Chapter 9 Vocab Flashcards
a group of people who share a set of characteristics— typically, but not always, physical ones—and are said to share a common bloodline.
Race
the belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits.
Racism
nineteenth- century theories of race that characterize a period of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race.
Scientific racism
the belief that one’s own culture or group is superior to others and the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one’s own.
Ethnocentrism
the philosophical and religious notion that everyone is created equal.
Ontological equality
the application of Darwinian ideas to society, namely, the evolutionary “survival of the fittest.”
Social Darwinism
literally meaning “well born”; the theory of controlling the fertility of populations to influence inheritable traits passed on from generation to generation.
Eugenics
movement to protect and preserve indigenous land or culture from the allegedly dangerous and polluting effects of new immigrants.
Nativism
the belief that “one drop” of black blood makes a person black, a concept that evolved from U.S. laws forbidding miscegenation.
One-drop rule
the technical term for interracial marriage; literally meaning “a mixing of kinds”; it is politically and historically charged— sociologists generally prefer exogamy or outmarriage.
Miscegenation
the formation of a new racial identity in which ideological boundaries of difference are drawn around a formerly unnoticed group of people.
Racialization
one’s ethnic quality or affiliation. It is voluntary, self-defined, nonhierarchal, fluid, and multiple, and based on cultural differences, not physical ones per se.
Ethnicity
a nationality, not in the sense of carrying the rights and duties of citizenship but of identifying with a past or future nationality. For later generations of white ethnics, something not constraining but easily expressed, with no risks of stigma and all the pleasures of feeling like an individual.
Symbolic ethnicity
Robert Park’s 1920s universal and linear model for how immigrants assimilate: they first arrive, then settle in, and achieve full assimilation in a newly homogenous country.
Straight-line assimilation
Clifford Geertz’s term to explain the strength of ethnic ties because they are fixed in deeply felt or primordial ties to one’s homeland culture.
Primordialism
the presence and engaged coexistence of numerous distinct groups in one society.
Pluralism
the legal or social practice of separating people on the basis of their race or ethnicity.
Segregation
the mass killing of a group of people based on racial, ethnic, or religious traits.
Genocide
describes a subordinate, oppressed group of people.
Subaltern
an organized effort to change a power hierarchy on the part of a less-powerful group in a society.
Collective resistance
thoughts and feelings about an ethnic or racial group.
Prejudice
harmful or negative acts (not mere thoughts) against people deemed inferior on the basis of their racial category without regard to their individual merit.
Discrimination
institutions and social dynamics that may seem race-neutral but actually disadvantage minority groups.
Institutional racism
