← Introduction to Ethnic Studies outline

Week 2 · Chapter

Chapter 2 — Core Concepts: Race, Ethnicity, and Racialization

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~35–45 minutes · Objective 2 (define and distinguish the course's core concepts: race, ethnicity, and nationality; racialization and racial formation; ethnocentrism; prejudice, individual and institutional discrimination, and structural inequality; and intersectionality as distinct from adding identities together), building on Objective 1 (explain what ethnic studies is and how it works: its origins in the 1968-1969 student strikes, the questions it asks, its interdisciplinary methods, its four core fields and the comparisons among them, and the role of positionality in reading evidence) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slide deck, the tutorial, the quiz, and the Community History Workshop all build on it.

In plain language

People sort each other into groups all the time, and forms ask us to sort ourselves. This week you learn the words ethnic studies uses to talk about that sorting with care. Race (a way a society sorts people by how they look) is different from ethnicity (a shared heritage, such as ancestry, language, or customs). You also learn to tell an attitude from an action, and one person's act from a rule that treats people unequally. By the end, a form, a job posting, or a family story will read differently to you.

Why you already care about this

In 2024, the Office of Management and Budget revised a list you have probably met: the federal government's race and ethnicity categories. You have filled in a form that said "check all that apply." Maybe it was a job application, a clinic's intake sheet, or a college application. A short list of boxes sat there, and you had to find yourself in it. Did the boxes fit? Did you check one, two, or none? Someone wrote that list before you ever saw it.

The federal list now has 7 minimum categories in one combined question, and you may select all that apply. The Census Bureau, which uses these categories, 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." That is the government itself saying the boxes are a social choice. This chapter teaches you what that means and why it matters.

The same questions show up far from any form. A landlord hangs up on a caller with an accent. A bank follows a rule about which neighborhoods are too risky. A store lets some customers return items without a receipt and not others. Each case involves group membership and unequal treatment, but they are not the same kind of thing. This week gives you the words to tell them apart, and you will use those words in every week that follows.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

define race, ethnicity, nation, and nationality and keep each one separate from the others;
explain racialization and racial formation and tell which one a case shows;
recognize ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism in a choice about what counts as normal;
sort a scenario as prejudice, individual discrimination, institutional discrimination, or structural inequality, and say why;
explain intersectionality as overlap, not addition;
read the federal categories as the issuing body's categories, not as biological groups.

Carry this sentence with you: a category is made by people — not found in nature.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1, What Ethnic Studies Is, introduced the field, its origins in the student strikes of 1968 and 1969, its four core fields, and positionality.
This week: the core concepts the field uses for every group it studies: race, ethnicity, nationality, racialization, racial formation, prejudice, the kinds of discrimination, structural inequality, intersectionality, and the federal categories.
How they connect: Week 1 taught you to ask who made a category or a law, whom it served, and whom it affected; this week gives you the words to answer.
Where we're going next: Week 3, Theories of Belonging, uses these concepts to compare the frameworks scholars built to explain how groups become part of a society.

Week 1 is the chapter this one leans on. Recall the field's first question about any record: who made it, whom it served, whom it affected, and how the people affected answered. This week you ask that question of the categories themselves. Recall also positionality, the way your own background shapes what you notice and miss. Your positionality shapes which boxes on a form feel natural to you and which feel strange. Naming it is part of reading fairly.

1. Separate race, ethnicity, and nationality

Picture three people at a family reunion in a park. One grandmother speaks two languages and cooks the dishes her own mother taught her. Her grandson was born in another country and became a citizen last year. His cousin checks a different box on forms than he does. Each of them is answering a different question when someone asks "what are you?" This section names those questions.

Start with race. A society looks at features such as skin color or hair texture and sorts people into groups. The sorting feels natural to many people, but it was made, and it has changed over time.

Race is a social classification of people by perceived physical difference, made and changed by societies over time. It is not a set of natural biological groups, but the inequality organized around it has real effects.

"Social" does not mean "unreal." A classification that people made can still decide where a family may live or who gets a loan. That is what "real effects" means.

Ethnicity answers a different question. It is about heritage and belonging, not appearance.

Ethnicity is a shared identity based on ancestry, language, religion, customs, or a sense of common origin.

Nation and nationality answer a third question: whom do you belong to politically?

A nation is a self-governing people with its own territory, government, and history. The course uses this sense for Native nations, which govern themselves today.
Nationality is legal membership in a state, which is citizenship.

