Week 2 — Sort the Scenario, Read the Form: Core Concepts at Work — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 2 of the term — sort everyday scenarios by this week's concepts, read a form as a record, and explain the form to someone who has not studied ethnic studies.

This week you learned to tell race from ethnicity and nationality, an attitude from an action, and one person's act from an organization's rule and from outcomes built up over time. Last week you learned the field's first questions about any record: who made it, whom it served, and whom it affected. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Community History Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

You will use two things from this week's chapter: the course's illustrative concept-sorting set (scenarios written for teaching, describing no real person or place) and the 2024 federal categories, which are 7 minimum categories in one combined question, select all that apply: American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Hispanic or Latino; Middle Eastern or North African; Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander; White. The Census Bureau says its race categories reflect "a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically."

Part A — sort six scenarios. Here are six illustrative scenarios from the concept-sorting set:

1. A fan holds a fixed, negative belief about people of an ethnic group he has never met.
2. A manager passes over a qualified employee for promotion because of the employee's religion.
3. A school district's rule assigns children to separate schools by ancestry.
4. A new employee feels uneasy around coworkers of a particular religion, though nothing has come of it.
5. Because their grandparents were barred from owning farmland, members of a community start adult life with less family property than their neighbors.
6. A club's bylaws admit new members only with sponsorship from two current members, and the membership has always come from one group.

Sort each one as prejudice, individual discrimination, institutional discrimination, or structural inequality, and give a one-sentence reason that uses the definition: an attitude with no act, one person's act, an organization's rule or routine practice, or unequal outcomes built up across many institutions over time. Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

1. Part A lists 6 illustrative scenarios from the concept-sorting set; 2 of them show an attitude with no act and 1 shows unequal outcomes built up across institutions over time. How many of the 6 show an act of discrimination?

Part B — read a form as a record. Here is an illustrative clinic intake form, written for this course. It is not a real clinic's form.

• Race (check one): White; Black or African American; Asian; American Indian or Alaska Native; Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
• Nationality (write in, for example Irish, Korean, or Haitian): a blank line

Work this problem, showing your reasoning:

1. The 2024 federal standards set 7 minimum categories in one combined question, and the illustrative clinic form in Part B lists 5 of them. How many of the 7 minimum categories does the form leave out?

Then read the form the way the field reads any record, in 6–10 sentences: what it asks, who made it and whom it serves, and what it leaves out. Name the categories it leaves out and compare its "check one" rule with the federal "select all that apply." Say which of this week's three questions, race, ethnicity, or nationality, the second line really collects, and why. End with one plain sentence that says what kind of thing the boxes are.

Explain it to a non-expert

A volunteer at the clinic's front desk asks you what the boxes are for and whether they describe something in a person's biology. Write a 3–5 sentence message that tells them, in everyday words, what the boxes are for, that the federal categories are social categories for collecting data rather than biological groups, and one honest limit of this form. Explain any term the volunteer might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a library volunteer who asks what the "preferred language" box on a library card form is for. Model answer: "The box asks which language you'd like the library to use when it contacts you. It doesn't ask where you were born or what your background is. The library uses the answers to decide which languages to print its notices in. One limit: a single box can't show that many families use two languages at home."

Use that pattern for your message to the volunteer, with your own explanation of the clinic form.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it against Chapter 2. For each sort, underline the word in your reason that matches the definition; tick each part of the form reading you covered; and check that your message says the boxes are social categories, not biology. Make at least one change and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

• (a) Which change made one of your sorts or reasons more exact, and which definition showed you it was needed?
• (b) Which change made your reading of the form more complete, and what did you notice that you had missed at first?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

• your Part A sorts with reasons and your count of acts of discrimination;
• your Part B count of missing categories and your reading of the form;
• your message to the volunteer;
• your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about five minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the sorting, the reading, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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