use Reliable Sources : Ensure your evidence comes from credible and relevant sources.
• Integrate Smoothly : Blend your citations into your writing seamlessly.
• Be Specific : Provide detailed and specific evidence.

Citation : For instance, in the novel, Scout stands up to a mob intent on lynching Tom Robinson, demonstrating her bravery (Lee, 1960, p. 153).

Explain: Making the Connection

The final step is to explain how your evidence supports your answer. This is where you connect the dots and show the significance of your evidence.

Tips for Explaining

• Be Thorough : Provide a detailed explanation of how the evidence supports your answer.
• Clarify Relevance : Clearly show the link between your evidence and your response.
• Avoid Assumptions : Don’t assume the reader will understand the connection without your explanation.

Explanation : This act of defiance highlights Scout’s moral courage, as she is willing to face danger to uphold justice and protect the innocent.

Watch this playlist of videos on RACE Writing:

Using RACE Writing for Yourself

Implementing the RACE strategy in your writing can significantly enhance the quality and coherence of your work.

Here are some practical steps to integrate RACE into your writing process:

1. Understand the Prompt

Before you start writing, make sure you fully understand the question or prompt.

This will help you accurately restate it in your response.

Spend time analyzing the prompt to grasp its nuances and underlying questions. This thorough understanding allows you to pinpoint exactly what is being asked, ensuring that your response remains relevant and focused.

Misinterpreting the prompt can lead to an off-topic answer, wasting both your time and effort.

Additionally, breaking down the prompt into smaller, manageable parts can be beneficial.

Identify the key terms and phrases, and consider their implications.

By doing this, you can create a mental map of your response, making it easier to restate the prompt effectively in your own words.

This step sets a strong foundation for the rest of the RACE process.

2. Outline Your Response

Create a brief outline using the RACE components.

This will help you organize your thoughts and ensure that you address each part of the strategy.

Start with your restatement, then outline your direct answer, list the evidence you will cite, and plan your explanations.

An outline serves as a roadmap, guiding you through your writing process and helping you stay on track.

An organized outline not only saves time but also enhances the coherence of your response.

It allows you to see the overall structure and flow of your argument, making it easier to identify any gaps or weaknesses.

This proactive approach helps you craft a well-rounded and compelling response, ensuring that each RACE component is effectively addressed.

3. Draft and Revise

Write a draft of your response, focusing on incorporating each element of RACE.

Afterward, revise your work to refine your restatement, answer, citations, and explanations.

Drafting allows you to put your ideas into words without worrying too much about perfection.

It’s an opportunity to explore your thoughts and see how well they translate onto the page.

Revising, on the other hand, is where the real magic happens.

Take a critical look at your draft, checking for clarity, coherence, and consistency.

Ensure that your restatement is accurate, your answer is direct, your citations are relevant, and your explanations are thorough.

This iterative process of drafting and revising helps you produce a polished and effective piece of writing.

4. Practice Regularly

Like any skill, mastering RACE takes practice.

Regularly applying the strategy in various writing contexts will help you become more proficient.

The more you practice, the more intuitive the process will become, allowing you to apply the RACE strategy effortlessly.

Experiment with different types of writing prompts and questions.

This diversity in practice will help you adapt the RACE strategy to different contexts and topics, making you a more versatile writer.

Regular practice also builds confidence, enabling you to tackle any writing task with ease and assurance.

Teaching RACE Writing to Students

As an educator, teaching the RACE writing strategy to students can significantly improve their writing abilities.

Here are some tips for effectively teaching RACE:

1. Introduce the Strategy

Start by explaining the RACE acronym and its components.

Use examples to illustrate each part of the strategy. Providing a clear and thorough introduction helps students understand the purpose and benefits of the RACE strategy.

Use engaging examples that are relevant to their interests to capture their attention and make the concept more relatable.

In addition, consider using visual aids such as charts or diagrams to break down the RACE components.

Visual representations can make it easier for students to grasp the structure and flow of the strategy.

Reinforce your explanation with real-life examples from texts they are familiar with, demonstrating how RACE can be applied in various contexts.

2. Model the Process

Demonstrate how to apply the RACE strategy by working through an example together with your students.

Show them how to restate, answer, cite, and explain cohesively.

Modeling the process provides students with a concrete example of how to effectively use RACE in their writing.

It also allows them to see the strategy in action, making it more accessible and understandable.

During the modeling process, think aloud to explain your reasoning and decision-making.

This helps students understand the thought process behind each step of the RACE strategy.

Encourage questions and provide immediate feedback to clarify any doubts. By actively engaging students in the modeling process, you foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of the strategy.

3. Practice with Guidance

Provide students with practice prompts and guide them through the RACE process.

Offer feedback to help them improve their responses.

Guided practice allows students to apply the RACE strategy in a supportive environment, where they can receive constructive feedback and make necessary adjustments.

Start with simpler prompts and gradually increase the complexity as students become more comfortable with the strategy.

Pair students up for peer practice sessions, where they can collaborate and learn from each other.

As they practice, circulate around the classroom to provide individualized feedback and address any challenges they may face.

This hands-on approach helps reinforce the RACE strategy and builds students’ confidence in their writing abilities.

4. Encourage Peer Review

Have students review each other’s work using the RACE strategy.

This peer review process can provide valuable insights and help reinforce their understanding.

Peer review fosters a collaborative learning environment, where students can share their perspectives and learn from each other.

Provide clear guidelines and criteria for peer review to ensure that the feedback is constructive and focused.

Encourage students to use the RACE framework to evaluate their peers’ responses, highlighting strengths and suggesting areas for improvement.

This process not only helps students refine their writing but also enhances their critical thinking and analytical skills.

By engaging in peer review, students gain a deeper understanding of the RACE strategy and learn to appreciate different writing styles and approaches.

5. Assess Progress

Regularly assess students’ writing to ensure they are effectively applying the RACE strategy.

Provide constructive feedback to help them continue improving.

Regular assessments allow you to track students’ progress and pinpoint areas where they might need extra help or guidance.

Use a variety of assessment methods, such as quizzes, writing assignments, and in-class exercises, to evaluate students’ understanding and application of the RACE strategy.

Provide detailed feedback that highlights both strengths and areas for improvement.

Offer specific suggestions for how they can enhance their responses.

Celebrate their successes and acknowledge their efforts to motivate and encourage continuous improvement.

By consistently assessing progress, you can ensure that students are mastering the RACE strategy and developing strong writing skills.

Examples of RACE Writing in Action

To illustrate how the RACE strategy can be effectively applied, here are three comprehensive examples.

These examples cover different contexts, showcasing the versatility of the RACE strategy in enhancing writing clarity and coherence.

Example 1: Literature Analysis

Prompt : How does the theme of friendship manifest in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”?

Restate : The theme of friendship is a central element in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Answer : Friendship is portrayed through the strong bond between Harry, Ron, and Hermione, which helps them overcome numerous challenges.

Cite : For instance, when Ron sacrifices himself in the life-sized chess game to allow Harry and Hermione to move forward (Rowling, 1997, p. 283).

Explain : This act of selflessness exemplifies the deep trust and loyalty among the trio, highlighting how their friendship empowers them to face dangers together. Ron’s willingness to risk his life underscores the strength of their bond, illustrating the theme of friendship as a vital force in their journey.

Example 2: Scientific Report

Prompt : Explain how photosynthesis contributes to the oxygen supply on Earth.

Restate : Photosynthesis plays a crucial role in maintaining the oxygen supply on Earth.

Answer : During photosynthesis, plants convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen, releasing oxygen as a byproduct.

Cite : According to Smith (2020), “Plants release approximately 260 billion tons of oxygen into the atmosphere each year through the process of photosynthesis” (p. 45).

Explain : This process is fundamental to sustaining life on Earth, as it replenishes the oxygen that animals and humans breathe. Without photosynthesis, the oxygen levels in the atmosphere would diminish, leading to a decline in aerobic organisms. Therefore, photosynthesis is essential for maintaining the balance of gases in our atmosphere and supporting life.

Example 3: Historical Analysis

Prompt : Discuss the impact of the Industrial Revolution on urbanization in the 19th century.

Restate : The Industrial Revolution significantly influenced urbanization in the 19th century.

Answer : The rapid industrialization led to a massive migration of people from rural areas to cities in search of employment opportunities.

Cite : Historical records indicate that the urban population in England increased from 20% to 50% between 1800 and 1850 due to industrialization (Johnson, 2015, p. 102).

Explain : This shift transformed the social and economic fabric of society, as cities grew rapidly to accommodate the influx of workers. The development of factories and the need for labor created new urban centers, leading to improved infrastructure and changes in living conditions. However, this rapid urbanization also brought challenges, such as overcrowding and poor sanitation, highlighting the complex impact of the Industrial Revolution on society.

Final Thoughts: RACE Writing

Mastering the RACE writing strategy enhances clarity, coherence, and persuasiveness in writing.

By Restating, Answering, Citing, and Explaining, you can effectively address any prompt.

Embrace RACE to elevate your writing skills and produce compelling responses.

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• K-12 Outreach
• RACES Writing Strategy

The RACES writing strategy is an acronym that stands for the following components:

This refers to restating or rephrasing the question or prompt in your own words to ensure that you understand it correctly.

Provide a clear and concise answer to the question or prompt. This is the main part of your response and should directly address what is being asked.

Support your answer with evidence or examples. This could involve referencing specific facts, data, quotations, or other sources of information that support your response. Citing your sources helps to strengthen your argument and provide credibility to your writing.

Elaborate on your answer and provide further clarification or reasoning. Explain how your evidence or examples support your answer and demonstrate your understanding of the topic.

Summarize your response by restating your main points and bringing your writing to a conclusion. This helps to reinforce your main argument and leave a lasting impression on the reader.

Google Doc of the student graphic

The strategy provides a simple and structured framework for students to follow when responding to questions or prompts. It helps them develop their writing skills by encouraging them to restate the question, provide a clear answer, support their answer with evidence, explain their reasoning, and summarize their response.

By introducing the RACES strategy to students, teachers can help them organize their thoughts, express their ideas more effectively, and develop critical thinking skills. The strategy can be applied to various types of writing tasks, including short responses, paragraph writing, or longer compositions.

However, it's important to adapt the strategy to the age and abilities of the students. For younger elementary students, the concept of citing sources may be simplified to using examples from the text or personal experiences. Teachers can provide guidance and support as students learn to apply the different components of the RACES strategy in their writing.

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Using the RACE Strategy for Text Evidence

How to Teach Constructed Response Using the RACE Strategy

Constructed response questions can be scary at first. Scary to teach and scary to write! Using the RACE Strategy will help ensure students get this skill right, every time!

I mean, when you compare writing a constructed response to answering a multiple-choice question, well, there really is  no  contest.

Constructed Response makes multiple-choice questions seem so simple to complete.

Since we know that students need to be able to write constructed responses, I was so happy when I was introduced to the RACE strategy.

It took the fright out of teaching constructed responses for text evidence.

The RACE Strategy gave me a step-by-step template to teach my students precisely what to do.

Even though writing constructed responses are still challenging, when you teach your students the RACE strategy and give them lots of opportunities for practice, your students will master it!

What is the RACE Strategy? So, just what is the RACE strategy? RACE is an acronym that helps students remember which steps and in which order to write a constructed response.

R = Restate the Question

The first step is to change the question into a statement.

This is also known as restating the question.

Students need to remove the question word like who, what, when, where, or why and then restate the keywords.

For example, if the question was, “Why did Jill decide to give her mother a jewelry box?” the answer would start this way, “Jill decided to give her mother a jewelry box because.”

A = Answer the Question After restating the question, the second step is to finish the sentence and answer the question.

Students may use their knowledge and inferences from the text to identify the answer.

Here are a few tips for this. 

1) Students must answer the specific question being asked.

2) Students also need to answer every part of the question.  Sometimes questions have more than one part. 3) T hey need to list the character’s name before using a pronoun like he/she/they.

C = Cite Text Evidence Citing evidence is the tricky part.

First, kids need to find relevant evidence to support their answer.

Then, they must write it correctly using a sentence stem

According to the text…

• The author stated…
• In the second paragraph…
• The author mentioned…
• On the third page…
• The text stated…
• Based on the text…

To teach this skill, I make an anchor chart with the question stems and put them up when we start to work on citing evidence.

Once kids memorize a few question stems, this part of the RACE strategy goes much more smoothly.

I make sure students know to quote the text  exactly as it is written  and use quotation marks correctly too.

E = Explain What it Means

The last part of the Constructed Response is where kids tell how their text evidence proves their point.

Again, some simple sentence starters help kids stay on track here.

Here are a few examples of sentence starters that help students begin to Explain: 

• This proves
• This is a good example of
• This means that

When I teach the RACE strategy, I give the kids an overview of a completed constructed response example, so they can see where we’re going.

Then, I break it down into separate parts and teach each one before putting it all together.

By the time kids reach my fourth or fifth-grade class, most students at my school have had teachers who have required them to answer a question using a restatement.

Students aren’t doing constructed responses yet, but most are fairly comfortable with restating a question.

Because of this, I might spend a few days teaching or reviewing the restating and answering part.

I teach the  Restating  and  Answering  together since they usually form one sentence.

Then, I move to  Citing  text evidence, which takes much longer to teach.

The  Explaining  part goes pretty quickly after that.

Once I’ve taught all of the components, it’s time for students to practice putting it all together.

To do this, we read a short text as a class.

It might be a Scholastic News article, a page from  Chicken Soup for the Soul,  or a passage I’ve created.

Finally, I model (with their input) a Constructed Response using a RACE template from The Teacher Next Door’s Text Evidence Differentiated Unit

I project it on the smartboard so everyone can see it.

The next day, we repeat this with a different passage in pairs.

When students are finished, we go over it together to compare notes when they’re finished. After that, it is time to work on it independently.

A few notes…

• Make sure to start teaching the RACE strategy early in the year, so there’s plenty of time to practice.  If you teach this strategy right before standardized testing, it will not be very effective.
• Start with short passages. One page is ideal. Giving students practice with shorter texts will help them gain confidence for the longer texts in the future.  Baby steps, right?
• You’ll want students to write constructed responses repeatedly, but NOT for every passage they read.
• Constructed responses are somewhat of a chore, even with an excellent strategy like RACE.
• I try not to burn kids out on any one thing so that they dread it. It would be like asking them to write a five-paragraph essay each day. No one wants to do that. So, my advice is to give them a good foundation for how to write them and then sprinkle them in now and then throughout the year. Spiral practice is key!

You can apply the RACE Strategy to any set of materials that you have on hand. However, The Teacher Next Door knows how time consuming it can be to search for standards-aligned and grade level appropriate materials.

To save you time, The Teacher Next Door has created a Text Evidence Differentiated Unit with everything you need for students to master this skill!

The Text Evidence Differentiated Unit contains:

• 10 color coding passages
• 8 practice passages
• 3 sets of text evidence games (with 32 task cards in each set)
• Posters for the entire RACE Strategy

The entire unit is differentiated for you! Each passage comes in  three  different levels, and the three games are differentiated too!

Click here to check this unit out! 

Want to give this Text Evidence Differentiated Passage a spin for FREE? 

If you’d like to read more about how to teach text evidence, we have another post you may want to read :

Citing Text Evidence in 6 Steps.

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Writing About Race, Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, and Disability

View in pdf format.

As language evolves alongside our understanding of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and disability, it is important for writers to make informed choices about their language and to take responsibility for those choices. Accurate language is important in writing about people respectfully and in crafting effective arguments your audience can trust. This handout includes writing practices and language tips to help you discuss various groups of people respectfully and without perpetuating stereotypes.

Best Practices

• Use people-first language. Use terms that focus on people rather than on the method of categorization to ensure your language is not dehumanizing. For example, use “people with mental illness” rather than “the mentally ill,” “people with disabilities” rather than “disabled people,” and “enslaved peoples” rather than “slaves.”
• Don’t use adjectives as nouns.   Using adjectives as nouns is not only grammatically incorrect, it is often demeaning to the people you are describing. For example, use “Black people,” not “Blacks.”
• Avoid terms that imply inferiority or superiority.   Replace terms that evaluate or might imply inferiority/superiority with non-judgmental language. For example, use “low socioeconomic status” rather than “low class,” or “historically marginalized population” rather than “minority.”
• Be specific.  When these descriptors are relevant, be as specific as possible to avoid inaccurate or generalized statements. For example, use “Dominicans” rather than “Hispanics,” or “people who use wheelchairs” rather than “people with disabilities.”

Writing About Race and Ethnicity

When writing about race and ethnicity, use the following tips to guide you:

• Capitalize racial/ethnic groups, such as Black, Asian, and Native American. Depending on the context, white may or may not be capitalized.
• African Americans migrated to northern cities. (noun)
• African-American literature. (adjective)
• The terms Latino/Latina/Latin are used mostly in the US to refer to US residents with ties to Latin America .

Umbrella Terms

• Avoid the term “minority” if possible. “Minority” is often used to describe groups of people who are not part of the majority. This term is being phased out because it may imply inferiority and because minorities often are not in the numerical minority. An alternative might be “historically marginalized populations.” If it is not possible to avoid using “minority,” qualify the term with the appropriate specific descriptor: “religious minority” rather than “minority.”
• Note that the terms “people of color” and “non-white” are acceptable in some fields and contexts but not in others. Check with your professor if you’re uncertain whether a term is acceptable.  

Writing About Socioeconomic Status

When writing about socioeconomic status, use the following tips to guide you:

• “Avoid using terms like “high class” or “low class,” or even “upper class” or “lower class,” because they have been used historically in an evaluative way. Also avoid “low brow” and “high brow.” Instead, if you must incorporate adjectives like “high” or “low,” use the term “high” or “low socioeconomic status” to avoid judgmental language.
• The word “status” (without the qualifier of “socioeconomic”) is not interchangeable with “class” because “status” can refer to other measures such as popularity.
• When possible, use specific metrics: common ones include level of educational attainment, occupation, and income.Use specific language that describes what is important to the analysis.
• Be aware of numbers: there are no distinct indicators of “high” and “low,” but there are percentages that make it easy to determine, via income bracket for example, where on a range an individual falls.

General Guidelines

When writing about disability, use the following tips to guide you:

• uses a wheelchair rather than confined to a wheelchair
• diagnosed with bipolar disorder rather than suffers from bipolar disorder
• person with a physical disability rather than physically challenged
• Do not use victimizing language such as afflicted, restricted, stricken, suffering, and unfortunate.
• Do not call someone ‘brave’ or ‘heroic’ simply for living with a disability.
• Avoid the term “handicapped,” as some find it insensitive. Note that it is widely used as a legal term in documents, on signs, etc.
• Do not use disabilities as nouns to refer to people. For example, use “people with mental illnesses” not “the mentally ill.”
• Avoid using the language of disability as metaphor, which stigmatizes people with disabilities, such as lame (lame idea), blind (blind luck), paralyzed (paralyzed with indecision), deaf (deaf ears), crazy, insane, moron, crippling, disabling, and the like.
• Capitalize a group name when stressing the fact that they are a cultural community (e.g. Deaf culture); do not capitalize when referring only to the disability.

Referring to people without disabilities

Use “people without disabilities,” or “neurotypical individuals” for mental disabilities.  The term “able-bodied” may be appropriate in some disciplines. Do not use terms like “normal” or “healthy” to describe people without disabilities.

Writing with Outdated/Problematic Sources

  When analyzing or referencing a source that uses harmful language (slurs, violent rhetoric, etc.), either:

• Explain that the author or character uses harmful language without stating it verbatim. For example: “The author uses an ableist slur when discussing [context of the quote], indicating that [analysis].”
• Acknowledge its offensive nature in your analysis if you must quote the harmful language verbatim.

Do not change the quote or omit harmful language without acknowledging it. If you must use outdated and problematic sources, it is best to acknowledge any harmful language or rhetoric and discuss how it impacts the use and meaning of the text in your analysis.

Note that if you do need to use dated terminology in discussing the subjects in a historical context, continue to use contemporary language in your own discussion and analysis.

If you are still unsure of what language to use after reading this, consult your professor, classmates, writing center tutors, or current academic readings in the discipline for more guidance.

As we have noted, language is complex and constantly evolving. We will update this resource to reflect changes in language use and guidelines. We also welcome suggestions for revisions to this handout. Please contact the Writing Center with any questions or suggestions.

Thank you to the following people who contributed to earlier versions of this resource: Emma Bowman ’15, Krista Hesdorfer ’14, Jessica LeBow ’15, Rohini Tashima ’15, Sharon Williams, Amit Taneja, Phyllis Breland, and Professors Jessica Burke, Dan Chambliss, Christine Fernández, Todd Franklin, Cara Jones, Esther Kanipe, Elizabeth Lee, Celeste Day Moore, Andrea Murray, Kyoko Omori, Ann Owen, and Steven Wu.

Adapted from prior Writing Center resource “Writing about Race, Ethnicity, Social Class, and Disability.”

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How to teach the race writing strategy.

Teachers and students rely on the RACE or RACES writing strategies to construct high-quality answers using text evidence.

WHAT IS THE RACE – RACES WRITING RESPONSE STRATEGY?

Students and teachers rely on the RACE – RACES written response strategy for a good reason. It’s a simple method for teaching students how to answer text-based questions.

RACE – RACES helps students remember the key components of a quality response as they answer questions about a passage, story, or text.

Many students aren’t sure how to begin when faced with writing out answers about what they’ve read. This easy-to-use method gives students confidence. Moreover, it’s a concrete strategy they can use in all subject areas.

WHY SHOULD TEACHERS USE RACE/RACES?

Students struggle to write complete answers to text-based questions on tests, quizzes, assignments, and high-stakes tests. RACE/RACES is a step-by-step formula that can be used across all subject areas, leading to increased confidence.

All students benefit from explicit writing instruction. However, reluctant writers require direct instruction on what to write and how to write it. In addition, they should practice regularly to improve their skills.