Worked example — three questions about one person. Take the grandson at the reunion. Ask the three questions in order.

Race: which classification does the society around him place him in, by how he looks? That depends on the society and the time; it is not written in his body.
Ethnicity: which heritage does he share? His family's languages, foods, and stories answer this one.
Nationality: which state is he a legal member of? His citizenship answers this, and it changed last year without changing his heritage at all.

In one plain sentence: one person can hold a race classification, an ethnicity, and a nationality at once, and each answers a different question.

Misconception check. Students often think race is biology, a set of natural groups you could find in a blood test. It is tempting because the features societies use, such as skin color, are physical. The cure is to notice who drew the lines. The features are physical; the decision about which features count and where the boundaries go is social, and it has changed over time. The Census Bureau says so about its own categories.

Misconception check — race and ethnicity as synonyms. Students often use "race" and "ethnicity" as if they were the same word. They are not. Race sorts by perceived appearance; ethnicity is shared heritage. Two people a society places in the same race can have different ethnicities, and two people who share an ethnicity can be placed in different races.

Misconception check — ethnicity as nationality. Students often treat ethnicity and nationality as one thing. Nationality is citizenship in a state. The grandson's nationality changed when he became a citizen; his ethnicity did not.

Pause and think. Choose one of two prompts. (a) Think of a time someone asked you "what are you?" and name which of the three questions they seemed to be asking. (b) Look at any form you have filled in and say which question its boxes were really asking. Either way, notice what your own background made easy or hard to see.

2. Trace racialization and racial formation

Imagine a job posting for a front-desk clerk. It says applicants must be "native English speakers." Read it slowly. Is the employer asking for a skill, such as speaking clearly with customers? Or is it asking where and how a person grew up?

A posting could ask for "fluent English," which names a skill anyone can learn. "Native speaker" ties the job to someone's origin. If an accent then gets read as a sign of which group a person belongs to, a racial meaning has been attached to something that is not about race. That move has a name.

Racialization is the process by which racial meaning is attached to a group, a practice, or a relationship that was not classified that way before.

Racialization is one move. A whole category, though, has a history of many moves. Laws, courts, government agencies, and everyday life all help make it, change it, and fight over it. Two scholars gave that long history a name.

Racial formation, from Omi and Winant (1986), Racial Formation in the United States, is the historical process by which racial categories are created, lived, changed, and contested through social, economic, and political forces, including law and policy.

You can see racial formation in the federal categories themselves. The directive that sets them was first developed in 1977 and has been revised twice, in 1997 and in 2024. Each revision changed the boxes. The course traces that history in Week 13; for now, notice only that the categories have moved.

Worked example — which one does the case show? Ask one question: is this a single moment when meaning gets attached, or the long history of a category?

The job posting. An employer's wording turns an accent into a signal of origin. That is one moment of attaching meaning, so it shows racialization.
The federal directive. A set of categories was created in 1977 and changed in 1997 and 2024 through law and policy. That is the history of categories, so it shows racial formation.

In one plain sentence: racialization is one act of attaching racial meaning, and racial formation is the long, contested history of how racial categories are made and remade.

Misconception check. Students often think racialization and racial formation are two names for the same thing. They sound alike, and both are about race being made. The cure is scale. Racialization is a single move, like the job posting. Racial formation, Omi and Winant's term, is the whole history of a category over decades.

3. Notice the measuring stick: ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism

Think about a school calendar. It marks some holidays as days off and treats others as ordinary school days. Nobody had to dislike anyone for that to happen. Someone chose a standard of what counts as normal, and every other tradition gets measured against it. This section names that habit.

Ethnocentrism is judging another group's ways by the standards of your own.
Eurocentrism is treating European and European American experience as the standard against which every other is measured.

Worked example — find the standard. Picture a family recipe passed down for generations. A cooking show calls it "exotic," while calling a casserole "classic." Ask two questions.

Whose standard is being used? The show treats one tradition's food as the baseline and the other as a departure from it.
Which concept fits? Judging a group's food by your own group's standard is ethnocentrism. If European or European American food is the baseline by default, that habit is also Eurocentric.

In one plain sentence: ethnocentrism uses your own group as the measuring stick, and Eurocentrism makes European and European American experience the stick for everyone.

Misconception check. Students often think Eurocentrism means disliking other groups. It is tempting because the word sounds like an accusation. The cure: Eurocentrism is about the default, not about feelings. A calendar, a reading list, or a map can make one experience the standard without anyone feeling hostile at all.

