Chapter 9 Vocab

Question 1

a group of people who share a set of characteristics— typically, but not always, physical ones—and are said to share a common bloodline.

Answer 1

Race

Question 2

the belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits.

Answer 2

Racism

Question 3

nineteenth- century theories of race that characterize a period of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race.

Answer 3

Scientific racism

Question 4

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.

Answer 4

Ethnocentrism

Question 5

the philosophical and religious notion that everyone is created equal.

Answer 5

Ontological equality

Question 6

the application of Darwinian ideas to society, namely, the evolutionary “survival of the fittest.”

Answer 6

Social Darwinism

Question 7

literally meaning “well born”; the theory of controlling the fertility of populations to influence inheritable traits passed on from generation to generation.

Answer 7

Eugenics

Question 8

movement to protect and preserve indigenous land or culture from the allegedly dangerous and polluting effects of new immigrants.

Answer 8

Nativism

Question 9

the belief that “one drop” of black blood makes a person black, a concept that evolved from U.S. laws forbidding miscegenation.

Answer 9

One-drop rule

Question 10

the technical term for interracial marriage; literally meaning “a mixing of kinds”; it is politically and historically charged— sociologists generally prefer exogamy or outmarriage.

Answer 10

Miscegenation

Question 11

the formation of a new racial identity in which ideological boundaries of difference are drawn around a formerly unnoticed group of people.

Answer 11

Racialization

Question 12

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.

Answer 12

Ethnicity

Question 13

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.

Answer 13

Symbolic ethnicity

Question 14

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.

Answer 14

Straight-line assimilation

Question 15

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.

Answer 15

Primordialism

Question 16

the presence and engaged coexistence of numerous distinct groups in one society.

Answer 16

Pluralism

Question 17

the legal or social practice of separating people on the basis of their race or ethnicity.

Answer 17

Segregation

Question 18

the mass killing of a group of people based on racial, ethnic, or religious traits.

Answer 18

Genocide

Question 19

describes a subordinate, oppressed group of people.

Answer 19

Subaltern

Question 20

an organized effort to change a power hierarchy on the part of a less-powerful group in a society.

Answer 20

Collective resistance

Question 21

thoughts and feelings about an ethnic or racial group.

Answer 21

Prejudice

Question 22

harmful or negative acts (not mere thoughts) against people deemed inferior on the basis of their racial category without regard to their individual merit.

Answer 22

Discrimination

Question 23

institutions and social dynamics that may seem race-neutral but actually disadvantage minority groups.

Answer 23

Institutional racism