The RACE/RACES strategy helps students organize their thinking and writing. Students add details, such as citing text evidence and extending their answers, as they follow the steps of the acronym. As a result, students learn essential skills as they practice writing clear and complete responses.

What do the letters in RACE – RACES mean?

First, you need to choose either RACE or RACES for your instruction. RACE/RACES are acronyms that stand for the following writing strategies:

R  – Restate the question

A  – Answer the question

C  – Cite the text evidence

E  – Explain and extend the evidence

S  – Summarize your answer

*Some teachers prefer ACE or ACES. Choose the method that best suits your students and your curriculum. 

The R in RACE/RACES means “Restate the question.”

Restating the question becomes the topic sentence for the student’s answer. Each letter of RACE/RACES doesn’t have to be a complete sentence on its own. The R is often combined with the A in the same sentence. Remember – writing is individualized, and there’s more than one way of doing it.

The A stands for “Answer the question.”

Students provide the answer to the question in their own words. Unfortunately, many students resist taking the time to refer back to the text. I stress to my students that they need to look back in the reading to find the answer, even if they think they already know it.

Additionally, students need to make sure they answer all parts of the question . Unfortunately, students often answer only part of the question, causing them to lose points.

The C stands for “Cite the text evidence.”

First, students must understand what “cite” means. I often link “cite” to the word “sight” and connect it to looking back at the reading and seeing the answer with their eyes. Building that connection may help some students remember the meaning, especially if “cite” is a new word for them.

I also tell my students this step is where they need to use words and ideas straight from the text. In a follow-up lesson, older students should quote the text using quotation marks, which teachers should directly teach. Younger students can tell what the text says without directly quoting the text.

All students benefit from practicing with sentence starters (also called sentence stems). Sentence starters are the beginnings of sentences that allow students to fill in the blanks with the text evidence. Students (especially struggling students) find them very helpful for this step of the writing process.

Some examples are:

“The text states ___”

“The author explains ___”

There are many good sentence starter choices for students. They should use the ones they’re most comfortable with, and that come most naturally. (If you’re looking for a set you can display in your classroom, see the section at the end for links to matching sentence starter sets!)

The E stands for “Explain and extend the evidence.”

Lots of e’s! This step directs students to expand on their answers. They should explain the answer and text evidence using their own words. They should also provide examples to clarify their explanations.

The S (if you choose to use it) stands for “Summarize your answer.”

Like a summary/closing sentence in paragraph writing, this works as a restatement of the topic sentence. It concludes the response.

How do I teach the RACE/RACES method?

As with any instruction, there are many right ways of teaching a topic. You know your students best, so you can choose and adjust your teaching to their needs. Below are some general guidelines to keep in mind.

1. Choose the right text for the RACE/RACES strategy

Of course, choosing the right text depends entirely on your students. Students can apply the RACE/RACES strategy to any text, so you have many options. But I can offer you the following tips for successful instruction.

Begin with a simple reading comprehension paragraph.  It must be simple enough for students to understand yet meaty enough to contain details. We want to keep the focus on answering the question rather than understanding the text. For this purpose, I’ve found it best to begin with a basic passage on an exciting topic .

Eventually, as students practice and improve their skills, you can challenge them with more complex text.

2. Differentiate for students and their needs

Differentiating is pretty easy and straightforward when using RACE/RACES. 

During the introduction phase or for struggling students and special education students, choose passages that are familiar in some way to your students. For example, you might select a previously studied topic or a text that students have already read.

3. Use different types of reading materials

We know the importance of exposing our students to a wide variety of reading materials. RACE/RACES can be used for all types of reading. So, as students become accustomed to the RACE/RACES strategy, y ou can choose any genre or style of reading material and feel confident it will work well.

You may also differentiate by choosing several passages of varying levels for different ability levels in your classroom.

When it’s time to add variety and challenge to the texts, here are some suggestions:

• Vary the text length
• Vary the genre – fiction, nonfiction, persuasion, expository, etc.
• Vary the complexity
• Vary the question types
• Use paired passages

4. Teach important words and terms

• Explain the important terms and methods as you “think aloud.”
• Use the terms frequently each day as you teach. Students learn new words and vocabulary best when they hear it often in a natural way. 

5. Use color-coding to highlight

As you’re working through the steps of RACE – RACES, highlight and underline text as you color-code each step using different colors. Then, continue the modeling and think-aloud for as long as students need.

6. Offer visuals for easy reference

Hang visual references in your classroom and encourage students to refer to them. Posters make great visual representations hanging in the classroom. Anchor charts can be developed as a class or in small groups.

Students can use the RACE/RACES bookmarks as references taped to notebooks or desks. Students may benefit from receiving multiple copies of the bookmark references to be kept in notebooks at school and at home.

7. Think about pacing and reviewing

You can teach one step per day, two steps, or more. The pace depends on the age and ability level of your students.

The RACE/RACES strategy must be modeled and practiced many times.  The practice should occur as a group, together at first, and then students can be gradually released to independence.

A Quick RACE – RACES Recap:

• Explain important terms and steps as you “think aloud.”
• Model the steps as the class watches.
• Begin encouraging students to contribute their own ideas. Students can read passages and develop answers to text-based questions as a large group, small group, and with partners.
• Transition students to independence after ensuring they understand what’s expected of them.
• Use important terms daily as you teach. Students will gain a deeper understanding as they hear important words used naturally and frequently. 

Over time, keep students’ writing skills sharp by continuing to spiral back to practice the RACE – RACES writing technique.

The continued practice may not make students’ writing perfect, but it can help make their skills permanent and keep it fresh in their minds.

Looking for SENTENCE STARTERS?

If you need some Sentence Starters ready to be printed and hung in your classroom, check out the Sentence Starters sets at my Teachers Pay Teachers store. There are two different styles for you to look over.

These sentence starters are also known as writing stems , sentence stems , and constructed response starters .

Want to learn more about citing text evidence?

Your students can successfully cite text evidence when responding to reading comprehension questions.

Step-by-step on how to teach your students to cite text evidence in their reading.

How to Teach Compare and Contrast Essays .

Help students write high-quality responses and prepare for tests with Sentence Starters.

If you use a PLOT DIAGRAM, this article shows you How to Use the Plot Diagram for Teaching. 

Hi, I’m Jules

Find it fast, browse the blog, visit my teachers pay teachers shop.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

10.2 The Meaning of Race and Ethnicity

Learning objectives.

• Critique the biological concept of race.
• Discuss why race is a social construction.
• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a sense of ethnic identity.

To understand this problem further, we need to take a critical look at the very meaning of race and ethnicity in today’s society. These concepts may seem easy to define initially but are much more complex than their definitions suggest.

Let’s start first with race , which refers to a category of people who share certain inherited physical characteristics, such as skin color, facial features, and stature. A key question about race is whether it is more of a biological category or a social category. Most people think of race in biological terms, and for more than 300 years, or ever since white Europeans began colonizing populations of color elsewhere in the world, race has indeed served as the “premier source of human identity” (Smedley, 1998, p. 690).

It is certainly easy to see that people in the United States and around the world differ physically in some obvious ways. The most noticeable difference is skin tone: some groups of people have very dark skin, while others have very light skin. Other differences also exist. Some people have very curly hair, while others have very straight hair. Some have thin lips, while others have thick lips. Some groups of people tend to be relatively tall, while others tend to be relatively short. Using such physical differences as their criteria, scientists at one point identified as many as nine races: African, American Indian or Native American, Asian, Australian Aborigine, European (more commonly called “white”), Indian, Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian (Smedley, 1998).

Although people certainly do differ in the many physical features that led to the development of such racial categories, anthropologists, sociologists, and many biologists question the value of these categories and thus the value of the biological concept of race (Smedley, 2007). For one thing, we often see more physical differences within a race than between races. For example, some people we call “white” (or European), such as those with Scandinavian backgrounds, have very light skins, while others, such as those from some Eastern European backgrounds, have much darker skins. In fact, some “whites” have darker skin than some “blacks,” or African Americans. Some whites have very straight hair, while others have very curly hair; some have blonde hair and blue eyes, while others have dark hair and brown eyes. Because of interracial reproduction going back to the days of slavery, African Americans also differ in the darkness of their skin and in other physical characteristics. In fact it is estimated that about 80% of African Americans have some white (i.e., European) ancestry; 50% of Mexican Americans have European or Native American ancestry; and 20% of whites have African or Native American ancestry. If clear racial differences ever existed hundreds or thousands of years ago (and many scientists doubt such differences ever existed), in today’s world these differences have become increasingly blurred.

Another reason to question the biological concept of race is that an individual or a group of individuals is often assigned to a race on arbitrary or even illogical grounds. A century ago, for example, Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews who left their homelands for a better life in the United States were not regarded as white once they reached the United States but rather as a different, inferior (if unnamed) race (Painter, 2010). The belief in their inferiority helped justify the harsh treatment they suffered in their new country. Today, of course, we call people from all three backgrounds white or European.

In this context, consider someone in the United States who has a white parent and a black parent. What race is this person? American society usually calls this person black or African American, and the person may adopt the same identity (as does Barack Obama, who had a white mother and African father). But where is the logic for doing so? This person, as well as President Obama, is as much white as black in terms of parental ancestry. Or consider someone with one white parent and another parent who is the child of one black parent and one white parent. This person thus has three white grandparents and one black grandparent. Even though this person’s ancestry is thus 75% white and 25% black, she or he is likely to be considered black in the United States and may well adopt this racial identity. This practice reflects the traditional “one-drop rule” in the United States that defines someone as black if she or he has at least one drop of “black blood,” and that was used in the antebellum South to keep the slave population as large as possible (Wright, 1993). Yet in many Latin American nations, this person would be considered white. In Brazil, the term black is reserved for someone with no European (white) ancestry at all. If we followed this practice in the United States, about 80% of the people we call “black” would now be called “white.” With such arbitrary designations, race is more of a social category than a biological one.

President Barack Obama had an African father and a white mother. Although his ancestry is equally black and white, Obama considers himself an African American, as do most Americans. In several Latin American nations, however, Obama would be considered white because of his white ancestry.

Steve Jurvetson – Barack Obama on the Primary – CC BY 2.0.

A third reason to question the biological concept of race comes from the field of biology itself and more specifically from the studies of genetics and human evolution. Starting with genetics, people from different races are more than 99.9% the same in their DNA (Begley, 2008). To turn that around, less than 0.1% of all the DNA in our bodies accounts for the physical differences among people that we associate with racial differences. In terms of DNA, then, people with different racial backgrounds are much, much more similar than dissimilar.

Even if we acknowledge that people differ in the physical characteristics we associate with race, modern evolutionary evidence reminds us that we are all, really, of one human race. According to evolutionary theory, the human race began thousands and thousands of years ago in sub-Saharan Africa. As people migrated around the world over the millennia, natural selection took over. It favored dark skin for people living in hot, sunny climates (i.e., near the equator), because the heavy amounts of melanin that produce dark skin protect against severe sunburn, cancer, and other problems. By the same token, natural selection favored light skin for people who migrated farther from the equator to cooler, less sunny climates, because dark skins there would have interfered with the production of vitamin D (Stone & Lurquin, 2007). Evolutionary evidence thus reinforces the common humanity of people who differ in the rather superficial ways associated with their appearances: we are one human species composed of people who happen to look different.

Race as a Social Construction

The reasons for doubting the biological basis for racial categories suggest that race is more of a social category than a biological one. Another way to say this is that race is a social construction , a concept that has no objective reality but rather is what people decide it is (Berger & Luckmann, 1963). In this view race has no real existence other than what and how people think of it.

This understanding of race is reflected in the problems, outlined earlier, in placing people with multiracial backgrounds into any one racial category. We have already mentioned the example of President Obama. As another example, the famous (and now notorious) golfer Tiger Woods was typically called an African American by the news media when he burst onto the golfing scene in the late 1990s, but in fact his ancestry is one-half Asian (divided evenly between Chinese and Thai), one-quarter white, one-eighth Native American, and only one-eighth African American (Leland & Beals, 1997).

Historical examples of attempts to place people in racial categories further underscore the social constructionism of race. In the South during the time of slavery, the skin tone of slaves lightened over the years as babies were born from the union, often in the form of rape, of slave owners and other whites with slaves. As it became difficult to tell who was “black” and who was not, many court battles over people’s racial identity occurred. People who were accused of having black ancestry would go to court to prove they were white in order to avoid enslavement or other problems (Staples, 1998). Litigation over race continued long past the days of slavery. In a relatively recent example, Susie Guillory Phipps sued the Louisiana Bureau of Vital Records in the early 1980s to change her official race to white. Phipps was descended from a slave owner and a slave and thereafter had only white ancestors. Despite this fact, she was called “black” on her birth certificate because of a state law, echoing the “one-drop rule,” that designated people as black if their ancestry was at least 1/32 black (meaning one of their great-great-great grandparents was black). Phipps had always thought of herself as white and was surprised after seeing a copy of her birth certificate to discover she was officially black because she had one black ancestor about 150 years earlier. She lost her case, and the U.S. Supreme Court later refused to review it (Omi & Winant, 1994).

Although race is a social construction, it is also true, as noted in an earlier chapter, that things perceived as real are real in their consequences. Because people do perceive race as something real, it has real consequences. Even though so little of DNA accounts for the physical differences we associate with racial differences, that low amount leads us not only to classify people into different races but to treat them differently—and, more to the point, unequally—based on their classification. Yet modern evidence shows there is little, if any, scientific basis for the racial classification that is the source of so much inequality.

Because of the problems in the meaning of race , many social scientists prefer the term ethnicity in speaking of people of color and others with distinctive cultural heritages. In this context, ethnicity refers to the shared social, cultural, and historical experiences, stemming from common national or regional backgrounds, that make subgroups of a population different from one another. Similarly, an ethnic group is a subgroup of a population with a set of shared social, cultural, and historical experiences; with relatively distinctive beliefs, values, and behaviors; and with some sense of identity of belonging to the subgroup. So conceived, the terms ethnicity and ethnic group avoid the biological connotations of the terms race and racial group and the biological differences these terms imply. At the same time, the importance we attach to ethnicity illustrates that it, too, is in many ways a social construction, and our ethnic membership thus has important consequences for how we are treated.

The sense of identity many people gain from belonging to an ethnic group is important for reasons both good and bad. Because, as we learned in Chapter 6 “Groups and Organizations” , one of the most important functions of groups is the identity they give us, ethnic identities can give individuals a sense of belonging and a recognition of the importance of their cultural backgrounds. This sense of belonging is illustrated in Figure 10.1 “Responses to “How Close Do You Feel to Your Ethnic or Racial Group?”” , which depicts the answers of General Social Survey respondents to the question, “How close do you feel to your ethnic or racial group?” More than three-fourths said they feel close or very close. The term ethnic pride captures the sense of self-worth that many people derive from their ethnic backgrounds. More generally, if group membership is important for many ways in which members of the group are socialized, ethnicity certainly plays an important role in the socialization of millions of people in the United States and elsewhere in the world today.

Figure 10.1 Responses to “How Close Do You Feel to Your Ethnic or Racial Group?”

Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2004.

A downside of ethnicity and ethnic group membership is the conflict they create among people of different ethnic groups. History and current practice indicate that it is easy to become prejudiced against people with different ethnicities from our own. Much of the rest of this chapter looks at the prejudice and discrimination operating today in the United States against people whose ethnicity is not white and European. Around the world today, ethnic conflict continues to rear its ugly head. The 1990s and 2000s were filled with “ethnic cleansing” and pitched battles among ethnic groups in Eastern Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. Our ethnic heritages shape us in many ways and fill many of us with pride, but they also are the source of much conflict, prejudice, and even hatred, as the hate crime story that began this chapter so sadly reminds us.

Key Takeaways

• Sociologists think race is best considered a social construction rather than a biological category.
• “Ethnicity” and “ethnic” avoid the biological connotations of “race” and “racial.”

For Your Review

• List everyone you might know whose ancestry is biracial or multiracial. What do these individuals consider themselves to be?
• List two or three examples that indicate race is a social construction rather than a biological category.

Begley, S. (2008, February 29). Race and DNA. Newsweek . Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/lab-notes/2008/02/29/race-and-dna.html .

Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1963). The social construction of reality . New York, NY: Doubleday.

Leland, J., & Beals, G. (1997, May 5). In living colors: Tiger Woods is the exception that rules. Newsweek 58–60.

Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Painter, N. I. (2010). The history of white people . New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Smedley, A. (1998). “Race” and the construction of human identity. American Anthropologist, 100 , 690–702.

Staples, B. (1998, November 13). The shifting meanings of “black” and “white,” The New York Times , p. WK14.

Stone, L., & Lurquin, P. F. (2007). Genes, culture, and human evolution: A synthesis . Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Wright, L. (1993, July 12). One drop of blood. The New Yorker, pp. 46–54.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The dictionary's definition of race

Each of the major groupings into which humankind is considered (in various theories or contexts) to be divided on the basis of physical characteristics or shared ancestry.

The notion of race is a social construct designed to divide people into groups ranked as superior and inferior. The scientific consensus is that race, in this sense, has no biological basis – we are all one race, the human race. Racial identity , however, is very real. And, in a racialized society like the United States, everyone is assigned a racial identity whether they are aware of it or not.

Race as Social Construction

​The dictionary’s definition of race is incomplete and misses the complexity of impact on lived experiences. It is important to acknowledge race is a social fabrication, created to classify people on the arbitrary basis of skin color and other physical features. Although race has no genetic or scientific basis, the concept of race is important and consequential. Societies use race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression.

American Anthropological Association  states that "the 'racial' worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent." To understand more about race as a social construct in the United States, read the AAPA  statement on race and racism .

Learn more about race as it relates to human genetics In the Teaching Tolerance report, “Race Does Not Equal DNA” 

What is Racial identity?

• Racial identity is externally imposed: “ How do others perceive me? ”
• Racial identity is also internally constructed: “ How do I identify myself? ”

Understanding how our identities and experiences have been shaped by race is vital. We are all awarded certain privileges and or disadvantages because of our race whether or not we are conscious of it.

Race matters. Race matters … because of persistent racial inequality in society - inequality that cannot be ignored. Justice Sonya Sotomayor United States Supreme Court

Developmental models of racial identity

Many sociologists and psychologists have identified that there are similar patterns every individual goes through when recognizing their racial identity. While these patterns help us understand the link between race and identity, creating one’s racial identity is a fluid and nonlinear process that varies for every person and group.

Think of these categories of Racial Identity Development [PDF] as stations along a journey of the continual evolution of your racial identity. Your personal experiences, family, community, workplaces, the aging process, and political and social events – all play a role in understanding our own racial identity. During this process, people move between a desire to "fit in" to dominant norms, to a questioning of one's own identity and that of others. It includes feelings of confusion and often introspection, as well as moments of celebration of self and others. You may begin at any point on this chart and move in any direction – sometimes on the same day! Recognizing the station you are in helps you understand who you are.

What is ideology?

Ideology is a system of ideas, ideals, and manner of thinking that form the basis for decision making, often regarding economic or political theory and policy

No One is Colorblind to Race

The concept of race is intimately connected to our lives and has serious implications. It operates in real and definitive ways that confer benefits and privileges to some and withholds them from others.  Ignoring race means ignoring the establishment of racial hierarchies in society and the injustices these hierarchies have created and continue to reinforce.

• READ: “ Children Are Not Colorblind: How Young Children Learn Race ,” by Erin N. Winkler, Ph.D.

Understand More About the Dangers of Ignoring Race

Read this article, “ When you say you 'don't see race,' you’re ignoring racism, not helping to solve it. ”

Reflection:

• What are some experiences or identities that are central to who you are? How do you feel when they are ignored or “not seen”?

• The author in this article points out how people often use nonvisual cues to determine race. What does this reveal to us about the validity of pretending not to see race?

Either America will destroy ignorance, or ignorance will destroy the United States W.E.B. DuBois

RACISM = Racial Prejudice (Unfounded Beliefs + Irrational Fear) + Institutional Power 

Racism, like smog, swirls around us and permeates American society. It can be intentional, clear and direct or it can be expressed in more subtle ways that the perpetrator might not even be aware of.

Racism is a system of advantage based on race that involves systems and institutions, not just individual mindsets and actions. The critical variable in racism is the impact (outcomes) not the intent and operates at multiple levels including individual racism, interpersonal racism, institutional racism, and structural racism. 

• Interpersonal racism ​ occurs between individuals and includes public expressions of racism, often involving slurs, biases, hateful words or actions, or exclusion.

Source: Adapted from Terry Keleher, Applied Research Center, and Racial Equity Tools by OneTILT

Breaking the Silence Silence on issues of race hurts everyone. Reluctance to directly address the impact of race can result in a lack of connection between people, a loss of our society’s potential and progress, and an escalation of fear and violence. Silence around other issues of identity can also have the same negative impact on society. Silence on race keeps us all from understanding and learning. We can break the silence by being proactive - by learning, reflecting and having courageous conversations with ourselves and others.

VIDEO: Watch below as Franchesca Ramsey discusses racism on MTV’s Decoded (warning: adult language):

Take a moment to reflect

Let's Think

• How are you thinking about your own racialized identity after learning more about race?

• Ask a friend who has a different racial identity than yours to discuss how cultivating a positive sense of racial identity about yourself and others can interrupt racism at every level (personally, socially, and institutionally)?

For concerned citizens:

• Try this exercise to recognize the everyday opportunities you may have that can promote racial equity: Exercise on Choice Points .
• Activity: Try this group activity for talking about race effectively

For Families and Educators: Here are some ways to address race and racism in your classroom:

• Teaching young children about race: a guide for families and teachers
• Tipsfor talking to children about race

Why Us, Why Now?

Subtitle here for the credits modal.

Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York, c 1900. Photo courtesy Library of Congress

How to see race

Race is a shapeshifting adversary: what seems self-evident takes training to see, and twists under political pressure.

by Gregory Smithsimon   + BIO

We think we know what race is. When the United States Census Bureau says that the country will be majority non-white by 2044, that seems like a simple enough statement. But race has always been a weaselly thing.