4. Split the attitude from the action: prejudice versus discrimination

Imagine a store with a posted return policy. One clerk privately believes customers from a certain group are more likely to cheat. That clerk still applies the policy the same way to everyone. Another clerk asks only some customers for a receipt. These two clerks are doing different things, and the difference matters.

Prejudice is an attitude: a fixed, usually negative prejudgment about a group and its members.
Discrimination is an action: unequal treatment of people because of their group.

The first clerk holds a prejudice. The second clerk discriminates. One is inside a head; the other happens to a customer.

Worked example — P1 from the concept-sorting set (illustrative). "A shopper privately assumes that a new neighbor from another country will not keep up the yard, but says and does nothing." Ask: is there an attitude, an action, or both?

Attitude? Yes. The shopper holds a fixed, negative prejudgment about the neighbor's group.
Action? No. The shopper says and does nothing.

There is an attitude and no action, so the key is prejudice.

Misconception check. Students often use prejudice and discrimination as synonyms. They often travel together, which is why they blur. The cure is the attitude-versus-action test. Ask whether anyone was treated unequally. If not, the case shows prejudice alone.

5. Sort by who or what does it: three levels

Now look at the actions. Some unequal treatment comes from one person's choice. Some comes from a rule that an organization applies to everyone. And some is the result of many rules across many years. Ethnic studies uses three terms for those three levels.

Individual discrimination is one person's act of unequal treatment.
Institutional discrimination is unequal treatment produced by an organization's rules or routine practices, whether or not anyone intends it.
Structural inequality is unequal outcomes built up across many institutions over time.

The course practices these with an illustrative concept-sorting set: fifteen everyday scenarios, each keyed. Here are three more of them.

Worked example — I1, N1, and S1 (illustrative). You read each scenario and ask who or what does the unequal treating.

I1. "A landlord tells a caller the apartment is taken after hearing the caller's accent, then shows it to the next caller." One person acts, so the key is individual discrimination.
N1. "A lender follows a written rule that rates every loan in a grade D neighborhood as too risky, no matter who applies." The rule does the work, and no prejudiced person is needed, so the key is institutional discrimination.
S1. "Decades after lending maps graded neighborhoods, homes in once-redlined areas are worth less, families there have less wealth to pass on, and schools funded by local property taxes have less money." The outcome is built up across housing, wealth, and schools, so the key is structural inequality.

Now tally the whole set. It holds 4 prejudice + 4 individual discrimination + 4 institutional discrimination + 3 structural inequality = 15 keyed scenarios. Of those, 4 + 4 = 8 are acts of discrimination, individual or institutional, and 15 − 8 = 7 are not. Four of those 7 are prejudice, an attitude with no act, and 3 are structural inequality.

Three more scenarios are borderline. They are discussed and never keyed, so you read 15 + 3 = 18 scenarios in all. One borderline case is a teacher who calls on students of one group less often without noticing. Is that one person's act, or a pattern the school's practices allow? Good readers can disagree, and the course does not key it.

Misconception check. Students often think institutional discrimination needs a prejudiced person somewhere. N1 is the cure. Every loan officer can follow the written rule with no ill will at all, and grade D applicants are still turned down. The rule, applied evenly, produces the unequal result.

Misconception check — racism as only individual intent. Students often think racism is only about what one person feels or means. That leaves out two of the three levels. Institutional rules and structural patterns can produce unequal outcomes without any one person's intent.

Caveat. The concept-sorting set is illustrative. Its scenarios were written for teaching and describe no real person, store, lender, or town.

6. Hear the concept in a voice: the archive's E2 excerpt

Week 1 introduced the course's running community oral-history archive: an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection, with narrators named only by role and decade. One excerpt, E2, comes from a woman whose family moved north in the Great Migration in the 1940s, interviewed in the 1990s. It is illustrative, written for the course, and it is not a real person's words.

She remembers leaving in 1943 and riding in the train car set aside for Black passengers until the family was out of the South. Then she says: "In the new city nobody told us where to sit, but there were neighborhoods where the bank would not lend to us."

Worked example — name the concept in the line. Walk the reading in the field's order.

What it says: in the new city, a bank would not lend in some neighborhoods.
Who made it: a narrator recalling her family's life, recorded decades later by an archive.
Whom it affected: her family, and anyone who lived in or wanted to move to those neighborhoods.
What it leaves out: the bank's own records, its written rules, and the dates. An interview tells you what living with the rule felt like; it cannot prove what the rule said.
Which concept fits: a lender refusing loans by neighborhood, as a rule, is institutional discrimination, the same pattern as N1.