Today my students, including Black and Latino students, regularly ask me why Asians (supposedly) ‘assimilate’ with whites more quickly than Blacks and Latinos. Strangely, in the 1920s, the US Supreme Court denied Asians citizenship on the basis that they could never assimilate; fast-forward to today, and Asian immigrants are held up as exemplars of assimilation. The fact that race is unyielding enough to shut out someone from the national community, yet malleable enough for my students to believe that it explains a group’s apparent assimilation, hints at what a shapeshifting adversary race is. Race is incredibly tenacious and unforgiving, a source of grave inequality and injustice. Yet over time, racial categories evolve and shift.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation .

O ccasionally there are historical moments when the creation of race and its political meaning get spelled out explicitly. The US Constitution divided people into white, Black or Indian, which were meant to stand in for power categories: those eligible for citizenship, those subjected to brutal enslavement, and those targeted for genocide. In the first census, each resident counted as one person, each slave as three-fifths a person, and each Indian was not counted at all.

But racialisation is often more insidious. It means that we see things that don’t exist, and fail to recognise things that do. The most powerful racial category is often invisible: whiteness. The benefit of being in power is that whites can imagine that they are the norm and that only other people have race. An early US census instructed people to leave the race section blank if they were white, and indicate only if someone were something else (‘B’ for Black, ‘M’ for Mulatto). Whiteness was literally unmarked.

A brief aside on the politics of typography, in case you’re wondering: throughout this article I leave ‘white’ as is, but I capitalise ‘Black’, as well as ‘Indian’ and ‘Irish’. Why? Well, as the writer and activist W E B DuBois said in the early 20th century, during the decades-long campaign to capitalise ‘Negro’: ‘I believe that 8 million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.’ I could argue that I don’t capitalise white because ‘white’ rarely rises to the level of a cultural identification – but the real reason I don’t is because race is never fair, so it’s fitting for inequality be written into the words we use for races.

Putting whiteness under inspection shows how powerful race is, despite the instability of racial categories. For decades, ‘whiteness’ was an explicit standard for citizenship. (Blacks could technically be citizens, but enjoyed none of the legal benefits. Asians born outside the US were prohibited from becoming citizens until the mid-20th century.) Eligibility for citizenship – painted as whiteness – has remained a category since its inscription in the Constitution, but those eligible for membership in that group have changed. Groups such as Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews were popularly defined as non-citizens and non-white when they first arrived, and then became white. What we see as white today is not the same as it was 100 years ago.

Thomas Nast’s cartoons are notorious in this regard. His caricatures of Irishmen and Blacks are particularly shocking because they are a type we no longer see today. Working-class Irishmen are represented as chimpanzees in crumpled top hats and curled-up shoes. Their faces have a large dome-shaped upper lip surrounded by bushy sideburns:

At times, Nast partnered the Irishman with an equally offensive image of a Black American, with big ‘Sambo’-style lips, perhaps a large rump and clunky bare feet. Today, few Americans have an image in their minds of what an Irish American should look like. Unless, perhaps, they meet a man named O’Connor with red hair, Americans today rarely think to themselves: ‘Of course! He looks Irish.’

Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could . Not all white people look the same

But Nast was not only sketching nasty caricatures of Irishmen; he was doing so in a way that would appear believable to his audience. In a similar example of invisible ethnicity, 15 per cent of Americans in 2014 reported German heritage. This ethnic group is widespread and numerous. So let me pose a simple question: what do German Americans look like? One in seven Americans are German American; how many of the German Americans you meet have you identified that way? Even more so than later immigrant groups such as Italian, Irish or Jewish, German is invisible.

Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could . It’s not the case that all white people look the same. My parents are both of predominantly Irish heritage. One summer, my family was travelling and had a layover in Ireland long enough for us to see the city of Dublin for the first time. We had not left the airport before my seven-year-old son said what I was already thinking: ‘Everybody here looks like grandma and grandpa!’ My family, according to my seven-year-old, looked like people from Ireland.

A few years later, I was to meet a French colleague at a busy Paris train station at rush hour, but neither of us knew what the other one looked like, and there were hundreds of people. I tried to guess which of the women entering, exiting, waiting, smoking, texting and milling about was the person I was to meet, but to no avail. Then I turned, and from a block away, through a crowd of hundreds, a woman waved directly at me. She had picked me out. I had been vaguely aware, before then, that no matter how familiar I got with Paris, I stood out on the subway: I might feel perfectly French riding the train, reading the advertisements in French and understanding the conductor, but when I got home and looked in the mirror, I knew my face was different from the diverse visages I saw in public.

Later I asked my colleague, and she said she knew I wasn’t French. How so? I asked. She scrutinised me. ‘ La mâchoire .’ It was your jaw, she said, with a satisfied smile. Until that day, I never knew there was such a thing as an Irish chin, but I had one. And no doubt, if Nast ever met my earliest American ancestors on the street, he’d know they looked Irish too. We don’t see Irish anymore, we don’t recognise it, we no longer caricature it. But we could.

T he racial category of Asian is just as unstable and entangled with political power as whiteness is. The US census started counting ‘Chinese’ back in 1870 (with no other category for people from the continent of Asia). Around the same time, the census started counting a similarly excluded group, American Indians, which the Constitution had designated as ripe for expropriation. Tellingly, Indian racial categories were unstable from the start: after not being counted at all, Indians were then included but tallied in the ‘white’ column – except in areas where there were large numbers of Indians, where they became their own category.

For Asians, as Paul Schor points out in his fascinating history Counting Americans (2017), the US government counted Chinese and Japanese but still left the rest of Asia blank, adding ‘Filipino, Hindu, and Korean’ in the 20th century. For something so clearly created by people, lists of racial groups are never comprehensive and typically ill-defined. Looking across the Eurasian continent, the US government today is still vague about where white ends and Asian begins. People in the US who were born east of Greece and west of Thailand are often unsure which boxes to check in the US census every 10 years. Like storm-borne waves or wind-blown sand dunes, race is a daunting obstacle that shifts and changes.

During the Second World War, China was a US ally, while Japan was an enemy. The US military decided it necessary to identify racial differences between the Chinese and the Japanese. In a series of cartoon illustrations, they tried to educate American soldiers about what to look for – what to see – in order to distinguish a Japanese solider who might be trying to blend in among a Chinese population.

Today, the ‘How to Spot a Jap’ leaflets are an offensive novelty – used either to illustrate the history of racist stereotyping or sold on postcards as ironic curiosities. But they can also be examined in another way. In The Civilizing Process (1978), the sociological theorist Norbert Elias studied books on manners from the European Renaissance to understand the process of the creation of what he called habitus . Manners that we see as utterly natural and inevitable today, like not blowing one’s nose at the table, or eating off the serving spoon, or belching or farting in public, are, in fact, socially constructed and learned behaviours.

At the historical moment at which they were introduced, books of manners were required to teach what is today utterly obvious to adults. They make for incredible reading. In his chapter ‘On Blowing One’s Nose’, for instance, Elias quotes a ‘precept for gentlemen’ that matter-of-factly explains: ‘When you blow your nose or cough, turn round so that nothing falls on the table.’ ‘Do not blow your nose with the same hand that you use to hold the meat.’ ‘It is unseemly to blow your nose into the tablecloth.’ Some of the recommendations are as poetic as they are graphic: ‘Nor is it seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head.’ It appears that actions that seem completely natural had to be taught explicitly.

Genetic inheritance isn’t what matters. What we literally see is shaped by politics

The ‘How to Spot a Jap’ flyers were printed to serve much the same function as the manners books that Elias studied. They tried to create and implant a racial habitus that distinguished the Japanese from the Chinese. That Second World War poster looks offensive today – crude, reductionist, insulting – and it is. We think that recognising such ridiculousness makes us less racist than the people who made it. It doesn’t. It merely means that we have different racial categories than in 1942.

Chinese and Japanese people look no more ‘similar’ or ‘different’ from one another than Irish Americans do from French Americans. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t differences as a matter of statistical distribution, but only that what we think we know about race has to be learned, and that what people ‘know’ and ‘see’ as salient and obvious changes over time. Most Americans cannot distinguish a white American of Irish origin versus one of French origin walking down the street, yet they hardly need pamphlets explaining what to look for to tell if someone is white or Black. If the distinction between Japanese and Chinese had remained as significant in the US today as it was to US soldiers during the Second World War, many people would see it as similarly self-evident.

On-the-street racial distinctions don’t have to be ‘perfect’. People often don’t recognise the author Malcolm Gladwell as Black, although he is; other times whites are mistaken for Blacks. For the purposes of making or unmaking a racial difference, genetic inheritance isn’t what matters. What we literally see is shaped by politics. The same two groups can be visibly different racially or indistinguishable racially, depending on the political context and power relations by which they’re categorised.

F rancis Galton was a pioneer in modern statistics. But he was also a eugenicist. Among other things, Galton became notorious for photos in the late 19th century that purported to reveal the ‘Jewish type’. At the time, people believed that Irish, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese or German denoted races. When Jews were a race, people thought that they could tell who was Jewish by looking at them. Today, many Jewish people recoil at the idea that there is a Jewish ‘race’, and find the suggestion that there is a Jewish ‘look’ inherently racist. At various times, then, the US Army, Thomas Nast and the father of the statistical method of regression analysis all believed that there were visually distinct and observable races that many Americans today would be generally unable to identify – certainly not with the level of certainty they’d feel with respect to racial categories such as Caucasian, African American, Latino or Asian.

I suspect that a visitor from a planet without race would have a very difficult time slotting anyone on Earth into the racial categories we use today. If they were asked to group people visually, there is no statistical possibility that they’d use the same set of arbitrary boxes, and even if these categories were described for them in detail, they would probably not sort actual people in the same way as the modern US does.

That we think we see race naturally, when in fact it’s socially constructed, is the third eye through which we see the world. The census prediction that the US will be majority minority is less a conclusion than a question: ‘What future will immigrants of colour build in the US?’ The answer involves not just changes that transpire between one group and another, but changes to the membership of those groups and their symbolic meaning. In response to demographic shifts, the very boundaries of whiteness are likely to shift, as indeed they’ve done before.

In the worst case, a majority non-white US could take its cue from apartheid-era South Africa

In The History of White People (2011), Nell Irvin Painter argues that the idea of ‘whiteness’ has expanded several times to include more and more people. First came the Irish and previously ‘suspect’ non-Protestants, who ‘gained’ whiteness in the late 1800s. The next great expansion of whiteness came with the social upheaval and physical relocation of both servicemen and migrating industrial workers during the Second World War. In the war economy, groups including Italians, Jews and Mexicans became upwardly mobile, and sought to present themselves in allegiance with Anglo-Saxon beauty ideals (the only Jewish Miss America was crowned in 1945) – all of which helped to recast them as ‘white’. The narrative of white inclusivity continued from the Roosevelt era into the postwar period. Finally, intermarriage eventually dissolved previous notions of racial boundaries. Few white Americans could claim a single national race (Swedish, German, French) with any confidence, and whiteness could no longer sustain the idea of nation-based races. For Painter, this most recent change closed the book on any scientific basis for race, and helped to make the US a country where people are much more mixed, across old racial boundaries, than ever before.

Perhaps this mixing means that the US is finally warming to multiracial identity. But if that is indeed happening, it’s not because of demographics, but because of the tireless efforts of activists who continue to fight racism and racial segregation. Movements for racial justice succeed not simply because of demographic shifts but because racial privileges cannot justify themselves in the face of an organised alternative. Many countries have been minority white yet held on to whiteness; to the extent that whiteness meant citizenship, these were states that were ruled by a minority and oversaw the hyper-exploitation of a much larger part of the country. In the worst case, a majority non-white US could take its cue from apartheid-era South Africa, or Brazil, or Guatemala, where a small light-skinned group has enjoyed privileges at the expense of many more who are excluded.

The path to justice therefore involves attacking the prerogative to categorise people in order to justify their exploitation or colonisation. That means acknowledging and challenging the basis of racial categories. It’s not about a token embrace of multicultural colour: it’s about power, and power is far too wily for us to expect it to stand still and be overtaken by demographic change. We need to confront the force of racial privilege no matter who inhabits the privileged caste at any given moment. It’s no good imagining that innate human diversity will render the system powerless.

T he US shift towards majority non-whiteness is not destiny, but it is an opportunity. Painter notes that when external conditions change, it becomes possible to imagine different racial hierarchies. The geographical and social remixing of the Second World War cooked down the diverse European identities in the US into a single racial category of ‘white’. Likewise, Asian immigrants occupied one role when Asian immigration was largely working class, West Coast, limited in numbers, and male, as it was at the end of the 19th century. But the racial constraints on Asian Americans shifted when immigration law came to favour professionals, and brought middle- and working-class people, women and men, in larger numbers than before to more US cities.

Using shifting social situations to upend racial hierarchies is not just about challenging racism, but race itself. This doesn’t mean the disingenuous denial of race when racism still very much exists, but a collective challenge to its right to determine our lives. The Black Lives Matter movement seeks to take away the police’s prerogative to use violence against African Americans with no legal sanctions; success would undermine an important means of maintaining racial segregation and inequality. What would it mean, once and for all, to bury the shameful, misplaced pride some white people have for the South’s role in the Civil War, and acknowledge instead the irredeemable mistakes of their forefathers? What would it mean to frankly acknowledge each nation’s racial past, and think about what reparations would set us on a path to greater prosperity? Race is neither inevitable nor something we can wish away. Instead, we must take advantage of the instability in what we perceive, and redistribute the power that perpetuates race.

Race never stays still. As the sociologist Richard Alba pointed out in The Washington Post last month, the prediction that the US will be majority non-white by 2044 relies on a definition of race that is static, and doesn’t acknowledge the surprising reality that people’s races change. Nearly 10 million people listed their racial identification differently on the 2010 census than they had in 2000. Alba criticises the census for ‘binary thinking’ which counts anyone with Hispanic heritage as Hispanic, and through a quirk in the census questions, effectively ignores any other racial identity that they could claim. ‘[A] majority-minority society should be seen as a hypothesis, not a foreordained result,’ Alba wrote, of the 2044 claim. This is important, because when it comes to fighting racism, we can’t rely on demographic shifts to do the work for us. Instead, if we recognise that race looks solid but is shifting, we can find additional ways to destabilise the structures of racial inequality.

Getting rid of racism requires clarity about the nature of the enemy. The way to defeat white supremacy is to destroy it. The US will truly be ‘majority non-white’ only when white is no longer the privileged citizenship category, when white is no more meaningful than the archaic Octoroon or Irish. This is not to discount the anxiety about cultural loss conjured by talk of an imagined colourblind future, but to recognise the inextricability of racial identities and power inequality. With work, perhaps the next expansion of whiteness will be into oblivion.

This Essay is adapted from Cause … And How it Doesn’t Always Equal Effect (2018) by Gregory Smithsimon, published by Melville House Books.

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Getting Real About Race

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Getting Real About Race  is an edited collection of short essays that address the most common stereotypes and misconceptions about race held by students, and by many in the United States, in general. Key Features

• Each essay concludes with  suggested sources  including videos, websites, books, and/or articles that instructors can choose to assign as additional readings on a topic.
• Essays also end with  questions for discussion  that allow students to move from the “what” (knowledge) to the “so what” (implications) of race in their own lives.
• In this spirit, the authors include suggested “ Reaching Across the Color Line ” activities at the end of each essay, allowing students to apply their new knowledge on the topic in a unique or creative way.
• Current topics  students want to discuss are brought up through the text, making it easier for the instructor to deal with these topics in an open classroom environment.

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Race and Ethnicity

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Race is a concept of human classification scheme based on visible features including eye color, skin color, the texture of the hair and other facial and bodily characteristics. Through these features, humans are ten categorized into distinct groups of population and this is enhanced by the fact that the characteristics are fully inherited.

Across the globe, debate on the topic of race has dominated for centuries. This is especially due to the resultant discrimination meted on the basis of these differences. Consequently, a lot of controversy surrounds the issue of race socially, politically but also in the scientific world.

According to many sociologists, race is more of a modern idea rather than a historical. This is based on overwhelming evidence that in ancient days physical differences mattered least. Most divisions were as a result of status, religion, language and even class.

Most controversy originates from the need to understand whether the beliefs associated with racial differences have any genetic or biological basis. Classification of races is mainly done in reference to the geographical origin of the people. The African are indigenous to the African continent: Caucasian are natives of Europe, the greater Asian represents the Mongols, Micronesians and Polynesians: Amerindian are from the American continent while the Australoid are from Australia. However, the common definition of race regroups these categories in accordance to skin color as black, white and brown. The groups described above can then fall into either of these skin color groupings (Origin of the Races, 2010, par6).

It is possible to believe that since the concept of race was a social description of genetic and biological differences then the biologists would agree with these assertions. However, this is not true due to several facts which biologists considered. First, race when defined in line with who resides in what continent is highly discontinuous as it was clear that there were different races sharing a continent. Secondly, there is continuity in genetic variations even in the socially defined race groupings.

This implies that even in people within the same race, there were distinct racial differences hence begging the question whether the socially defined race was actually a biologically unifying factor. Biologists estimate that 85% of total biological variations exist within a unitary local population. This means that the differences among a racial group such as Caucasians are much more compared to those obtained from the difference between the Caucasians and Africans (Sternberg, Elena & Kidd, 2005, p49).

In addition, biologists found out that the various races were not distinct but rather shared a single lineage as well as a single evolutionary path. Therefore there is no proven genetic value derived from the concept of race. Other scientists have declared that there is absolutely no scientific foundation linking race, intelligence and genetics.

Still, a trait such as skin color is completely independent of other traits such as eye shape, blood type, hair texture and other such differences. This means that it cannot be correct to group people using a group of features (Race the power of an illusion, 2010, par3).

What is clear to all is that all human beings in the modern day belong to the same biological sub-species referred to biologically as Homo sapiens sapiens. It has been proven that humans of different races are at least four times more biologically similar in comparison to the different types of chimpanzees which would ordinarily be seen as being looking alike.

It is clear that the original definition of race in terms of the external features of the facial formation and skin color did not capture the scientific fact which show that the genetic differences which result to these changes account to an insignificant proportion of the gene controlling the human genome.

Despite the fact that it is clear that race is not biological, it remains very real. It is still considered an important factor which gives people different levels of access to opportunities. The most visible aspect is the enormous advantages available to white people. This cuts across many sectors of human life and affects all humanity regardless of knowledge of existence.

This being the case, I find it difficult to understand the source of great social tensions across the globe based on race and ethnicity. There is enormous evidence of people being discriminated against on the basis of race. In fact countries such as the US have legislation guarding against discrimination on basis of race in different areas.

The findings define a stack reality which must be respected by all human beings. The idea of view persons of a different race as being inferior or superior is totally unfounded and goes against scientific findings.

Consequently these facts offer a source of unity for the entire humanity. Humanity should understand the need to scrap the racial boundaries not only for the sake of peace but also for fairness. Just because someone is white does not imply that he/she is closer to you than the black one. This is because it could even be true that you have more in common with the black one than the white one.

Reference List

Origin of the Races, 2010. Race Facts. Web.

Race the power of an illusion, 2010. What is race? . Web.

Sternberg, J., Elena L. & Kidd, K. 2005. Intelligence, Race, and Genetics. The American Psychological Association Vol. 60(1), 46–59 . Web.

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Article contents

Race, ethnicity, and nation.

• Polly Rizova Polly Rizova Center for Governance and Public Policy Research, Willamette University
•  and  John Stone John Stone Department of Sociology, Boston University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.470
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 11 January 2018
• This version: 26 April 2021
• Previous version

The term “race” refers to groups of people who have differences and similarities in biological traits deemed by society to be socially significant, meaning that people treat other people differently because of them. Meanwhile, ethnicity refers to shared cultural practices, perspectives, and distinctions that set apart one group of people from another. Ethnic differences are not inherited; they are learned. When racial or ethnic groups merge in a political movement as a form of establishing a distinct political unit, then such groups can be termed nations that may be seen as representing beliefs in nationalism. Race and ethnicity are linked with nationality particularly in cases involving transnational migration or colonial expansion. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity, see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system. This culminated in the rise of “nation-states,” in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided with state borders. Thus, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined. Theories about the relation between race, ethnicity, and nationality are also linked to more general ideas concerning globalization and populist nationalism.

• nationalism
• transnational migration
• colonial expansion
• globalization
• populist nationalism

Updated in this version

Updated references, enhanced discussions of globalization and populist nationalism.

Introduction: Three Variations on a Theme

The three terms—race, ethnicity, and nation—represent forms of group identification that may be the result of internal choice, external categorization, or some combination of the two perspectives. “Race” is the most controversial term since it is based on a false biological premise that there are distinct groups of genetically similar human populations and that these “races” share unique social and cultural characteristics. This assumption was common among many thinkers during the 19th and much of the 20th centuries and still has a considerable following in folk theories and everyday discourse, but it has been completely discredited by scientific knowledge in biology and genetics. The popularity of such racist thinking is linked to its utility in justifying all types of group oppression and exploitation, exemplified by slavery, imperialism, genocide, apartheid, and other systems of stratification and segregation. Ethnicity, or the sense of belonging to a community based on a common history, language, religion, and other cultural characteristics, is a central concept that has been used to understand an important basis of identity in most societies around the world and throughout human history. When ethnic or “racial” groups combine in a political movement in order to create or maintain a distinct political unit, or state, then such groups can be termed nations and such movements may be seen as embodying ideologies or beliefs in nationalism.

In reality, there is a considerable overlap between racism, ethnicity, and nationalism. Extreme forms of nationalism often have a racial ideology associated with them, as was the case with German nationalism during the Nazi period ( 1933–1945 ) or Afrikaner nationalism in the era of apartheid ( 1948–1990 ). While some scholars use the term “ethnonationalism” (Connor, 1993 ) to merge the forces of ethnicity and nationalism, others draw a distinction between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism. The former comprises a sense of belonging based on common ancestry, while the latter focuses on membership in a shared political unit that can include citizens from diverse ethnic origins. However, the types of identity associated with these two variants of nationalism are rarely clear-cut and empirical cases usually consist of a mixture of features drawn from both phenomena (Brubaker, 2004 , pp. 132–146). Academic studies of racism, ethnicity, and nationalism reveal the same imprecise boundaries between them, which suggests they should be treated as variations on similar social and political themes.

Historians have argued at length concerning the legitimate application of the terms to different forms of social relationships and intergroup attitudes. While slavery has existed in many societies throughout human history, a question remains as to whether it is reasonable to regard the position of Greek slaves in the Roman Empire as on a par with that of African slaves in North America, the Caribbean, or Latin America. If the specific form of “racism” in the United States was a product of a particularly vicious system of chattel slavery, to what extent then can we make generalizations about this term m to cover other historical cases of group domination? Many of the same problems arise in the case of nationalism, but here the arguments have centered on the issue of the origins of the phenomenon. When can we say that a sense of national identity first arose: in the Ancient World, during the 16th century in England (Greenfeld, 1992 ), or as an outcome of the American and French revolutions? Was nationalism a deeply rooted and continuous force in human history, or a relatively recent “invention” that acts as a convenient cover for other, more fundamental changes (Gellner, 1983 ; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983 ; Smith, 1986 , 2008 )? Volumes have been written attempting to date the origins of nationalism and the types of forces that can be seen as central to its emergence as a major factor in the modern world. Like so many academic debates, much depends on one’s definition of nationalism—whether, for example, it is viewed as a mass or an elite phenomenon—and what combination of causal variables one chooses to include in its formation.

It is partly the association with difficult-to-change biological properties that has made racism so controversial and yet so attractive for dominant groups. In the middle of the 19th century , Gobineau’s ( 1853–1855 ) Essay on the Inequality of Human Races set out an analysis of human society and history using a racist model, and its popularity and widespread adoption by other thinkers served to reinforce the political realities of group domination for almost a century. It was cited approvingly by several influential American sociologists and historians in order to justify Southern slavery in the United States and acted as a precursor to the influential theory of an “Aryan” master race destined to rule or exterminate “inferior” racial groups, which underpinned the cultural and political thinking of such figures as Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler. Similar conclusions developed along parallel tracks in Anglo-American intellectual circles that employed a distortion of Darwin’s ideas of natural selection introduced by an influential group of thinkers, the Social Darwinists. Perhaps the best refutation of Gobineau’s assumptions was found in the critique by his friend and colleague Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America ( 1835–1840 ) and The Ancien Regime and the Revolution ( 1856 ). Tocqueville pointed to the historical tendency of all-powerful groups to assume the permanent nature of their superiority over those whom they had conquered and continued to dominate. A simple understanding of the rise and fall of empires and nations showed how improbable the assumption was that any particular system of group domination would last indefinitely. This implicit power model of race relations, while by no means the only system of thought designed to account for racial hierarchies in nonracial terms found among scholars, nevertheless recurred in the writings of social scientists and historians during the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries . Despite their often less than progressive ideas on many issues affecting the society of their day, prominent thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Vilfredo Pareto understood the political basis of imperialism and colonialism and were very much opposed to both of them. Thus, the former referred to European imperialist policies as “social cannibalism,” and the latter attacked the hypocrisy of the so-called civilizing mission of the colonial powers as nothing more than an excuse for exploiting their superior force (Stone & Rizova, 2014 ).

One of the clearest developments of this type of explanation of race, ethnicity, and nation can be seen in the writings of the influential German sociologist Max Weber (see Stone & Dennis, 2003 ). In keeping with his general framework that stressed the analogies between economic and social life, Weber conceived of these three types of group formation as another manifestation of the general tendency toward monopolization frequently found in economic life as well as in society as a whole. Such a formulation helped to explain the variety and often quite arbitrary nature of group boundaries—in one situation it would be religion, in another it would be language, or in a third it could be “race”—which happened to be used as the markers defining membership or exclusion from the group. Sometimes all three factors might be superimposed on each other to create the boundaries separating the dominant from the subordinate groups; on other occasions these characteristics appeared to cut across group membership in one or another combination. Nevertheless, the defining feature of this historical process was to establish increasingly strict criteria for membership and exclusion that, once set in motion, became a self-reinforcing process. Just as economic competition in the long run often results in monopolies under market capitalism, so too do groups seek to monopolize the life chances and other benefits of social hierarchy within multiethnic and multiracial states, or between states in the international arena.

In the middle of the 20th century , the defeat of the Axis powers of Germany and Japan, and the unraveling of colonialism, combined with powerful protest movements such as the civil rights struggle in the United States and the antiapartheid campaign in South Africa, were some of the forces diminishing the crude divisions between racially defined groups on a global scale. That said, the importance of ethnicity and the persistence of nationalism have proved to be surprisingly resilient. Premature declarations that modernity and globalization would inevitably undermine peoples’ allegiance to ethnic attachments, or spell the end of national sentiment, have turned out to be unfounded. This is not to claim that in certain spheres the influence of ethnicity and nationalism has become relatively less powerful, or indeed that racism has been abolished, but rather to point to the protean character of these basic types of identity and their ability to adapt, mutate, and reemerge as historical conditions unfold. Thus, the end of the Cold War reduced the ability of ideological rivalries to mask and submerge all manner of ethnic and national divisions in a wider global struggle. As a result, toward the final decades of the 20th century , a Pandora’s box of previously muted national sentiments burst open in the Balkans (Rizova, 2007 ) to provide a counterexample to the surprisingly peaceful transition from apartheid to nonracial democracy in South Africa.

Race: Biology as Destiny

In spite of the intellectual demolition of the genetic basis of racial theorizing since the second half of the 20th century , the legacy of racism lives on. This is hardly surprising given the coalescence of European colonialism, the slave trade, and the imbalances of global power over the past 500 years. All of this began to unravel during the 20th century in a way that first questioned and then started to undermine the customary hierarchies of half a millennium. The intellectual evolution of human biology initially provided what appeared to be a simple explanation for the apparent correlation between power and race. In the 19th century , biology rivaled theology as the perfect way to legitimize group domination. Subordinate groups no longer had to be damned by the Almighty to perpetual inferiority when they could be damned by their genes. In some ways the utility of biological excommunication was rather less than that justified by faith since the former was always subject to empirical refutation. As knowledge in the biological sciences progressed, greater evidence supported the view that all human population groups shared an overwhelmingly common genetic heritage and what was even more compelling was the fact that variations within so-called races were far more significant than any variations between these categories. As biological explanations seemed harder to sustain, a new consensus started to emerge in academic circles that races were social constructions and therefore that differences were the product of cultural traditions and historical circumstance that could, and no doubt would, change with time. The biological explanations of racial differences were thus false and so other factors needed to be used to explain the social reality behind group differences.

What Alexis de Tocqueville understood as a result of his historical perspective, and Max Weber appreciated by his comparative research, was increasingly supported by the scientific advances in the field of human biology. Not that this was a smooth transition from a paradigm of racial theorizing to an understanding of human difference in terms of resources and power. The elegance of justifying inequality as a consequence of scientific inevitability continually reoccurred in one form after another. Often the proponents were not “racist” in a direct sense of the term, and some had strongly antiracist credentials, but the result of this form of theorizing was almost indistinguishable from earlier biological arguments. Thus sociobiology, based on the twin concepts of kin selection and inclusive fitness, might be seen as entirely divorced from vulgar racial thinking. However, by elevating the “selfish gene” to the master explanation of all human activity and creation, this argument had the potential to offer an approach uncomfortably close in its implications to the theory that Gobineau had proposed a hundred years earlier. It is no surprise that the experience of biological theorizing and its consequences throughout the 20th century have subjected such ideas to a far more skeptical appraisal and caused their proponents to be rather more cautious in linking genetic characteristics to cultural and social outcomes.

Nevertheless, racism has been a persistent and powerful influence on social life for much of the 20th century . The frequently quoted prediction of W. E. B. Du Bois ( 1903 ) in The Souls of Black Folk , that the color line would be a defining division in human society for the following hundred years and that it would be not merely an American conflict but global in its reach, has been more than fulfilled by the passage of time. Against the backdrop of the history of the 20th century , which witnessed the decline of European domination over much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the struggle for civil rights in the United States and South Africa, and a succession of genocidal massacres that stretched from the gas chambers of Auschwitz to the killing fields of Rwanda and Darfur, it is often hard to imagine why racist ideas have not been totally discredited. Although some people, perhaps those coming from societies less conscious of the civil rights and liberation struggles of the 20th century , may still believe in the fallacy of racial difference, among the educated populations of the world these beliefs appear to be of diminishing significance. That said, it would be completely wrong to regard racism, and antagonism based on racial divisions, to be no longer a significant element in the conflicts that continue to tear apart much of the fabric of contemporary global society. This paradox, of greater understanding of the nature of “racial” conflict on the one hand, and yet the continuing persistence of race on the other hand, requires a careful dissection of the meaning of “race” in contemporary society. The complexity of the topic and the manner in which such thinking has subtly shifted has led some social scientists to write about “racism without racists” (Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ) and still others to devote much scrutiny to a related, counterintuitive phenomenon, “ethnicity without groups” (Brubaker, 2004 ) and the “slippery nature” of contemporary racisms (Solomos, 2020 ).

It is already generally accepted that race is a social construct, an idea—in this case a scientifically erroneous one—that is in the minds of people. The enormous variability of racial systems from one society to another, and in different historical periods, demonstrates that racial background has little intrinsic importance, and that racial identity is rather a powerful legacy of cultural tradition and social inertia. Nevertheless, the changes that still need to take place in order for all white Americans to accept their black fellow citizens not only as governors, leading officials, and even as their President, but also as residential neighbors, remain to be realized. Despite the two-term Obama presidency ( 2008–2016 ) and the premature use of the term “post-racialism” to describe it, such unexpected progress has been quickly put to rest by the arrival of the explicitly racist language and actions of the Trump administration (Stone & Rizova, 2020 ). The Black Lives Matter movement (Dennis & Dennis, 2020 ), along with the rise of white nationalism, part of a global trend toward populist nationalism, provide widespread evidence of the continuing significance of race throughout the world.

The long-term difficulty in overcoming this legacy can be explained in part by what Charles Tilly and Thomas Shapiro have termed “opportunity hoarding,” the passing on of assets between generations that favors whites over blacks at a ratio of 10 to one (Shapiro, 2004 ; Tilly, 1998 ). Another historical perspective that helps to explain the entrenchment of racial privilege is the manner in which the discussion about “affirmative action” has been framed. Increasingly, scholars are linking dominant “affirmative action” to the New Deal and to those policies designed to assist white veterans, notably the GI Bill, after World War II (Katznelson, 2006 ). A parallel discussion is to view the implementation of apartheid in South Africa, between 1948 and 1990 , as another type of affirmative action for the benefit of the dominant (white) political group. Its demonstrated effectiveness in raising the lower class of Afrikaners—the bywoners —out of poverty helps to explain some of the subsequent levels of racial inequality in postapartheid South Africa.

Returning to the American case, one only needs to drive through the heart of major, or for that matter minor, American cities, examine the student populations of so many of the worst American public schools, or simply consider the statistics describing the inmates of the American penal system (Alexander, 2010 ), and the reality of the continuing significance of race is hard to deny. Furthermore, the health disparities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 revealed the heavily disproportionate numbers of black and brown casualties among the infection and death rates in America. These figures, together with the often lethal police violence exposed, yet again, by the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, show how black and white lives are by no means subject to the same opportunities and risks in contemporary America.

To focus on the American case is to survey only part of the problem. However, because of its high ideals—crafted by the slave-owning proponents of democracy for a “civilized” elite that did not include either women or minorities—the United States has been at the center of a storm of ethical debates about who should be granted full membership of, and who should be excluded from, the rights and privileges of freedom. The problematic nature of this debate can be seen in the preference of so many black slaves to join and fight with the British colonial forces in the 1770s against the advocates of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Given the bias toward white property-owning males, this decision was based on a rational calculation that London was more likely to end the “peculiar institution” than the slave-owning “democrats” meeting in Philadelphia (Schama, 2006 ). This is not to glamorize the motives of the British who, no sooner had they lost the fight in North America, went on to pillage Africa, Asia, and other exploitable parts of the globe as they scrambled to “civilize” the rest of humanity.

But racism is certainly not confined to the Anglo-American world. The evolution of rather different patterns of racial hierarchy and group conflicts can be seen in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. As Edward Telles ( 2004 ) has argued in Race in Another America , Brazil has been plagued by powerful traditions of racial distinction, but the dynamics of race relations follow a different logic from that underlying the pattern found in the United States. Despite the ideology of “racial democracy,” formulated in its classical manner by Gilberto Freyre’s ( 1933 ) The Masters and the Slaves , few social scientists or historians would seriously deny that Brazilian society is permeated by considerations of color (Bailey, 2020 ; Fritz, 2011 ). The fundamental difference is, in some cruel paradox, that individuals, under the rules of the Brazilian system, can, so to speak, “change their race,” while blacks in America, conforming to the pressures of the one drop rule, cannot.

Individualism in the United States may be characterized the philosophy of social mobility, but it does not breach the color line. The very fluidity of the Brazilian system has made it in the past a more subtle and complex problem to solve, although the election of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 —the “Trump of the Tropics”—revealed a new, and hardly nuanced, slant on racial democracy. The Brazilian case can be seen as a cautionary tale concerning the strengths and weaknesses of a comparative perspective. On the one hand, viewing the patterns in one society in isolation from a wider lens invites a form of myopia that greatly diminishes the value of the exercise; on the other hand, embarking on elaborate comparative analyses without a close understanding of the complexities of each situation invites another type of bias. Nevertheless, trying to place rather different systems within a wider framework has become increasingly necessary as the forces of globalization continue to foster closer links between virtually all societies as they are bound together by the ties of an interlinked global system. The exercise becomes even more challenging when one recognizes that there are “many globalizations” (Berger & Huntington, 2003 ) and that no society is ever static as far as its intergroup relationships, or indeed most other aspects of its structure and culture, are concerned. In many of the classic attempts to formulate such broadly comparative models of racial conflict—Pierre van den Berghe ( 1967 ) and Anthony Marx ( 1998 ), for example—the United States, Brazil, and South Africa are often the key reference points. But the shifting nature of race relations in all three of these societies reveals how difficult it is to predict the future direction of multiracial societies.

From being the bastion of racial oppression under the apartheid regime, South Africa has been regenerated as a society where nonracial democracy is the dominant political consensus.

The full implications of this profound and, in many respects, surprising transformation of a rigid racial hierarchy raised enormous hopes for the future direction of the country. However, understanding the nature of social change and how far it has affected the lives of most citizens of the new South Africa is an important illustration of the dynamic nature of most racial systems over time. It is also an excellent way to develop insights into the generation of racial conflict by analyzing those situations where, despite the presence of so many of the characteristics that are often associated with violence, it simply did not take place on anything like the scale that most experts, politicians, and ordinary people predicted. Nevertheless, a quarter of a century later, we have a more realistic assessment of the degree to which “Mandela’s miracle” has transformed South African society or rather has replaced one elite, which was racially defined, with another system of privilege, but one less loosely linked to racial divisions. A succession of disastrous political leaders following Mandela, from Thabo Mbeki, with his tragic refusal to address the AIDS crisis, to the rampant corruption of Jacob Zuma, has squandered much of the promise of a democratic South Africa (Moodley & Adam, 2020 ).

Ethnicity: Group Divisions Rooted in Culture

The power of race as a boundary marker has been continuously demonstrated for the past two centuries in many societies throughout the globe. Its persistence, despite the intellectual bankruptcy of its genetic rationalization, cannot be attributed solely to ignorance, and this explains why education alone is often an insufficient antidote to racial thinking and hierarchies built on racial divisions. Economic, social, and political changes are all part of the process by which racial stratification is challenged, modified, and in some cases overturned. Claims about the relative significance of race or class, and whether strategies emphasizing political mobilization or economic self-sufficiency and advancement hold the key to transforming racial disadvantage and oppression, have been at the core of racial debates throughout the 20th century . Another complication is the overlap between racial markers and ethnic boundaries that often exacerbates such conflicts. Ethnic divisions can be just as deep-seated and ethnic conflicts just as violent as those linked to a racial divide. Language, religion, history, and culture merge and intersect in varying degrees in many of these conflicts. Which factors prove to be salient in any one situation largely depends on the particular historical circumstances that frame the subsequent patterns of ethnic relations.

Among the critical events that influence ethnogenesis and ethnic conflict are patterns of global migration and the related forces of conquest, genocide, settlement, and types of assimilation, integration, and pluralism. Migration has been an endemic force in most societies and in recent centuries has even been incorporated into the founding myths of states that view themselves as based on migration, rather than being derived from some claim of indigenous ownership of a specific land. Such migrant societies include not simply the United States—a self-proclaimed “Society of Immigrants”—but also Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Canada. In reality, most societies over time have experienced considerable influxes of new peoples and large outflows of population groups motivated by a variety of factors including the search for economic opportunities, flight from political persecution or military destruction, and the quest for freedom of religious practice and expression, to mention just a few. Some societies encounter inflows and outflows simultaneously, while others include migrants and settlers of varying lengths of time—seasonal migrants, “guest workers” ( gastarbeiter ), transnational communities, nomadic peoples, diasporas, “global cosmopolitans,” undocumented workers, and refugees—and most change the composition and scale of migrant flows and influence over time. Thus, Italy and Ireland were major sources of global migration, particularly the transatlantic movements to North and South America, for much of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries . However, by the turn of the 21st century , it was the impact of migrants trying to enter these two parts of the prosperous European Union (EU), as opposed to the previous tradition of sympathizing with poor migrants escaping famine and rural poverty, that became the salient issue in both societies (O’Dowd, 2005 ). A similar dramatic reversal in perception could be seen in the opposition and violence directed at refugees and economic migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and other sub-Saharan African states living in urban townships around Johannesburg in 2008 .

Different societies have different mechanisms for accommodating ethnic diversity. Some seek to assimilate newcomers as rapidly as possible, while others have more fluid systems of differential incorporation—segmented assimilation, to use one of the common terms employed in the North American literature—with a variety of possible forms. Not all migrant groups wish to become completely integrated into the mainstream of the dominant society; many do but are not accepted without a long period of acculturation and a fierce struggle for structural inclusion. The constant interaction between racism and ethnicity can also be seen in the manner in which some ethnic groups are more readily accepted than others and, in certain cases, migrant groups of one ethnic background may receive advantages denied to oppressed indigenous minorities. In the United States, many of the white ethnic groups, in order to achieve greater acceptance by the core society, quite specifically distanced themselves from blacks and Native Americans, who had been living as stigmatized sectors in the society for centuries prior to their arrival. How the Irish “became white” (Ignatiev, 1995 ; Roediger, 2007 ) was a pattern repeated by many other immigrants, such as the Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews, who arrived toward the end of the 19th and in the first two decades of the 20th centuries . Other ethnic groups were also assimilated in patterns that reflected the particular set of characteristics that they possessed, in terms of human and social capital, as well as the economic, social, and political conditions prevailing during the period of their arrival. Thus, Cubans fleeing the Castro revolution in 1959 , and for the duration of the Cold War, benefited greatly from the ideological struggles of the period. Haitians, arriving in Florida at much the same time and escaping the murderous regimes of the Duvaliers, received far less support. Although color may have been part of the equation, the political advantage of being fervent anticommunists was probably an even more important factor.

While North America and Western Europe shared many similar patterns of migration and assimilation during the first two decades of the 21st century —unlikely parallels between Mexican and Muslims having been raised by social scientists on both continents (Huntington, 2004 ; Zolberg & Woon, 1999 )—even societies with a strong ideology of ethnic homogeneity were forced to confront their actual diversity. Germany’s powerful ethnic nationalist tradition (Alba & Foner, 2015 ; Alba et al., 2003 ) has had to be modified by the increasing integration of the European Union, so that second- and third-generation Germans of Turkish ethnic background could no longer be regarded as permanent aliens. Much the same is true of Japan, and not only Ainu and Burakumin, but also Koreans, Chinese, and Okinawans are increasingly self-conscious minorities that have started to challenge the monoethnic ideology of post-World War II Japan (Lie & Weng, 2020 ; Tarumoto, 2020 ). In China, with its enormous population of 1.3 billion, relatively small numbers of ethnic and religious minorities nevertheless constitute a group of approximately 100 million people, and the situation of the Uighurs, Tibetans, and Hui have started to receive greater scholarly and political attention (Hou & Stone, 2008 ). This is hardly surprising given the monumental transformation of Chinese society as the workshop of the modern world, and the types of pressures that such an economic transition creates for all peoples involved in this historic process. Not only are there massive internal migratory movements linked to rapid industrialization and urbanization (Luo, 2020 ), but the adaptation of minorities to these forces almost inevitably results in language change and perceived threats to traditional ways of life. As for the Tibetan case, China’s vast population has allowed a pattern of outside migration of Han Chinese that for the nationalist critics is seen as tantamount to “ethnic swamping,” a variant on ethnic cleansing with a veneer of democratic legitimacy. Contemporary China is facing yet another policy dilemma between playing an increasing global role on the one hand, and using the forces of rising nationalism on the other hand (Hou, 2020 ).

In Africa, ethnic divisions have been a continuing legacy of imperialism that has followed on into the postcolonial era and resulted in much conflict and bloodshed. Even decades after independence, many African states are still permeated by political systems closely linked to ethnic (tribal) loyalties, making a winner-takes-all electoral system unsuited to resolving the problems of state-building and economic development. Nigeria’s war to prevent the Biafran secession ( 1967–1970 ), the genocidal massacres in Rwanda ( 1994 ), and the killings in the Darfur region of Sudan ( 2003 –) are some prominent examples of independent Africa’s struggles with the impact of ethnic conflict. The South African situation was another case where a society that was deeply divided by racial and ethnic boundaries managed to resolve these conflicts in a remarkably peaceful form of negotiation. The society simply redefined the racial and ethnic boundaries to include all groups on the basis of full citizenship for everyone. Whether the South African model, with its distinctive use of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and many other unique features, can be a successful long-term experiment in nonracialism remains to be seen. However, some of the lessons learned from the South African case have been applied to other conflict-torn areas of the world, such as Northern Ireland and the Basque region of Spain.

The last two cases illustrate the diverse boundary markers that can be found in regions plagued by ethnic conflicts. In Northern Ireland, “religion” was the ostensible ground for group solidarity and division, the centuries-old difference between the Protestant ruling group and the Catholic minority being the manner in which the conflict was framed. However, the underlying struggle appeared to most analysts to have little or nothing to do with doctrinal matters and much more to be based on those who regarded themselves as part of Britain (the “Protestants”) and those who identified with Ireland and being Irish (the “Catholics”). In the Basque case, language and cultural divisions, closely tied in with feelings of historical separation, represented the ethnic glue behind a strong sense of Basque identity and the movement for separation from Spain (Conversi, 1997 ). For both situations, however, many social scientists interpret the struggle as one between groups divided on the basis of nationalism. Once an ethnic group moves toward mobilization with the goal of creating a separate state, or joining a different state from the one that it is currently a part, then ethnicity is transformed into nationalism.

The nature of these movements has been explored by scholars who emphasize a variety of different factors to account for the changing salience of ethnic and national struggles over time (Fearson & Laitin, 2003 , 2005 ). Most of these factors are related to the relative power of ethnonationalist movements compared with the state structures they are fighting against. The components of the power equation can include many influences, including the legitimacy of the groups’ claims for national independence; whether such movements are united or consist of a coalition of conflicting parties; the extent to which ethnic groups and nationalist movements are spread across multiple state boundaries and are geographically concentrated or dispersed; the strength and resilience of the states that oppose them; and the geopolitical context in which the conflict is taking place. The situation of the Kurds illustrates several of these elements, such as the opposition to statehood from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and the opportunities for greater autonomy presented by the collapse of centralized political control that emerged as a consequence of the 2003 Iraq war (O’Leary et al., 2005 ). While the Kurds played a significant military role in the defeat of ISIS during the Syrian civil war ( 2011 –) after the Russian support for President Bashar al-Assad proved decisive, the Kurdish forces were rapidly abandoned by their former allies, reflecting the number of states opposed to any idea of an independent Kurdish state.

The Continuing Significance of the Nation

Thus, ethnicity and nationalism form different stages along a continuum. Some ethnic groups, particularly those living in explicitly multinational states, are content to remain as part of a wider political unit. In certain cases, such as Switzerland, the state is fundamentally based on these separate group components, coexisting in various types of federal structures. The Swiss canton system is a long-established version of federalism that has been able to contain at least three major linguistic groups—German, French, and Italian speakers—in a united state structure.

However, the Swiss example is in many respects exceptional. The clear recognition that these types of arrangements may combine a high degree of autonomy for each national group while retaining the cohesiveness of the overarching political unit is but one way to manage ethnic diversity. Much depends on the perceptions of equal treatment and a just division of power and resources, which explains why these federal solutions are often difficult to maintain. Conflicts between Canada and Quebec, between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon, and between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds in post-Saddam Iraq all point to the complexities of trying to contain the aspirations of diverse ethnonational groups within a single political structure. Lebanon was once regarded as the “Switzerland of the Middle East” before it descended into religious divisions amid corruption and outside interference.

Europe in the postcommunist period provides some interesting examples of failed federalism and federalist expansion taking place simultaneously. The collapse of Yugoslavia, which under Josip Broz Tito had been one of the most genuinely devolved, ethnically diverse states in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, demonstrates how rapidly such arrangements can disintegrate in the aftermath of political change (Sekulic, 2020 ). With the initial breakaway of Slovenia, followed by the wars between Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, what had once been a unified power-sharing arrangement rapidly degenerated into a power struggle articulated in nationalist terms. The split with Montenegro, and the declaration of independence by Kosovo in 2008 , finally left Serbia on its own, thus completing the total disintegration of what had been a unified state since 1918 . While Yugoslavia was falling apart, much of the rest of Eastern Europe, having emerged from the political control of the Soviet system, was involved in a scramble to join the European Union. Just as one part of the continent was fragmenting into an increasing number of units defined by their dominant ethnic population, other parts, comprising firmly established states, were voluntarily surrendering some of their sovereignty in order to enjoy the benefits of an enlarged economic and political community. Thus, a continuing dialectic of national fission and fusion demonstrates that there is nothing inevitable about the strength and direction of nationalist sentiment, which can wax and wane depending on a range of economic, social, and political factors. The component parts of the former Yugoslavia would also join the scramble for EU membership in the early decades of the 21st century .

While European consolidation during and after the 1990s was a remarkable transition from centuries of rivalry and warfare, even this has to be seen as an ever-changing development. After having narrowly defeated the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014 , the United Kingdom was locked in a struggle to leave the EU in June 2016 , after almost half a century of membership. While this was in part a political miscalculation by Prime Minister David Cameron designed to silence critics within his party, the surprising outcome and the protracted negotiations to work out an exit from the EU—Brexit—came to a head with the electoral victory of Boris Johnson in 2019 . This outcome resonated with other global trends, including the unexpected electoral victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 American presidential election together with a string of parallel political movements from Turkey to Brazil, from India to Indonesia, and including Russia and China. This revival of populist nationalism can be seen in part as a massive reaction to the uneven outcome of accelerated globalization (Brubaker, 2017 ; Stone & Rizova, 2020 ).

Furthermore, the expansion and internal dynamics of Europe were also influencing the types of internal “national” conflicts taking place between member states. Thus, the gradual solution of the centuries-old Northern Ireland struggle can in part be attributed to the lower salience of national boundaries resulting from the increasing influence of Brussels and Strasbourg. While many Unionists (Protestants) and Nationalists (Catholics) had a visceral dislike of dealing with Dublin and London respectively, the prospect of a fundamental shift in the European political center of gravity meant that both groups could increasingly bargain with a third party. This was the politically neutral European Parliament and Commission (bureaucracy), which rendered their traditional foes much less important and prevented compromise from looking like capitulation. No one would suggest that this was the only factor involved in the lessening of tensions and facilitating the historic power-sharing arrangement. The phenomenal growth of the Irish economy—the emergence of the Celtic Tiger—and the changed attitude of the American public toward “terrorism” (and hence financial support for the Irish Republican Army) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon were also critical developments pushing the parties in Northern Ireland toward completing the negotiations. However, given the earlier emphasis on the ever-changing nature of these group relationships, the arrival of Brexit raised a totally new obstacle to sustained peace in Northern Ireland. Whether peaceful cooperation can withstand the complex border issues resulting from the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU remains to be seen.

The academic scholarship on nationalism has involved a series of debates about the fundamental nature of the phenomenon that is being analyzed. Proponents of primordialism, ethnosymbolism, and modernism, the three most influential perspectives in the literature, have argued extensively about the content and origin of nationalism. Some maintain that this form of identity is rooted in a long and continuous association of specific peoples, whether it is tied to a perceived cultural history often stretching back over centuries, if not millennia, or whether it is, in fact, a relatively recent form of identity. Others date nationalism to the Industrial Revolution and/or the political revolutions in America and France in the late 18th century and claim it was largely “invented” by modernizing elites in an attempt to unify political structures. There are a large number of permutations and combinations of these basic perspectives. Most primordialists avoid the genetic mechanisms associated with sociobiological arguments—Pierre van den Berghe being a notable exception—for the same reason that the overwhelming majority of scholars analyzing “race” are careful to emphasize that they are describing a fictitious construction based on a poor understanding of biological processes. Thus, sociologists such as Edward Shils and Steven Grosby stress cultural and social mechanisms that bond human groups together on the basis of family, culture, and territory. While not biologically programmed, these cultural affiliations are deeply felt and are often experienced with great intensity, which helps to explain the power and resilience of nationalist sentiments. A related emphasis on the strong psychological basis of much nationalism can be found in Walker Connor’s analysis of what he calls ethnonationalism (Connor, 1993 ). Connor draws a firm distinction between two closely related, but he would insist distinct, sources of identification: nationalism, which refers to loyalty to an ethnic group or nation; and patriotism, which is defined as political identification with the state.

The fact that the nation-state, a perfect overlap between one specific ethnic group and a given political unit, only exists in a few cases, and even then is only an approximation to reality, explains the nature of so many types of nationalist conflict. States often seek to incorporate minority ethnic groups into the structures and culture of the dominant group, and this can often result in reactive resistance by the minority group(s): subordinate nationalism to counter dominant nationalism. A related distinction that is frequently made is between ethnic and civic nationalism, a difference between those states that explicitly attempt to fuse the nation and the state and those that try to maintain an ethnically neutral political organization. In practice, this too is an analytical dichotomy that was initially developed to contrast the types of nationalism found in Eastern Europe and those typically prevailing in the Western states of the continent. Once again, no matter how much the civic ideal-type is professed, it is rarely pure in form, and many of the cultural characteristics of the dominant group are subtly, or often less than subtly, incorporated into the basic assumptions of the state.

Other theorists of nationalism tend to emphasize the modern nature of the phenomenon, insisting that none of the forms of identity that characterized society for long periods of human history share the vital ingredients of the modern understanding of the term. There are several variations on this perspective, some coming out of the Marxist tradition that dismisses nationalism, like religion, as yet another form of false consciousness, and others that view the emergence of nationalism as an integral element of modernity. The former perspective regards nationalism as an ideological smokescreen hiding the “true” interests of the working classes so that the owners of the means of capitalist production can better exploit them. It is a variant on the divide and rule strategy that promotes ideological confusion and pits worker against worker on the basis of a totally irrelevant set of distinctions. Modernity theorists, meanwhile, do not link the rise of nationalism with the growth of capitalism alone but see it as stemming from a combination of political, social, and economic forces generated by the Enlightenment. One result of the economic and political revolutions of the 18th and early 19th centuries , and the scientific and technological advances associated with these historical transformations, is the need for mass education to build a culturally homogeneous platform to sustain these developments (Gellner, 1983 ). Central to these changes, and resulting as an unintended consequence of the functional requirements of a modern lifestyle, are conditions that encourage and sustain nationalism.

The ethnosymbolists, exemplified by the writings of Anthony Smith ( 1986 , 2008 ) and John Hutchinson ( 2005 , 2017 ), take a middle position between modernist social construction and the sense of historical continuity. While Smith and his colleagues are fully aware of the cultural foundations of nations, they are also equally cognizant of the role of myths, symbols, and the frequently distorted collective memory that underpins all the major forms of nationalist movements. This middle path between the extremes of construction and continuity provides a valuable balance that helps us to understand a wider range of nationalist movements, from those with a pedigree stretching back millennia to the nationalisms of the postimperial era during the 19th and 20th centuries . With the emergence of a variety of interpretations of how and when nationalism developed in modern society, much of the current debate concerns an assessment of the impact of such forces as globalization, religious fundamentalism, and international nonstate terrorism as factors that may shape the continuing importance, growing salience, or declining significance of nationalism in the future.

Globalization and Populist Nationalism

Is it possible that racism, ethnicity, and nationalism will become much less salient in the coming decades? If so, what would be the explanation for such trends? Social scientists do not have a particularly good record in predicting far into the future. While W. E. B. DuBois was remarkably prescient in seeing the power of the color line throughout the 20th century , other predictions have proved to be far less accurate. For example, a claim that the advance of science and technology, as a crucial component of the “rationality” of modernization, would make religion obsolete in the latter half of the 20th century has not turned out to be correct. The particular forms of identity that are likely to be salient or, in contradistinction, may quite probably diminish in significance in the decades to come remains an enduring question.

Of the three elements, racism seemed, until the arrival of Trump, to be the least likely candidate for a rapid revival as a basis of group categorization. There are several forces that could strengthen a general antiracist trend in modern global society. Olzak ( 2006 ) has stressed the need to integrate the changing nature of international organizations and processes into the analysis, particularly the complex ramifications of globalization with its impact on migration, transnational communities, suprastate institutions, and transnational corporations. Increased diversity in all the major societies as a result of the global transformation of the world economy, and the interconnections of capital and labor, can be expected to increase during the successive decades of the century. This will apply not only to the postindustrial societies of the First World, but also to the intermediate developing economies and to the Third World. The sheer diversity of migration patterns, internal flows within regional free trade areas, transnational communities whose dynamics will be enhanced by accelerated innovations in communication technologies and transportation, growing groups of highly skilled global migrants, and the unpredictable flows of refugees from political persecution, famines, and genocidal massacres, will all combine to increase the multiracial complexion of states and federations throughout the world. No one would expect these trends to be entirely in one direction, or to be without the potential for strong backlashes or reactive political movements against the type of social changes that such developments represent.

Ethnicity and nationalism, meanwhile, will probably be rather more persistent markers of group boundaries. There are several reasons for this conclusion. While the United Nations, as a global organization for political governance, has a role to play in trying to respond to crises and catastrophes that cut across state boundaries or involve multiple state conflicts, its structure is fundamentally state-bound. The Security Council’s veto power means that a coordinated response is extremely difficult when a particular state, or power bloc, deems such action to be a threat to their “national interests” or to set a precedent that can be viewed as “interference in the internal affairs of a member state.” Thus, on issues such as genocide, torture, brutal ethnic repression, and the blatant disregard for human rights, UN conventions are invariably ignored when geopolitical interests are involved.

If one overarching political structure is unlikely to reduce ethnic and nationalist sentiments, what about the impact of intermediate-scale organizations that bunch together clusters of states in regional groupings? What will be the net effect of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the EU, NAFTA, and related supranational, but not global, institutions and treaties? Will they, on balance, help to diminish the types of ethnic and national mobilization as increased cooperation and mutual dependency in economic, social, and political ties start to extend the traditional boundaries of group interaction? Or will they lead to strong opposition, with political parties appealing to xenophobic solidarity, to setting up “Fortress Europe,” or building fences to try to curtail the increasing flows of illegal economic migrants that are a direct outcome of the trade and economic policies forcing capital and labor to seek out a new equilibrium? If we add the factors of international terrorism, environmental pressure resulting from global climate change, the worldwide implications of drug policies, and the competitive rivalries of major religious faiths, a volatile mix of influences will undoubtedly be unleashed.

Some sociologists such as Richard Alba ( 2008 ) point to demographic factors that could exert pressure on societies such as the United States to move toward greater economic and social justice for ethnic minorities. Given the differential fertility rates of dominant whites and those of minorities, particularly minorities of color, Alba suggests these trends will have a tendency toward minority inclusion in the upper levels of the U.S. stratification system. While in the past immigration from Europe was one mechanism that provided an alternative reservoir of talent to fill a range of positions in the economic hierarchy, since the 1960s the shortfall in the supply of scientific, technical, and managerial talent has often been filled by foreigners, either those directly recruited by U.S. corporations or American-trained aliens who choose to remain in the country and work after completing their higher education. Alba argues that this pool of talented individuals will be subject to increasing competition from many other growing economies and that, combined with the domestic demographic shortfall, the result will be the incorporation of more American minorities into professional, managerial, and technical positions. What is true of the United States is likely to be repeated in Europe with its even lower demographic rates of reproduction and similar patterns of migration both within the enlarged economic community and from the peripheral regions surrounding it.

None of these macro sociopolitical trends necessarily diminish the tensions that arise from increasing globalization that can be channeled along ethnic and nationalist grooves. In fact, the very success of the integrative economic forces may exacerbate ethnonational mobilization as a way to maintain meaningful identity in a world subject to mounting anomic strains associated with rapid and discontinuous social change. What Mann ( 2005 ) has characterized as “the dark side of democracy” is simply a further elaboration of the argument about the dual-edged sword of modernity, which has its intellectual roots in Weber’s pessimistic analysis of “rationality.” From the “banality of evil,” to cite Hannah Arendt’s classic formulation, genocide and ethnic cleansing are not so much a reversion to primitive violence as a logical outcome of many of the forces inherent in modern society. While it is true that there may also be a “banality of good” that can, on occasions, help to counter such threats (Casiro, 2006 ), it is unlikely that this will be the dominant outcome. “Rational” bureaucratic techniques tend to be harnessed to the goals of modern states, multistate alliances, and nonstate global actors such as multinational corporations. These modern methods can combine the destructiveness of scientific means with the tenacity of group identity to attain highly particularistic ends. Regrettably, there is nothing intrinsically benign in the forces underpinning the societal changes that have taken place during the first two decades of the 21st century . The precise balance between racism, ethnicity, and nationalism remains unclear but their possible eradication from future social, economic, and political conflicts seems highly unlikely.

Further Reading

• Acosta, D. (2018). The national versus the foreigner in South America: Two hundred years of migration and citizenship law . Cambridge University Press.
• Boucher, A. , & Gest, J. (2018). Crossroads: Comparative immigration regimes in a world of demographic change . Cambridge University Press.
• Cramer, K. (2016). The politics of resentment . University of Chicago Press.
• Elias, S. , & Feagin, J. (2016). Racial theories in social science: A systemic racism critique . Routledge.
• Esch, El. (2018). The color line and the assembly line: Managing race in the Ford empire . University of California Press.
• Favell, A. (2015). Immigration, integration and mobility: New agendas in migration . ECPR Press.
• Hanchard, M. (2018). The spectre of race: How discrimination haunts Western democracy . Princeton University Press.
• Noble, S. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce RACISM . New York University Press.
• Stone, J. , Rutledge, D. , Rizova, P. , & Hou, X. (Eds.). (2020). The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism . Wiley-Blackwell.
• Suarez-Orozco, M. (2019). Humanitarianism and mass migration : Confronting the world crisis . University of California Press.
• Tesler, M. (2016). Post-racial or most racial? Race and politics in the Obama era . University of Chicago Press.
• Alba, R. (2008). Blurring the color line: Possibilities for ethno-racial change in early 21st century America . Harvard: The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures.
• Alba, R. , et al. (Eds.). (2003). Germans or foreigners ? Attitudes toward ethnic minorities in post-reunification Germany . Palgrave Macmillan.
• Alba, R. , & Foner, N. (2015). Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness . The New Press.
• Bailey, S. (2020). Latin America. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 183–201). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Berger, P. , & Huntington, S. (Eds.). (2003). Many globalizations: Cultural diversity in the contemporary world . Oxford University Press.
• Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists : Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States . Rowman & Littlefield.
• Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups . Harvard University Press.
• Brubaker, R. (2017). Why populism? Theory and Society , 46 , 357–385.
• Casiro, J. (2006). Argentine rescuers: A study in the “banality of good.” Journal of Genocide Research , 8 (4), 437–454.
• Connor, W. (1993). Ethnonationalism : The quest for understanding . Princeton University Press.
• Conversi, D. (1997). The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain: Alternative routes to nationalist mobilization . University of Nevada Press.
• Dennis, R. , & Dennis, K. (2020). Confrontational politics: The Black Lives Matter movement. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 11–27). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Du Bois , William E. B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk . A.C. McClurg & Co.
• Fearson, J. , & Laitin, D. (2003). Ethnicity, insurgency and war. American Political Science Review , 97 , 75–90.
• Fearson, J. , & Laitin, D. (2005). Primary commodity exports and civil war. Journal of Conflict Resolution , 49 , 483–507.
• Fritz, C. (2011). Brazilian immigration and the quest for identity . LFB Scholarly Publishing.
• Freyre, G. [1933] (1986). The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of the Brazilian Civilization . University of California Press.
• Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism . Cornell University Press.
• Gobineau, Arthur de [1853–1855] (1915). [ An Essay on] The Inequality of Human Races . G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Gordon, M. (1964). Assimilation in American life . Oxford University Press.
• Greenfeld, L. (1992). Nationalism: Five roads to modernity . Harvard University Press.
• Hobsbawm, E. , & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (1983). The invention of tradition . Cambridge University Press.
• Hou, X. (2020). The paradox of nationalism and globalism: China’s participation in global capitalism. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 119–128). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Hou, X. , & Stone, J. (2008). The ethnic dilemma in China’s industrial revolution. Ethnic and Racial Studies , 31 (4), 812–817.
• Huntington, S. (2004). Who are we? The challenges to America’s national identity . Simon & Schuster.
• Hutchinson, J. (2005). Nations as zones of conflict . SAGE.
• Hutchinson, J. (2017). War and nationalism . Oxford University Press.
• Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white . Routledge.
• Katznelson, I. (2006). When affirmative action was white: An untold history of racial inequality in the twentieth century . Norton.
• Lie, J. , & Weng, J. (2020). East Asia. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 129–146). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Luo, X. (2020). New patterns of internal migration: Movement with Chinese characteristics. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 307–320). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Mann, M. (2005). The dark side of democracy : Explaining ethnic cleansing . Cambridge University Press.
• Marx, A. (1998). Making race and nation: A comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil . Cambridge University Press.
• Moodley, K. , & Adam, H. (2020). Transforming settler colonialism in South Africa. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 211–226). Wiley-Blackwell.
• O’Dowd, A. (2005). Establishing boundaries : A comparative analysis of immigrants as outsiders in Ireland and Italy . [Ph. D. Dissertation, University College, Dublin.]
• O’Leary, B. , McGarry, J. , & Salih, J. (Eds.). (2005) The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Olzak, S. (2006). The global dynamics of race and ethnic mobilization . Stanford University Press.
• Rizova, P. (2007). Balkanization. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology (Vol. 1) (pp. 239–240). Blackwell.
• Roediger, D. (2007). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class . Verso.
• Schama, S. (2006). Rough crossings : Britain, the slaves and the American Revolution . HarperCollins.
• Sekulic, D. (2020). The creation and dissolution of multi-national states. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 457–468). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Shapiro, T. (2004). The hidden cost of being African American . Oxford University Press.
• Smith, A. (1986). The ethnic origins of nations . Blackwell.
• Smith, A. (2008). The cultural foundations of nations: Hierarchy, covenant, and republic . Blackwell.
• Solomos, J. (2020). The changing nature of global racial and ethnic relations. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 61–76). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Dennis, R. (Eds.). (2003). Race and ethnicity : Comparative and theoretical approaches . Blackwell.
• Stone, J. , & Rizova, P. (2020). From Obama to Trump: The dialectics of race and nationalism in contemporary America. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 29–42). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Stone, J. , … Rizova, P. (2014). Racial Conflict in Global Society . Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Tarumoto, H. (2020). Immigrant acceptance in an ethnic country. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 379–401). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Telles, E. (2004). Race in another America : The significance of skin color in Brazil . Princeton University Press.
• Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality . University of California Press.
• Tocqueville, Alexis de [1835–1840] (1956) Democracy in America (ed. Richard Heffner ) New York, NY: Mentor Booksn & Co.
• Tocqueville, Alexis de [1856] (1966) The Ancien Regime and the Revolution . Fontana
• van den Berghe, P. (1965). South Africa : A study in conflict . Wesleyan University Press.
• van den Berghe, P. (1967). Race and racism: A comparative perspective . John Wiley.
• Zolberg, A. , & Woon, L. (1999). Why Islam is like Spanish: Cultural incorporation in Europe and the United States. Politics and Society , 27 (1), 5–38.

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What is Race? Four Philosophical Views

Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer, What is Race? Four Philosophical Views , Oxford University Press, 2019, 283pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780190610180.

Reviewed by Michael O. Hardimon, University of California San Diego

In his provocative 2006 essay, “‘Race’: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” Ron Mallon argues that much of the apparent metaphysical debate over race is an illusion. 1 There is widespread agreement that racialist race (race conceived of in essentialist and hierarchical terms) is unreal. The remaining metaphysical debate (over whether race understood in a non-racialist way is real) is mostly illusory, since the parties to the dispute operate with different understandings of the word ‘race’ and different theories of meaning. The real substantive philosophical dispute is normative; it concerns what we want our racial concepts, terms, and practices to do.

The welcome appearance of this book suggests that Mallon may have overlooked the possibility that the proper understanding of the terms is one of the points at issue in the metaphysical debate over race and that this metaphysical debate itself contains a normative dimension. The book makes clear that, in addition to being real, the metaphysical debate over race (understood as a complex dispute that includes a semantic and normative dimension) is alive and well. It brings together, in one convenient volume, the metaphysical accounts of race of four prominent philosophers of race at the cutting edge of the field.

The book divides into two parts. In part one, the authors lay out their own views. In part two, they address one another’s positions. Part one begins with Sally Haslanger’s account of race as a sociopolitical phenomenon, followed by Chike Jeffers’ cultural account. Quayshawn Spencer then presents his conception of race as a biological phenomenon. Finally, Joshua Glasgow articulates his understanding of races as visible-trait groups not legitimized by biology but which may count as real in a non-biological, non-social “basic” sense. These four positions represent four of the most important options in the metaphysics of race today. Haslanger and Jeffers offer two forms of social constructionism. Spencer represents biological realism about race. Glasgow offers an ultra-minimalist account. The discussion in the second part of the book is lively and engaging. The degree to which the four authors actually take up one another’s views is remarkable. The book is a model of philosophical discussion. Owing to limitations of space, I will concentrate on the authors’ exposition of their own views.

Haslanger approaches the question concerning what race is as a critical theorist and anti-realist about biological race. Her central purpose is to undermine the hierarchy of White Supremacy. Race for Haslanger just is sociopolitical race. Races are racialized groups, social groups that are represented as races. They are, more specifically, groups whose members are observed or imagined to exhibit bodily features thought to be evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographic region (or regions) and who occupy either subordinate or privileged social positions, depending on the bodily features they are observed or imagined to exhibit. A background ideology represents these individuals as suited to the stratified social positions they occupy, thus motivating and justifying the social hierarchy of race (pp. 25-26). This powerful account identifies one semantically permissible and politically valuable albeit non-standard use of the term ‘race’. A comprehensive specification of what-race-is must include the idea of race as a social construction. Nonetheless, Haslanger’s account needs to be supplemented in two ways.

First, Haslanger seems to think it possible fully to account for sociopolitical race without a biological concept of race. She makes use of the non-biological race-like concept of “color.” Groups whose members are observed or imagined to exhibit bodily features thought to be evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographic region (or regions) are “colors.” But the concept color is not the concept race . The background ideology to which she refers must itself deploy a biological concept of race with which to represent the sociopolitical groups it racializes as races. Racialization does not operate through the application of the benign technical concept color . It operates instead through the application of a pernicious and vacuous biological concept of race that represents social groups as biological races, endowed with “essences” or “natures” that explain why individuals are suited to the subordinate or privileged social positions they occupy. The racialist concept of race has been empirically refuted. 2 But critical theory must have this refuted concept at its disposal so that it can refer to the concept’s ideological deployment.

Second, there is reason to think that a viable practice of racialization requires the existence of groups that do in fact exhibit bodily features that are evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographic region. One of the strengths of Haslanger’s account is that it allows for the possibility of particular racialized groups that are merely imagined to have such bodily features. But if no groups exhibited bodily features of the relevant sort, could the project of racialization get off the ground? It would seem that racialization requires the existence of a number of groups that exhibit the right sort of bodily features. If everyone looked like the Dali Lama (to borrow Glasgow’s example), constructing sociopolitical races would be impossible. But groups that exhibit bodily features of the relevant sort satisfy the notion I have elsewhere dubbed the minimalist concept of race. 3 Minimalist races are defined as groups that exhibit patterns of visible physical features that correspond to geographical ancestry. What this means is that, in order for there to be sociopolitical races, minimalist races must exist. A full metaphysical account of sociopolitical race must therefore acknowledge the existence this sort of biological race. Social constructionism needs minimalist biological realism about race.

Haslanger’s account has one striking normative deficiency. As Glasgow notes, it cannot countenance the equality of races (p. 139). On her view, sociopolitical races are the only kind of race there are. Social hierarchy is a necessary feature of sociopolitical race; the end of the social hierarchy of race would mean the end of races as such. But isn’t a minimal condition of adequacy on a critical theory of race that it be able to represent racial equality as a coherent social ideal? Critical theory cannot do that unless it possesses a non-hierarchical race concept. The minimalist concept of race is such a concept; nothing in its content precludes racial equality. Indeed, there is reason to think that equality among minimalist races is what the original idea of racial equality comes to. Critical theory needs a concept like the minimalist concept of race to satisfy its own normative aspirations.

Jeffers writes as a social constructionist committed to the preservation of races. His cultural conception of race is political; it represents races as having a political origin. Races “are appearance-based groups that initially resulted from the history of Europe’s imperial encounter” (p. 65). They are characterized (a) by patterns of visible physical features that correspond to geographical ancestry (pp. 39, 40) but do not become races until (b) they are subordinated by other groups (that presumably exhibit different visible physical features) and © develop distinctive cultures in response (50). These cultures are intrinsically valuable; races should, therefore, be preserved.

Jeffers presents his account as a characterization of the metaphysics of race. This commits him to the claim that the features it ascribes to races are necessary — features a group must have in order to be a race. So, on Jeffers’ view, a group must have distinctive cultures to be a race. But is this correct? Why isn’t possession of patterns of visible physical features that correspond to geographical ancestry sufficient for racehood? Surely it is more parsimonious to define races without bringing in the notion of culture. Is it not plausible to say that a group that retained its pattern of visible physical features from t 1 to t 2 but ceased at t 2 to retain the culture it possessed at t 1 would remain the same race at t 2 ? Were Blacks to become fully assimilated to “White culture” while retaining their distinctive pattern of visible physical characteristics, they would remain Black. However abhorrent this eventuality may be, its unattractiveness does not constitute a philosophical reason for rejecting the metaphysical point.

Jeffers could abandon his metaphysical claim that groups must exhibit distinctive cultures to be races and defend the notion that the distinctive culture that races possess should be preserved as a purely normative thesis. But this presupposes, dubiously, that each race — including in particular each continental-level race — has a single distinctive culture. As Haslanger points out, “it is not clear how to define a ‘way of life’ that is shared by all Asians, or all Blacks, or all Whites, or all Native Americans” (p. 167). Without the idea that each race has a single distinctive culture, however, the idea that each race should be preserved for the sake of its distinctive culture has no punch.

It is to culture that Jeffers primarily appeals in advancing the ideal of preserving race (p. 58). But, given his specification of what-a-race-is, the preservation of race requires more than the preservation of cultures. It also requires the preservation of patterns of visible physical features. 4 But is the long-term preservation of these patterns an attractive goal? I’m not so sure. I do not think we should aim at their elimination. The notion that the only way to eliminate racism is through the literal elimination of race is deeply mistaken. And it is vitally important that members of minimalist races be able to celebrate and affirm their pattern of visible physical features. But Jeffers does not convincingly establish the claim that the long-term preservation of these patterns is something at which we should necessarily aim. It has taken philosophers a very long time to separate the idea of race from the idea of culture. We should be wary of attempts to think them together again.

Spencer approaches the metaphysics of race as a philosopher of science. His basic goal is to show that race, properly understood, is biologically real. More specifically, he wants to show that race, as understood in one specific form of ordinary US “race talk,” namely, “ OMB race talk,” has this status. OMB race talk is the racial discourse used by the US Office of Management and Budget. The meaning of ‘race’ in OMB race talk, Spencer contends, is just the set of OMB races: the set of groups to which the race terms used in OMB race talk refer {Blacks, Asians, Whites, American Indians, and Pacific Islanders} (p. 93). The set of OMB races, however, is identical to the set of “human continental populations”, i.e., {Africans, East Asians, Eurasians, Native Americans, and Oceanians} (p. 100). This latter set is a “biologically real entity” (p. 95). It counts as such because it is an epistemically useful and justified entity in a well-ordered research program in biology, namely, population genetics (p. 99), and thus is on a par with other entities that are used in empirically successful biology such as the monophyletic group, the TYRP1 gene, and the hypothalamus (p. 77). Because the set of OMB races is identical to set of human continental populations, it is a biologically real entity. This is the sense in which ‘race’ is real.

The basic idea that the races picked out by OMB race talk are biologically real is well-taken. A full account of “race” must include an account of race as a biological phenomenon. The specific claim that Pacific Islanders are a race can be doubted, since this group includes two subgroups (Melanesians and Polynesians) that exhibit different patterns of visible physical features. But this is a quibble. 5 More serious is the worry that Spencer’ account falls prey to a radical form of revisionism.

Spencer makes two main revisionary claims. The first is that is that ‘race’ as used by the OMB does not purport to refer to a kind or category (p. 93). If one thing is clear about the term ‘race’, as it is ordinarily used, it is that it purports to refer to a kind. The concept of race has generality; it reaches beyond particulars. Blacks, Asians, Whites, and so forth are putative instances of the kind. Race is the kind of which Blacks, Asians, Whites and so forth are putative instances. The set {Blacks, Asians, Whites, American Indians, and Pacific Islanders} may — as a matter of empirical fact — exhaustively specify all the races. But then again it may not. Take Hispanics. The OMB contends they are an ethnicity rather than a race. Arguments can be given for and against this claim. But if the meaning of ‘race’ just is the set {Blacks, Asians, Whites, American Indians, and Pacific Islanders}, the answer to this empirical question is settled by the term’s meaning. The fact that it isn’t, is a reason for thinking that this set cannot be the meaning of ‘race’. Another reason for thinking race is a kind is that doing so makes it possible to countenance the possibility that races other than the ones that exist now may have existed in the distant past.

Spencer’s second revisionary claim is that the sense of ‘race’ with which the OMB operates is one on which it is possible that no race is visibly distinguishable from any other (p. 93). This is revisionary because the way ‘race’ is used in American English requires that races be visibly distinguishable. It is essential not to misunderstand the visible distinguishability claim. It does not say that every race is visibly distinguishable from every other race. It allows that Blacks and Melanesians, say, might turn out to be visibly indistinguishable races. (The pattern of visible features they exhibit are very similar. Whether this similarity actually amounts to identity, however, is another matter.) The force of the visible distinguishability claim is that if R 1 is a race, there is at least one other race R 2 from which R1 is visibly distinguished.

There is no good objection to Spencer’s idea that races are ancestry groups. The problem is with his revisionary contention that they are ancestry-groups-that-may-be visibly-indistinguishable. Spencer is fully aware that his position is counterintuitive (p. 207). But the feature that makes his position counterintuitive is not its biological realism. It is its radically revisionary understanding of ‘race’. Also questionable is the decision to focus so narrowly on the OMB’s use of ‘race’ in the first place.

Glasgow’s account seeks to articulate the ordinary concept of race. The ordinary meaning of ‘race’, on his view, is something like: “Races, by definition, are relatively large groups of people who are distinguished from other groups of people by having certain visible biological traits (such as skin color) to a disproportionate extent” (p. 117). This characterization contains a very important truth but may be importantly incomplete. It leaves out the idea that races are ancestry groups that have distinctive geographical origins. This omission is no mistake. Glasgow elsewhere explicitly rejects the idea that the ordinary concept of race includes these two further conditions. 6 Can the ideas of ancestry and geographical origin be jettisoned from the ordinary concept of race?

Maybe not. The matter turns on how the “certain visible biological traits” that races are said to have to a disproportionate extent are to be specified. Some specification is needed lest men and women be counted as races. They are, after all, distinguished by certain familiar visible biological traits to a disproportionate extent. Why don’t they count as races? Glasgow uses the example of skin color to indicate the sort of visible physical traits he wants to capture. But what explains why skin color goes on the list and Adam’s apples do not? Don’t say skin color is racial and Adam’s apples are not. The question is why the one is racial and the other is not. The answer may be that the “relevant kind” of visible physical features are visible physical features that vary with geographical ancestry. What makes a visible physical feature “racial” is the fact that it is part of a pattern of visible physical features that varies in this way. The visible physical traits that Glasgow takes to fix the content of the ordinary concept of race cannot be given a full metaphysical specification without reference to the concepts of ancestry and geography. And, if this is true, these concepts cannot be jettisoned from the ordinary concept of race. Ancestry and geography are built into race ab inito.

Glasgow contends that race, as he understands it, is neither biologically nor socially real. He initially concluded that races don’t exist in any sense and opted for racial anti-realism. But then a student of his, Jonathan Woodward, asked the question, “Granted that race is not a biological or social thing, why does that mean that it couldn’t exist?” (p. 139) Reflection led to the idea they call basic racial realism: “rather than being biologically real, socially real, or illusory . . . race is real in a way that is more ‘basic’ than what science aspires to” (p. 139).

This idea faces two difficulties. One is that it provides no indication of the kind of reality that entities that exhibit basic reality are supposed to enjoy. If you maintain that something is real, it is incumbent on you to specify where it falls on the “ontological map.” To be sure, there are real things that are neither biological or social. Physical things for one. Chemical things for another. But presumably race isn’t a physical or chemical thing. So what kind of “thing” is it? The predicate ‘basicness’ does not fix a kind of thing or domain of reality. But unless we know what kind of thing race is supposed to be or to what domain of reality it is supposed to belong, we are not in a position to assess the claim that it enjoys basic reality. Basicness is presumably not a matter of metaphysical fundamentality. It would be odd to claim that race has that standing. It is just not clear what the predication of basicness to reality comes to. Nor is it clear what sort of reality “basic reality” is supposed to be.

The second difficulty is prompted by an example Glasgow gives to illustrate what it is for something to be basically real. The example is sundog. Sundogs, he contends, enjoy basic reality (p. 139). Sundogs are defined as things that are either suns or dog. Science doesn’t care about sundogs; the category plays no role in its theories. So, sundog doesn’t enjoy scientific reality. But that doesn’t mean that it enjoys no reality. There are things that are either suns or dogs. Fido is a sundog because Fido is a dog. It is therefore plausible, Glasgow claims, to say that sundogs are real. But is this inference plausible? Are we really willing to count sundog as a real entity or kind? One doesn’t have to be an “elitist” to find a metaphysics that allows the generation of a real thing by disjunctively pairing any two existing things problematic. 7 Glasgow’s “basic realism” looks like nominalism disguised as realism, the distinction being that nominalism knows that it is not realism. Glasgow’s idea of assigning a minimalist form of reality to race is welcome, but it is by no means clear that the idea of race as a “basic reality” advances the discussion.

These criticisms notwithstanding, the book provides a wonderful snapshot of the current state the metaphysics of race. It will be of interest to philosophers unfamiliar with that debate who would like to know what is going on in the field. It will also be of interest to philosophers familiar with the work of Glasgow, Haslanger, Jeffers, and Spencer who would like to see the latest presentations of their views. This volume could serve as the centerpiece of graduate seminars on race or as a text in upper-level undergraduate philosophy classes. It is a book well worth having.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Lucy Allais and Mary Devereaux for helpful comments.

1 Ron Mallon, 2006, ‘Race’: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic," Ethics , 116 n.3, pp. 525-551.

2 Michael O. Hardimon, 2017, Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism , Harvard University Press, pp. 12-26

3 Ibid., pp. 27-64.

4 Note, however, that Jeffers says at one point that he believes that “a future in which race is merely cultural is possible” and speaks of the “eventual achievement of a world in which races exist only as cultural groups” (p. 58).

This idea is in tension with the metaphysical status he appears to assign to patterns of visible physical features.

5 I owe this point about Polynesians to Spencer, 2015, “Philosophy of Race Meets Population Genetics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences , 52, p. 50.

6 Joshua Glasgow, 2009, A Theory of Race, Routledge.

7 Joshua Glasgow, 2015, “Basic Racial Realism,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association. 1 n.3, 452.

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An Introduction to the Concept of ‘Race’ for Sociology Students

Race is now discredited historical concept which classifies people on the basis of biological differences.

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Last Updated on December 21, 2022 by Karl Thompson

‘Race’ is a historical concept used to categorise peoples based on biological differences such as skin colour and body type.

Today it is clear that there is no scientific basis for there being different races based on biological differences, but the historical ideas of ‘scientific racism’ have done much to shape social inequalities in the present, so we still need to deal with the now discredited term ‘race’ to understand inequalities today.

The concept of Race has been used by powerful groups as part of their strategies of domination, examples of which are the slave system in American history, and the holocaust against the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the contemporary situation of African Americans and Jews today cannot be understood without reference to racial segregation and racial ideologies – thus we still need to use and ‘deal with’ the term ‘race.

The historical concept of race

There have been numerous attempts by governments to establish categories of people based on skin colour or racial type. However these schemes have never been successful, with some identifying just four or five major categories and others as many as three dozen. Such disagreement over categorisations does not provide a reliable basis for social scientific research.

In many ancient civilisations, distinctions were often made between social groups on visible skin colour differences, usually between lighter and darker skin tones. However, before the modern period, it was more common for perceived distinctions to be based on tribal or kinship affiliations. These groups were numerous and the basis of their classification was relatively unconnected to modern ideas of race, with its biological or genetic connotations. Instead, classification rested on cultural similarity and group membership.

Scientific Racism

Theories of racial difference based on supposedly scientific methods were devised in Europe the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, and used to justify the emerging social order – in which European nations came to control overseas territories through colonialism.

Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816 -82), sometimes referred to as the ‘father of modern racism’ proposed the existence of just three races – white (Caucasian), black (Negroid) and Yellow (Mongoloid).

According to Gobineau, the white race possessed superior intelligence, morality and willpower, and these properties explained their technical, economic and political superiority, while the black race were the least capable race – possessing the lowest intelligence, an animal nature, and a lack of morality, which served to justify their position in the American society as slaves.

Such wild generalizations have today been discredited, but they have been extremely influential, forming part of Nazi ideology in 1930s and 40s Germany, as well as the ideology of racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan in the USA.

There is a link here to social action theory as the use of the concept of race illustrates W.I Thomas’ famous theorem that ‘when men define situations as real, then they are real in their consequences’. In other words, despite the fact that there is no objective basis for racial differences, because people in power have believed these differences to exist, they have perpetuated social orders which have systematically disadvantaged (in the case of European-colonial history) non-white people.

No such thing as Races

Many biologists report that there are no clear-cut races, just a range of physical variations in the human species. Differences in physical type arise from population inbreeding which varies according to the degree of contact between different groups. The genetic diversity within populations that share visible physical traits (such as skin colour) is just as great as the genetic diversity between populations.

As a result of such findings, the scientific community has virtually abandoned the concept of race. UNESCO recognized these findings in its 1 978 Declaration of Race and Racial Prejudice :

‘All human beings belong to a single species and are descended from a common stock. They are born equal in dignity and rights and all form an integral part of humanity’.

Some sociologists argue that race is nothing more than an ideological construct and should therefore be abandoned, because simply using the term perpetuates the very idea that there are significant racial differences between humans

Unfortunately, despite the biological facts of there being no signficant differences between the peoples of planet earth, the idea of ‘race’ still has meaning for many people and forms the basis for discrimination in many societies around the world today.

Students of sociology will come across the term ‘race’ in many text books, but often in inverted commas to reflect the problems with the concept discussed below.

Racialization

The process through which understandings of race are used to classify individuals or groups of people is called ‘racialization’. Historically, some groups of people came to be labelled as distinct on the basis of naturally occurring physical features. From the fifteenth century onwards, as Europeans came into contact with people from different regions of the world, attempts were made to explain perceived differences. Non-European populations were racialized in opposition to the European ‘white race’.

In some instances, this racialization developed into institutions backed up by legal structures, such as the slave system in the United States, or the Apartheid system in South Africa.

More commonly, however, social institutions have become racialized in a de facto manner – in other words, informal white prejudice and discrimination have resulted in a situation in which institutions have come to be dominated by white people, with non-white people being under-represented.

In racialized systems, the life chances of individuals are shaped by their position in that system – in European societies, for example, you would expect white people to have greater life chances in relation to education and work (for example), while non-white people would suffer reduced life chances .

It follows that racialization (and the ideas of ‘race’ that inform the process) is an importance factor in the reproduction of power and inequality in a society.

The concept of racialization might be a powerful tool for challenging racist ideology: because it essentially names the process for what it is – a purely subjective process used by the powerful to maintain positions of privilege, rather than the social divisions being created being based on any really existing significant objective differences  between individuals.

Signposting and Related Posts

I use this material as part of an introduction to sociology . You might also like this related post:

What is Racism?

Sources used to write this post include:

Giddens and Sutton (2017) Sociology

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Fourth paragraph, typo: “face” should be “race” third sentence. “These groups were numerous and the basis of their classification was relatively unconnected to modern ideas of *face*, with its biological or genetic connotations.

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April 21, 2021

RACE Writing Strategy Examples: Student Guide and Grading Guide

RACE Writing Strategy responses are quite easy to grade. Teachers have asked me for tips and example responses. Today I’ll be sharing everything I have learned about grading RACE strategy responses quickly and efficiently!

Don’t know about teaching the RACE Writing Strategy? Read all you need to know about it here!

Tip 1: Use the Checklist

Just like you teach your students to write with the checklist, it is also helpful to grade with the checklist. As you read each response, make a small check mark beside each letter. This gives your students visual feedback about which parts of the assignment they have successfully completed. Additionally, it gives you a quick and easy reference for assigning a score.

Tip 2: Easy Scoring

There are four parts to the RACE Strategy, so scoring a response is easy.

Each step in the RACE strategy=25%, with successful use of all parts of the RACE strategy equaling 100%.

For example: if a student re-states the question, answers it, provides one citation, and explains, that would be 100%. If they did RAC, but did not explain the importance of their quotations, then they will score a 75%.

Tip 3: Answers will Vary

There is almost always more than one way to successfully respond to a question. As long as students are getting the fundamentals of responding in a paragraph and citing the text, consider it a win!

Tip 4: Save and Share Exemplar Responses

I have found that students love to share their responses when they’ve really nailed the assignment. The more your students can see examples of well-written paragraphs, the more they’ll understand how to write one on their own. Take some time to ask for volunteers to share their responses with the class. Praise students for making progress, and model well-written examples.

Tip 5: Feedback for Improvement

While providing scores and checkmarks is essential, offering constructive feedback is equally important for student growth. Take a moment to jot down specific comments about what the student did well and areas where they can improve. Encourage them to focus on enhancing certain aspects of their response, such as providing more in-depth explanations, strengthening their citations, or refining their restatement of the question. Constructive feedback not only guides students towards improvement but also reinforces the importance of continuous learning and refinement of their writing skills.

Consider scheduling brief one-on-one conferences with students to discuss their graded responses, addressing any questions they may have and offering personalized tips for enhancement. This individualized attention can foster a deeper understanding of the RACE Strategy and help students take ownership of their writing progress.

Paired Passages

If you are grading a response to paired passages , the RACE strategy can be modified to RACCE (since students should cite BOTH texts). In this case, each part of the response is worth 20%. If students complete each part, they will score 100%.

The predictable routine of writing using the RACE Strategy is one of the reasons I love it so much. Kids become very familiar with it, and before long, they’re using it on their own without being prompted. I’ve seen some of my most struggling writers find success with this method. With repeated practice, your students will be writing evidence-based passages like pros!

Get resources for teaching the RACE Writing Strategy here!

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, race vs. ethnicity vs. nationality: all you need to know.

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With all the recent controversy surrounding immigration in the news , you're probably hearing a lot of talk about race, ethnicity, and nationality. But what do these terms mean? While you probably have a general idea about what these terms mean, the truth is that the concepts can be pretty complicated. Like, how exactly do you define race? Are race and ethnicity the same thing? If not, what's the difference? And can you be racist against someone for the country they come from?

All of these issues are at the heart of the United States dialogue lately, but it seems like people rarely start at the beginning with how you define race vs ethnicity vs nationality. In this article, we're going to walk you through nationality, race, and ethnicity, including:

• Defining each term
• Explaining each term with examples
• Providing a table that compares and contrasts race vs ethnicity vs nationality
• Giving examples of race vs ethnicity

There's a lot to talk about when it comes to this topic, so let's get started!

Race vs Ethnicity vs Nationality: A Handy Table

While we're definitely going to talk a lot about race vs ethnicity vs nationality, we wanted to give you a handy table with definitions and examples of each term right off the bat. As you read this article, you can refer back to this table to help keep things straight. (Trust us: it can get kind of complicated!

Race is based on a person's physical traits.

What Is Race?

First, let's define race. To put it simply, race is a person's physical qualities that make them fit into distinct groups. Groups of people who share similar physical and behavioral characteristics are grouped together in racial categories.

Generally speaking, people are assigned to different racial categories by their physical, unchangeable traits, like skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and facial features. So, in the United States, a person with dark skin and very curly Black hair is going to be racially categorized as Black, and someone with pale skin and straight blonde hair is going to be assumed to be Caucasian.

It's important to understand that while people used to think that race was biologically determined, science has now proven that race is a social construct . But what does that mean, exactly? Well, at one point people thought that when you were of a certain race, you were significantly biologically different from people of other races. This was often used as a means to oppress people. For instance, one of the justifications for American slavery was that Black people were inherently genetically inferior to white people, making the latter the superior race.

Recent science has shown that race is actually something developed and assigned by society. That is, scientists have discovered that a person's race doesn't make them significantly genetically different than anyone else. That means that race is a way for societies to differentiate people based on common physically expressed traits.

Racism Defined

Like we just mentioned, race is based on a person's physical traits. That means racism is the act of discriminating against (or being prejudiced against) a person or group of people based on race. Racism is also the belief that a person's own race is superior or makes them superior to others.

Racism also happens when people assume that a person's race makes them predisposed to certain behaviors. Believing that all Black people are violent or that Latina women are sexually promiscuous are examples of racism that uses a person's race to assume negative things about them and their behavior.

Keep in mind that while individuals can have racist opinions or beliefs, racism can also exist on a larger level. When social and political systems operate on racist assumptions, it's called institutionalized racism. This type of racism is often harder to detect because we believe it's normal or acceptable. For example, the fact that Black and Hispanic people with a college degree will make less money than a white or Asian person with the same degree from similar universities is an example of institutionalized racism.

Ethnicity is someone's distinct cultural heritage.

What Is Ethnicity?

If race is based on a person's physical appearance, then what is ethnicity ? Ethnicity, put simply, is someone's regional cultural heritage . This includes a person's native language, their religion, the holidays they celebrate, and their cultural practices. In this case, ethnicity is tied much more closely to geographical region and culture than physical appearance.

Let's take a closer look at ethnicity. Someone from, say, the Appalachian region of the U.S. will have a cultural background that might involve bluegrass music and Protestant Christianity. Another person from the bayous of Louisiana might have a background that involves Zydeco music and Catholicism. These are ethnic differences. What is ethnicity vs race? Ethnicity, unlike race, is not visible on the surface.

If both of the people in our examples above are Caucasian, you would likely not be able to tell who was from Louisiana and who was from Appalachia unless you heard the difference in their accents. However, not all people from the Appalachian mountains who have a background in bluegrass are Caucasian, nor are all Louisianans who listen to Zydeco. In fact, both of these regions have a large number of African Americans who also fit those same ethnic characteristics. Furthermore, both also have a population of indigenous Native Americans who also fit those ethnic characteristics.

Now that you know the definitions of race and ethnicity, let's take a closer look at how the two differ from one another.

Ethnocentrism Defined

Ethnocentrism happens when a person judges another culture based on the values and standards of their own culture . The problem with this is that cultures vary widely, so the result of ethnocentrism is that a person thinks their culture is better than other people's cultures. Ethnocentrism leads to a person or a group of people thinking their way of life is natural and correct--and that cultures that don't share the same practices and values are dangerous, backwards, and uncivilized.

Like racism, ethnocentrism leads to discriminatory practices. For example, take this story about students being asked to remove their hijabs at one Virginia school. A hijab is an important part of some Muslim women's religious practice. The teacher who asked the girl to remove her hijab assumed that her cultural practices and values--in which hijabs aren't required--were superior. In this case, the teacher's actions were based on a false assumption that one ethnicity is somehow superior to all others, and that others should assimilate.

The differences between race and ethnicity are confusing at first, but we're here to help you understand the distinctions a little better.

Race vs Ethnicity

Race and ethnicity aren't the same thing, so you can't use the terms interchangeably. That's because race is defined by a person's physical appearance, whereas ethnicity is defined by a person's culture.

Let's take a look at an example using the languages people speak. Latinos are people whose roots are in Central and South America (or "Latin America"). Hispanics are people whose first language is Spanish. Not every Latino speaks Spanish—people from Brazil speak Portuguese, and tons of people speak only their indigenous language. Additionally, Hispanic people are not all Latino, since people from Spain might speak Spanish as their first language but aren't from Latin America. The language a person speaks falls into the category of ethnic distinction, since it has nothing to do with a person's physical appearance.

Ethnically, you can be Hispanic or Latino and be of many different races, including Black, indigenous, and Caucasian. For instance, people from Spain can be both Hispanic (ethnically) and Caucasian (racially), while people from the Dominican Republic can be both Latino (ethnically) and Black (racially).

The truth is that people have both a race and an ethnicity ...and these usually aren't the same things! Additionally, many people identify with multiple races and ethnicity depending on their heritage. For example, someone who is biracial and lives in Haiti might identify as racially Black and Asian, while considering themselves ethnically South Asian and Latino.

Race vs Ethnicity and National Context

Fascinatingly, race and ethnicity exist within the cultural context of a specific national environment . In other words, races and ethnicities differ between countries, and they even differ within countries!

So, for instance, someone with an Algerian background who lives in France occupies a specific ethnic role that depends completely on the history of occupation and colonization between France and Algeria. In France, the ethnic distinction of "Algerian" carries specific connotations.

But that ethnic role disappears once they move to the United States.

Once in the U.S., this person would gain a new and/or different ethnicity, since their national context changes when they move. Now, they fit into American racial and ethnic categories. So while this person might be Algerian in France, they may be categorized as Muslim in the United States. While this person would personally continue to personally identify as ethnically Algerian, they would be perceived and treated as a Saudi or Iraqi might be treated based on American national perceptions of ethnicity. They would perhaps even be called "Middle Eastern," even though they are actually North African.

Race vs Ethnicity Examples

We've already talked about some examples above, but it's probably helpful to see a race vs ethnicity list, too. In the table below, you'll see a race in the left column, then some associated ethnicities in the next two columns.

Keep in mind that this is a very small sample of the different race and ethnic combinations that exist. You can be more than one race and more than one ethnicity! These definitions also differ significantly between countries, too.

Again, these are not all the ethnicities that exist . ( There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ethnicities .) And there are even more combinations of ethnicity and race! For instance, you can be ethnically Latinx, but racially black, Asian, or  Caucasian. 

The big takeaway is that race and ethnicity are separate categories, and a person's ethnicity often depends on both cultural and national contexts. 

Nationality is all about where you were born.

What Is Nationality?

While race and ethnicity are a tangled mess that becomes more difficult to understand the harder you try, nationality is fairly simple. Nationality is defined as the legal citizenship of a nation state , pure and simple. It's pretty straightforward, too: you either are or are not a citizen of a nation state! In the United States, you can attain citizenship either by being born here (birthright citizenship) or by being granted legal citizenship by the United States government (naturalized citizenship). When you obtain your citizenship, your nationality becomes American.

So, that's simple, right? You belong to a nation once you have legal citizenship, and your citizenship defines your nationality . Oh, but hold on! Here's where it gets tricky. Once you are a citizen, do you then automatically receive all the privileges and protections of citizenship? Legally, yes, but culturally...it's complicated. While you may be a legal citizen, how you are actually received and the treatment you are afforded can be affected by your race and ethnicity. This leads us to the phenomenon of nationalism.

What Is Nationalism?

Nationalism is the belief that one's one nation state is to be prioritized, and the well-being of that collective is more important than, well, anything else really. Nationalism emphasizes the setting aside of individual differences or interests for the good of one's own state. That sounds okay, right? Well, it can be. There's definitely a positive side to it. Sometimes, nationalism means that people are treated more equally. Instead of being considered Asian American or Japanese American or African American, nationalism can sometimes mean you're treated just like everyone else regardless of race and/or ethnicity.

But nationalism can also mean that one's national identity should come before everything else. This is particularly problematic when a person's culture comes in conflict with national identity. This shows up when questions arise such as whether or not English should be the national language of the United States. The Nationalist belief would be that once you are an American citizen, you should conform to an American identity--one that happens to be English-speaking. This would require people who speak other languages to speak English, and when they don't, they can be considered to be "less American" and become subject to prejudice.

We talked a lot about the ways in which society shapes the definitions of race vs ethnicity vs nationality. If you think this is interesting, you might enjoy studying political science or sociology

Understanding the differences between these terms is key to succeeding on both the U.S History AP exam and the World History AP exam . Learn more about the U.S. History AP exam by clicking here (and the World History AP exam by clicking here ).

It might sound strange, but race, ethnicity, and nationality are key concepts in IB Geography, too . We have tons of resources for IB Geography students, including the best free IB Geography study guides , every IB Geography past paper , and a complete IB Extended Essay guide . These will help you tackle your IB exams like a pro.

Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

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Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Just what is critical race theory anyway?

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT , including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.

(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too?

The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?

Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practice s or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that “the United States was founded on racism.”

Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?

As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.

The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?

It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law : “History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.”

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and “action civics”—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

How is this related to other debates over what’s taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars?

The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism . The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.

As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing “canon wars” over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called “ebonics” debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavement—as well as Black Americans’ contributions to democratic reforms—at the center of American history.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

“It’s because they’re nervous about broad social things, but they’re talking in the language of school and school curriculum,” said one historian of education. “That’s the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.”

Education Issues, Explained

The literature on critical race theory is vast. Here are some starting points to learn more about it, culturally relevant teaching, and the conservative backlash to CRT.

Brittany Aronson & Judson Laughter. “The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education: A Synthesis of Research Across Content Areas.” Review of Educational Research March 2016, Vol. 86 No. 1. (2016); Kimberlé Crenshaw, ed. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press. (1996); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” American Educational Research Journal Vol. 32 No. 3. (1995); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol 11. No. 1. (1998); Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez. “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” Heritage Foundation. (2020); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York, NY: New York University Press. (2017); Shelly Brown-Jeffy & Jewell E. Cooper, “Toward a Conceptual Framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: An Overview of the Conceptual and Theoretical Literature.” Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2011.

A version of this article appeared in the June 02, 2021 edition of Education Week as What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

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A Luminary Historian Reconsiders Ideas of Race, Politics, and Identity

Nell Irvin Painter is Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita at Princeton University, and a New York Times bestselling author. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007, she has received honorary degrees from Yale, Wesleyan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Dartmouth. After a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, she earned degrees in painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Below, Nell shares five key insights from her new book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays . Listen to the audio version—read by Nell herself—in the Next Big Idea App.

1. Whiteness is a racial identity, just as Blackness is a racial identity.

We tend to assume that White people are individuals, while racial identity applies primarily to people who aren’t White. When I was writing my 2010 book The History of White People , public discourse most often treated Whiteness as an invisible default, not as a race shaped and often protected by history and society. It was unusual to see White people as people of a particular race with its own history. The wonderfully rich Princeton University Library, where I did my research, has multiple shelves of books on race as Black, but hardly any books on race as White. Although commentary on race as White still lags behind commentary on race as Black, the virtual silence I encountered before 2010 on Whiteness is no longer so dense. It’s no longer widely assumed that White identity could be reduced to one of its worst aspects: White nationalism. It’s so much more with its own history.

What it means to see yourself as White has fundamentally changed in the time of Donald Trump. Being White has gone from unmarked default to racially marked, a change now widely visible. Being White no longer means, of course, being president and, of course, being a beauty queen and, of course, being the cute young people selling things in ads. It now includes having to make space for other, non-White people to fill those roles.

Just as times have changed, I suggest with changing times that we capitalize the W of White, just as we capitalize the B of Black. Use the capital W to reveal Whiteness not only as a crucial indicator of social position, but also as an important historical concept, one as crucial in American history as the concept of Blackness. After all, Blackness has never existed in a vacuum alone. Now and over times past, the relationships between Whiteness and Blackness have made all the difference in the world.

2. Biographical specificity is crucial to understanding people.

It’s tempting to see individuals as units of their social identity. People aren’t interchangeable even when they share important parts of their social identities, such as their race, gender, and class. Historical figures like Sojourner Truth and Ralph Waldo Emerson become even more interesting as we learn more about them, both in their own times and our own times. Keep all that in mind as you talk about other people.

My own history situates me in my own times, discussing the relationships between my life and my work, between myself as a Black American and the people I discuss, Black and non-Black. The first autobiographical essay on affirmative action was first published in the New York Times in 1981, but it could have been published yesterday.

“You may mistakenly assume that Sojourner Truth, a woman who had been enslaved, was from the South.”

Prominent among those whose biographies I explore is the nineteenth-century feminist abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Truth is widely associated with the phrase “ar’n’t I” or “ain’t I a woman.” Not only did she never utter that phrase, but a White woman journalist made it up twelve years after Truth spoke in Akron, Ohio. This brief phrase and the circumstances of its creation shortchange our understanding of Sojourner Truth: her identity as a New Yorker, her own fascinating life story, and her Black women abolitionist peers, women like the poet Frances Watkins Harper. If you know only the slogan, you may misidentify Sojourner Truth’s regional origin. You may mistakenly assume that Sojourner Truth, a woman who had been enslaved, was from the South. She was not.

3. History changes as the times we live in change.

Contrary to what we often think, history exists in two time frames: the past and the present. It’s tempting to conclude that what happened in the past is over and done with, frozen in its moment and the lifetimes of its protagonists, utterly unchanging despite the passage of time. But when you think about how much happens—in individual lives, in the lives of peoples and nations—you realize that to make sense of what took place—to create a coherent narrative—you need to select what is important from all the rest. At any given point, this selection takes place in the present, as we, the living, decide what’s meaningful to us now.

This means historical narrative changes over time: what we want to know about the past at one point in time differs from what we wanted to know at an earlier point. It also changes, for that matter, what we will want to know in the future. We can see such changes clearly in American history. Compared with generations ago, we now ask different questions of the past. Who were the women? What were they doing? Before the civil rights revolution of the 1960s—before Black people began widely to be seen as truly American people—American history was mostly the story of prominent White people who were men. We now ask for and find women and Black Americans as historical actors in ways rarely possible before the 21st century.

“What we want to know about the past at one point in time differs from what we wanted to know at an earlier point.”

New scholarship generated by second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s has changed our thoughts on gender, women and girls, and sexuality. This scholarship uncovers the meanings of personal violence and how violence affects people who live together—people who are linked as though in a family even when they aren’t related biologically and belong to different races. Even when “attachment” means dislike. Recent scholarship has helped me understand how the violence so fundamental to slaveholding reverberated among everyone concerned, whether they were enslaved or were enslavers, whether they were Black, White, or Native, and down the generations.

4. You can reread history by bringing together unexpected contemporaries.

Normally, we separate—we segregate—people who lived in different regions and had contrasting social identities, such as two 19th-century thinkers, the American novelist Sue Petigru King, and the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. They were not in contact with one another, but both saw problems facing young women in similar ways, especially issues related to sexuality. King’s looking at American southerners and Freud’s looking at people in Vienna reveal parallels in thinking about interactions between the sexes, whether or not race was part of the picture.

Though we may think we know about the historical South, we can look again through today’s lenses at what seemingly disparate observers had to say about how the mores of Southern society influenced American society. Examples of these observers include Harriet Jacobs, Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Dickens. We see that those mores continue to make the South different from the rest of the US, especially in terms of the prevalence of personal violence. The views of 19th-century observers are more likely to resonate with us since the rise of passions swirling around the figure of Donald Trump and anxieties around gun violence. If we can’t put disparate observers in proximity, we miss how much they could see back then. Their distinct perspectives help us understand our own present times.

5. Images enrich understanding of our worlds.

Images convey important meanings and delight the eye with color and composition. I Just Keep Talking contains scores of my own works of art, produced in full color and large format on good, heavy paper. You can enjoy the images just for themselves, and you can follow my eye and hand into and beyond meanings conveyed in words. My images appear throughout the text, each image living where it belongs.

To listen to the audio version read by author Nell Irvin Painter, download the Next Big Idea App today:

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21-Day Anti-Racism Challenge

• Week 1: White Privilege as a Legacy of Racism
• Week 2: Structural Racism in Physical and Mental Health Care
• Week 3: "Not Racist" vs. "Anti-Racist" Ideologies
• Beyond the Challenge
• Resources/Bibliography

About This Week

White privilege in the United States is a structural inequity which stems from the systemic racism that has deep roots in this country. This week's resources focuses on what exactly white privilege entails, and how it impacts (positively or negatively) everyone regardless of race.

• Unpacking the Conversations that Matter: Distancing Statements The author of this blog post is "unpacking some common distancing statements that people may use when trying to assure others that they are on the “right side” of the issues and the ways that these ideas may in fact hinder our goals to promote inclusion, equity and justice."
• White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack "A 1989 essay written by American feminist scholar and anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh. It covers 50 examples, or hidden benefits, from her perspective, of the privilege white people experience in everyday life."
• White Supremacy Culture (PDF) This piece by Tema Okun builds on the work of many people, It characteristics of white supremacy culture that show up in our organizations. organizations.
• How Racism Shows Up at Work and the Antiracist Actions Your Organization Can Take (Report) "In this report, we shine a spotlight on a key overarching structure that drives racism at work: White defaults—or the underlying assumption that what employees should look and sound like, how people should carry themselves and interact with others, and whose skills are worthy and whose are not should follow historical White standards and habits."
• The Subtle Linguistics of White Supremacy Author Yawo Brown explains how the way we speak can either bolster or subvert white supremacy in small ways that add up to make big change.
• Dr. Robin DiAngelo discusses 'White Fragility' "University of Washington professor Dr. Robin DiAngelo reads from her book "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism," explains the phenomenon, and discusses how white people can develop their capacity to engage more constructively across race." Duration: 1:23:30

• Understanding White Privilege: A Key to Dismantling Systemic Racism "Diane J. Goodman, Ed.D. explains what white privilege is, how it operates, ways it is experienced in everyday life, and how it can be used to create more racial justice. Goodman has been an educator, trainer, and consultant on diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice issues for over 30 years." Duration: 52:51

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• Next: Week 2: Structural Racism in Physical and Mental Health Care >>
• Last Updated: May 28, 2024 1:08 PM
• URL: https://guides.libraries.uc.edu/2024challenge

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I Was a White Nationalist. Here’s What It Took to Change My Mind

I grew up in one of the leading families of the American white nationalist movement. My dad, Don Black, founded the first white power website and online community, and his closest friend since they were teens, David Duke, had run for and won office as an open white nationalist despite national condemnation. I joined my dad in giving national interviews advocating for the racist and antisemitic cause when I was 10, and I continued to believe in it and advocate for it on a national level throughout my teens.

By the time I went to college, I had become an international spokesperson for the movement and a presumed leader in waiting. In college, however, after initially flying under the radar, I was outed and spent several years engaging with a new community of people who were personally harmed and shocked at what I believed. It wasn’t the first time people told me racism was wrong and stupid. But it was the first time that I had been told I was not only wrong, but hurting people I knew and cared about. At the end of that experience, I condemned the beliefs I grown up in and have spent the decade since advocating against the movement I once expected to lead.

Looking back, it’s surprising that I no longer saw myself as a white nationalist when I publicly declared that I wasn’t one anymore. I’d dismissed the last pieces of that worldview months earlier, but it was in the moment of saying it out loud that I saw what it meant to “change my mind.” And that process had only been possible once I felt connected to a new community that challenged me.

Read More: The Power of Changing Your Mind

Students publicly debated what to do about me being there, and activists had organized a school shut down to address campus racism and discrimination. Others had invited me into their dorms. It had been in those private conversations where I tried to answer how I could see myself as someone who didn’t want to harm others and yet, advocated a worldview that hurt hundreds of people I knew and respected.

I was only able to have those conversations in dorm rooms, on walks, and in long car rides because I was talking to someone who had already become a significant person in my life. In those conversations, I had slowly accepted that the arguments about IQ, race, and crime I had learned at white nationalist conferences growing up were false. I had arrived at college believing I was someone who followed evidence—someone who did not reject anyone simply because of who they were. That led me to develop deep relationships with students of color and Jewish students. Although I didn’t immediately abandon my exclusionary worldview, it was the process of navigating that contradiction—of loving this new community and also being someone who caused them pain—that opened me to finally hearing, and truly considering, the plentiful and rigorous counter evidence to racist beliefs.

Accepting that my arguments and beliefs were wrong, both factually and morally, was incredibly hard. Even harder was the overwhelming pain of realizing that I had to walk away from the community that had raised me and formed nearly every significant relationship of my life up until that time.

What kept so many people in this ideological community, even though it brought them so much social stigma and criticism, was the feeling of being supported by the loyal community that reaffirmed their identity. New followers often showed up with common, and therefore less extreme, racist views that had often dominated the white communities they grew up in. What reaffirmed them was the bonds they formed. It was a movement that defined membership through demonstrations of ideological commitment and familiarity with the movement’s history and symbolism.

Read More: White American Christianity Needs to Be Honest About Its History of White Supremacy

Learning the arguments that white nationalists used to describe their all-encompassing view of the world became the measure of inclusion in the community. Their identities were defined by collective resentment and a shared understanding of who their enemies were. No evidence could reach them, not because they were uneducated or ignorant, but because their identity and community relied on the fact that they continued to believe in the cause.

Changing our minds about anything we hold dear often feels like accepting contradictory facts. But we only become open to doing that when there is a conflict between what we believe and our ability to connect with a community we love. That doesn’t mean we can convince ourselves of anything, or that facts don’t matter. But it does mean that trying to change someone’s mind about anything fundamental to who they are shouldn’t be seen as an academic debate. If we can recognize that changing someone’s beliefs is as sacred as changing their community, we can also see why it’s so rare and difficult.

It was only once I had condemned the movement I was raised in that I could finally see what seems obvious in retrospect. I was afraid to change my mind because I knew it would mean losing the sense of safety and security that this community had provided all my life. But it was also about seeing my sense of value change. Because it is our values that drive how we interact with others: whether we see ourselves as loyal friends, seekers of knowledge, reliable partners, or any other list of things at the core of our sense of self. We adopt our worldviews, decide what’s true or good evidence—and sometimes fundamentally change our minds about both of those things—based on who we feel responsible for and connected to. We love or reject others by following our values.

The white nationalist movement demands ideological conformity from people who generally see themselves as independent thinkers, loyal friends, and moral absolutists. What often unites them, even if they might not put it this way, is that they have seen the unequal society they were born in and try to justify it. Unlike antiracists, who choose to act to dismantle that unfairness, white nationalists seek to justify the hierarchy. And this community offers them supposed evidence to support that belief.

My dad often repeated the mantra that the members he was looking for weren’t necessarily extremists or militants. He wanted people who started sentences with the phrase, “I’m not a racist, but…” Whatever it was they said next was the seed of a more extreme belief that would make them feel at home in this community. The most effective pitch for white nationalist beliefs was always one that told people they did not need to feel guilty for being the beneficiaries of an unequal society. More than anything else, white nationalists told white people that calls of racism were nothing more than jealousy or hatred being expressed towards them as white people.

Antiracism, on the other hand, is a belief system that is much more expansive. Instead of justifying or advocating for separation, it is a worldview that seeks constantly to widen the circle of people that anyone can find connection, value, and loyalty to. And yet, it has oftentimes been harder to advocate for an antiracist worldview. Antiracism asks people to constantly change, to spend their lives trying to find new forms of connection with an ever-expanding group of people. It can be overwhelming. It is not less natural than the fear peddled by racism, but it can feel more risky to ask people to imagine something that does not yet exist—that is a work in progress.

When I first entered college, I had already heard the argument that racism was a horrible construct. But, for the first time, I felt like I could no longer fall back on the belief that the people—one specific person, in fact—on the other end of that message didn’t understand me or my beliefs. Instead, that specific person, after hearing me out over months, could recite back to me what I believed as well as I could. She was clear that she believed it was wrong on every level. It is rare to be able to sit with that level of dissonance and love someone when you fundamentally abhor their beliefs. Yet that is what is necessary to be able to engage with others and affect change.

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The Hidden Racism in Classic Disney Movies

This essay about the hidden racism in classic Disney movies explores how beloved films like “Dumbo,” “Peter Pan,” “Song of the South,” “The Jungle Book,” and “Aladdin” contain racial stereotypes and prejudices. It discusses the impact of these portrayals on audiences, particularly children, and highlights Disney’s recent efforts to address these issues. The essay calls for continued critical engagement with media and the creation of respectful, diverse portrayals in future storytelling.

How it works

Disney movies have long been a staple of childhood entertainment, enchanting generations with their vibrant animations, timeless stories, and memorable characters. However, beneath the surface of these beloved classics lies a troubling undercurrent of racial stereotypes and prejudices. This essay explores the hidden racism in classic Disney movies, examining how these elements have been woven into the fabric of these films and their impact on audiences.

One of the earliest examples of racial stereotyping in Disney films is found in “Dumbo” (1941).

This animated feature includes a group of crows that help Dumbo learn to fly. The lead crow is named Jim Crow, a direct reference to the segregation laws of the time, and the characters are voiced by white actors using exaggerated African American vernacular. The portrayal of these crows reinforces negative stereotypes of African Americans as uneducated and clownish, perpetuating harmful racial caricatures.

Another classic Disney film that has faced criticism for its racial content is “Peter Pan” (1953). In this movie, Native Americans are depicted in a highly stereotypical and offensive manner. The song “What Made the Red Man Red?” is particularly egregious, as it trivializes and mocks Native American culture and identity. The characters speak in broken English and are shown engaging in primitive and savage behavior, reinforcing colonialist views of Native Americans as uncivilized and inferior.

“Song of the South” (1946) is perhaps the most controversial Disney film in terms of its portrayal of race. Set in the post-Civil War South, the film romanticizes the relationship between white landowners and their former slaves. The character of Uncle Remus, an African American man, is depicted as a content and subservient figure who is eager to tell stories to the white children on the plantation. This portrayal glosses over the brutal realities of slavery and its aftermath, presenting a distorted and sanitized version of history that minimizes the suffering and exploitation of African Americans.

“The Jungle Book” (1967) also contains problematic racial elements. The character of King Louie, an orangutan who rules over the jungle’s monkeys, has been interpreted as a racial stereotype. Voiced by Louis Prima, an Italian American singer known for his jazz performances, King Louie embodies elements of African American culture. His desire to become human and learn the “secret of man’s red flower” can be seen as a metaphor for the racial integration struggles of the 1960s. However, the depiction of the monkeys as lazy, foolish, and subservient perpetuates harmful stereotypes of African Americans.

Disney’s “Aladdin” (1992), while not as old as the other films mentioned, also contains elements of hidden racism. The opening song, “Arabian Nights,” describes the fictional setting of Agrabah in a way that reinforces Orientalist stereotypes. Phrases like “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home” suggest that Middle Eastern culture is exotic, violent, and uncivilized. Additionally, the characters of Aladdin and Jasmine are depicted with lighter skin and more Western features compared to the villain, Jafar, who has darker skin and more stereotypically Arab features. This dichotomy between the “good” light-skinned characters and the “evil” dark-skinned character reinforces colorist and racist ideas.

These examples illustrate how classic Disney movies have incorporated racial stereotypes and prejudices, often in subtle and insidious ways. While these films were products of their time, reflecting the societal attitudes and norms of their respective eras, their continued popularity and influence raise important questions about their impact on audiences.

Children, in particular, are impressionable and absorb the messages conveyed through media. When they see characters of certain races depicted in stereotypical and negative ways, it can shape their perceptions and attitudes towards those races. This can lead to the internalization of racist ideas and contribute to the perpetuation of racial biases and discrimination.

In recent years, Disney has made efforts to address and rectify some of these issues. The company has introduced more diverse and inclusive characters and stories, such as Tiana in “The Princess and the Frog” (2009) and Moana in “Moana” (2016). Disney has also placed content warnings on some of its older films, acknowledging the problematic depictions and encouraging viewers to consider the historical context.

However, these steps, while commendable, are only part of the solution. It is essential for parents, educators, and media consumers to critically engage with these films, discussing their historical context and the ways in which they reflect and perpetuate racial stereotypes. By fostering an awareness of these issues, we can help mitigate their impact and promote a more nuanced understanding of race and representation in media.

Furthermore, it is crucial for media creators to continue striving for authentic and respectful portrayals of diverse cultures and identities. This involves not only avoiding harmful stereotypes but also actively seeking to tell stories that celebrate and honor the richness and complexity of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

In conclusion, the hidden racism in classic Disney movies reveals a troubling aspect of these beloved films. While they have brought joy and wonder to countless viewers, they have also perpetuated harmful racial stereotypes and prejudices. By acknowledging and addressing these issues, we can work towards a more inclusive and equitable media landscape, ensuring that future generations of children grow up with stories that reflect the diversity and dignity of all people.

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It’s Time to End the Quiet Cruelty of Property Taxes

By Andrew W. Kahrl

Dr. Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.”

Property taxes, the lifeblood of local governments and school districts, are among the most powerful and stealthy engines of racism and wealth inequality our nation has ever produced. And while the Biden administration has offered many solutions for making the tax code fairer, it has yet to effectively tackle a problem that has resulted not only in the extraordinary overtaxation of Black and Latino homeowners but also in the worsening of disparities between wealthy and poorer communities. Fixing these problems requires nothing short of a fundamental re-examination of how taxes are distributed.

In theory, the property tax would seem to be an eminently fair one: The higher the value of your property, the more you pay. The problem with this system is that the tax is administered by local officials who enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy and that tax rates are typically based on the collective wealth of a given community. This results in wealthy communities enjoying lower effective tax rates while generating more tax revenues; at the same time, poorer ones are forced to tax property at higher effective rates while generating less in return. As such, property assessments have been manipulated throughout our nation’s history to ensure that valuable property is taxed the least relative to its worth and that the wealthiest places will always have more resources than poorer ones.

Black people have paid the heaviest cost. Since they began acquiring property after emancipation, African Americans have been overtaxed by local governments. By the early 1900s, an acre of Black-owned land was valued, for tax purposes, higher than an acre of white-owned land in most of Virginia’s counties, according to my calculations, despite being worth about half as much. And for all the taxes Black people paid, they got little to nothing in return. Where Black neighborhoods began, paved streets, sidewalks and water and sewer lines often ended. Black taxpayers helped to pay for the better-resourced schools white children attended. Even as white supremacists treated “colored” schools as another of the white man’s burdens, the truth was that throughout the Jim Crow era, Black taxpayers subsidized white education.

Freedom from these kleptocratic regimes drove millions of African Americans to move to Northern and Midwestern states in the Great Migration from 1915 to 1970, but they were unable to escape racist assessments, which encompassed both the undervaluation of their property for sales purposes and the overvaluation of their property for taxation purposes. During those years, the nation’s real estate industry made white-owned property in white neighborhoods worth more because it was white. Since local tax revenue was tied to local real estate markets, newly formed suburbs had a fiscal incentive to exclude Black people, and cities had even more reason to keep Black people confined to urban ghettos.

As the postwar metropolis became a patchwork of local governments, each with its own tax base, the fiscal rationale for segregation intensified. Cities were fiscally incentivized to cater to the interests of white homeowners and provide better services for white neighborhoods, especially as middle-class white people began streaming into the suburbs, taking their tax dollars with them.

One way to cater to wealthy and white homeowners’ interests is to intentionally conduct property assessments less often. The city of Boston did not conduct a citywide property reassessment between 1946 and 1977. Over that time, the values of properties in Black neighborhoods increased slowly when compared with the values in white neighborhoods or even fell, which led to property owners’ paying relatively more in taxes than their homes were worth. At the same time, owners of properties in white neighborhoods got an increasingly good tax deal as their neighborhoods increased in value.

As was the case in other American cities, Boston’s decision most likely derived from the fear that any updates would hasten the exodus of white homeowners and businesses to the suburbs. By the 1960s, assessments on residential properties in Boston’s poor neighborhoods were up to one and a half times as great as their actual values, while assessments in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods were, on average, 40 percent of market value.

Jersey City, N.J., did not conduct a citywide real estate reassessment between 1988 and 2018 as part of a larger strategy for promoting high-end real estate development. During that time, real estate prices along the city’s waterfront soared but their owners’ tax bills remained relatively steady. By 2015, a home in one of the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods worth $175,000 received the same tax bill as a home in the city’s downtown worth $530,000.

These are hardly exceptions. Numerous studies conducted during those years found that assessments in predominantly Black neighborhoods of U.S. cities were grossly higher relative to value than those in white areas.

These problems persist. A recent report by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy found that property assessments were regressive (meaning lower-valued properties were assessed higher relative to value than higher-valued ones) in 97.7 percent of U.S. counties. Black-owned homes and properties in Black neighborhoods continue to be devalued on the open market, making this regressive tax, in effect, a racist tax.

The overtaxation of Black homes and neighborhoods is also a symptom of a much larger problem in America’s federated fiscal structure. By design, this system produces winners and losers: localities with ample resources to provide the goods and services that we as a nation have entrusted to local governments and others that struggle to keep the lights on, the streets paved, the schools open and drinking water safe . Worse yet, it compels any fiscally disadvantaged locality seeking to improve its fortunes to do so by showering businesses and corporations with tax breaks and subsidies while cutting services and shifting tax burdens onto the poor and disadvantaged. A local tax on local real estate places Black people and cities with large Black populations at a permanent disadvantage. More than that, it gives middle-class white people strong incentives to preserve their relative advantages, fueling the zero-sum politics that keep Americans divided, accelerates the upward redistribution of wealth and impoverishes us all.

There are technical solutions. One, which requires local governments to adopt more accurate assessment models and regularly update assessment rolls, can help make property taxes fairer. But none of the proposed reforms being discussed can be applied nationally because local tax policies are the prerogative of the states and, often, local governments themselves. Given the variety and complexity of state and local property tax laws and procedures and how much local governments continue to rely on tax reductions and tax shifting to attract and retain certain people and businesses, we cannot expect them to fix these problems on their own.

The best way to make local property taxes fairer and more equitable is to make them less important. The federal government can do this by reinvesting in our cities, counties and school districts through a federal fiscal equity program, like those found in other advanced federated nations. Canada, Germany and Australia, among others, direct federal funds to lower units of government with lower capacities to raise revenue.

And what better way to pay for the program than to tap our wealthiest, who have benefited from our unjust taxation scheme for so long? President Biden is calling for a 25 percent tax on the incomes and annual increases in the values of the holdings of people claiming more than $100 million in assets, but we could accomplish far more by enacting a wealth tax on the 1 percent. Even a modest 4 percent wealth tax on people whose total assets exceed $50 million could generate upward of $400 billion in additional annual revenue, which should be more than enough to ensure that the needs of every city, county and public school system in America are met. By ensuring that localities have the resources they need, we can counteract the unequal outcomes and rank injustices that our current system generates.

Andrew W. Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “ The Black Tax : 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.”

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Nina Sharma’s Essays Are A Riot Of Race And Romance

A love-story exposé of race, immigration, and more.

W hile many a story about America’s race history is wrapped in pain, some stories come wrapped in love. Nina Sharma delivers her brush with race as a love story in her debut non-fiction essay collection, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love In Black And Brown , named after the Michael Jackson classic . Written in a romcom-meets-chick-flick-meets-personal-diary style, the book unlocks a bigger story about immigration, colonialism, Afro-Asian connection, class, caste, white supremacy, colorism in India, and racism in America. Besides herself and her husband Quincy, mental health and sexuality are equally conspicuous protagonists all through the collection.

The book is personal, political, and hilarious. Sharma teaches English at Barnard College , Columbia University, and is also the co-founder of a South Asian women’s improv group called “ Not Your Biwi .”

Edited excerpts from a Zoom interview with Sharma

India Currents : The book is extremely personal. To bare your interiority for mass consumption is gutsy. Are you cringing now?

Nina Sharma: (laughs) I try to think of myself as a character. That creates a dissociative distance. This is the first time I’ve done this on such a massive scale. So I’m really experiencing it in real-time… the cringing, blushing, all of it. When I was writing, my husband and I kept calling each other Harry and Sally; that was a way I kept a placeholder for this character. That let me let it all hang out, let myself be naked… that’s one of the things I worked on editorially — really getting this relationship with all its colors on the page and going from Harry and Sally to finding Nina and Quincy.

That’s also my training; I’ve written memoirs for many years, I’ve studied non-fiction writing, I read a lot of non-fiction. It’s kind of just the way I am in the world. I think I am a chronic oversharer!

IC: Even so, did you create boundaries for yourself while writing?

NS: I think as a non-fiction writer you’re constantly negotiating that internal boundary. Sometimes it makes sense to honor that boundary and sometimes it makes sense to challenge it. It really depends on where you’re at and on a lot of things.

IC: Like what?

NS: Like — Are you ready to tell that story? Is that story a whole book unto itself? Am I holding back? Am I self-censoring? Is it because I’m protecting myself or for some other reason, like feeling ashamed or thinking ‘what will people say’? Is there anything that’s making me hesitate?

IC: What’s the backstory here? Why did you write this book?

NS: I’ve been working on this book for 10 years. At the heart of this book is a love story — my husband’s and my love story — that’s where it began for me. It came from me moving from New York to Philly. I left my community, my ecosystem; we were barely dating, we were in that lusty stage and I just was like “I need to hop in bed with this guy!” It was such a move of passion.

From a very busy New York life I found a lot of stillness. Right at the same time I started taking a local community writing workshop called ‘Life Writing’. I didn’t even consider myself an essayist, I was just taking the class. My community in Philly was just me and him. So I began to write about us — stories of us becoming closer, of what happens when you settle in and really get to know each other, warts and all.

I began to crack into talking about all different parts of my identity through our love story.

I love watching romcoms and I realized I’d never seen us portrayed in a love story that way — never seen a Black or brown person in a white American love story. The Black or brown person is a helpful sidekick.

IC: It seems like being the child of immigrants informed the blueprint of the book…

NS: My parents came in the 1970s and I was born in Edison, New Jersey, in a large Indian community in the 1980s, and that really did inform the lens with which I understood the world. I come from a particular time and place in my parents’ immigration.

I’ve been thinking a lot about telling the story of assimilation — and how assimilation can feel like a capitulation or erasure of your identity. I think a lot of how anti-Blackness is baked into assimilation.

Broadly speaking, the idea of being a “quiet,” model minority is a stereotype of Asian Americans, which is set against the idea of the “angry Black Americans” being the “problem” minority. Those two lies are narratives that grew out of white America trying to problematize the Civil Rights Movement to uphold the ultimate lie of white supremacy. For me it’s that journey of thinking about how much we as immigrants adhere to stereotypes out of a false notion of safety. But that just keeps us in pain.

IC: South Asian writers seem to be having a collective moment. Name some favorites.

NS: Bushra Rehman ( Roses In The Mouth Of A Lion ), Rajiv Mohabir ( Antiman ), Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ( Big Girl ), Prachi Gupta ( They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us ), the late Kamilah Aisha Moon (poet).

The Way You Make Me Feel: Love In Black And Brown was published by Penguin Press on May 7.

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