In one plain sentence: E2's line about the bank names institutional discrimination from the inside, as a family lived it. The history of the lending maps comes in Week 7.

Misconception check. Students often think that because "nobody told us where to sit," the new city treated the family equally. The excerpt itself pushes back. The mother's own words, "different, not finished," say that one kind of unequal treatment ended while another, written into lending rules, went on.

Honesty note. An oral history is read for experience and meaning. Its dates and details are checked against dated records, which is what the course does with E2 later in the term.

7. Meet intersectionality: overlap, not addition

Picture a company that hires Black workers for its factory floor and hires women for its front office. A court looking only at race sees Black employees. A court looking only at sex sees women. Now picture a Black woman who applies and is turned away. If the law only checks one category at a time, her case can fall through the gap.

That gap is what one legal scholar named.

Intersectionality, from Crenshaw (1989), "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex", University of Chicago Legal Forum, is the idea that overlapping categories, such as race and sex, produce experiences that neither category alone describes. Crenshaw argued that antidiscrimination law that looks at race alone or at sex alone fails people, such as Black women, whose experience is shaped by both at once.

Worked example — overlap versus addition. Compare two ways to describe the applicant.

Adding: "She faces race discrimination plus sex discrimination." This treats her case as two separate problems stacked up.
Overlapping: "She faces a kind of treatment aimed at Black women, which neither a race-only check nor a sex-only check can see." This is Crenshaw's point.

In one plain sentence: intersectionality says the overlap creates its own experience, so you cannot find it by adding up one category at a time.

Misconception check. Students often think intersectionality means adding identities together, as if each one were a separate weight on a scale. It is tempting because lists of identities look like sums. The cure is the hiring case. The applicant's problem was invisible to both one-category checks, so no sum of those checks could find it.

Pause and think. Choose one of two prompts. (a) Describe a place you know, such as a workplace, team, or club, where looking at one category at a time would miss someone's experience. (b) Explain in your own words why "plus" is the wrong word for intersectionality. The course applies intersectionality across many more categories in Week 14.

8. Read the form again: the federal categories

Go back to the form at the start of this chapter. You can now read it with the field's tools. The list is the federal government's. It was written by an issuing body for a purpose: collecting data on broad population groups.

The federal categories are the race and ethnicity categories the federal government sets for collecting data. The course writes them exactly as the issuing body writes them and never calls them "the races."

Worked example — read the 2024 list. The 2024 federal categories 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.

What it says: seven minimum categories, and a person may choose more than one.
Who made it: the federal government, through the Office of Management and Budget.
Whom it affects: everyone who fills in a federal form, and every program that counts people with these boxes.
What it leaves out: most ethnicities, nations, and languages, which the boxes group under broad headings.
What the issuing body says it is: 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."

In one plain sentence: the list is the issuing body's list for collecting data, and the Census Bureau itself says its race categories reflect a social definition, not a biological one.

Misconception check. Students often read a census category as a biological fact. A government form looks official, so its boxes feel like facts about bodies. The cure is to read the issuing body's own words. The Census Bureau says its categories are not an attempt to define race biologically, and the directive behind them has been revised twice.

Limitation. The federal categories are useful for counting people in broad groups, and they are also broad by design. A box can hold many nations, languages, and histories, so the course always asks what a category leaves out.

Key terms

Race — A social classification of people by perceived physical difference, made and changed by societies over time; it is not a set of natural biological groups, but the inequality organized around it has real effects. (first used: 1. Separate race, ethnicity, and nationality)
Ethnicity — A shared identity based on ancestry, language, religion, customs, or a sense of common origin. (first used: 1. Separate race, ethnicity, and nationality)
Nation — A self-governing people with its own territory, government, and history, the sense in which the course speaks of Native nations. (first used: 1. Separate race, ethnicity, and nationality)
Nationality — Legal membership in a state, which is citizenship. (first used: 1. Separate race, ethnicity, and nationality)
Racialization — The process by which racial meaning is attached to a group, a practice, or a relationship that was not classified that way before. (first used: 2. Trace racialization and racial formation)
Racial formation — Omi and Winant's (1986) account of the historical process by which racial categories are created, lived, changed, and contested through social, economic, and political forces, including law and policy. (first used: 2. Trace racialization and racial formation)
Ethnocentrism — Judging another group's ways by the standards of your own. (first used: 3. Notice the measuring stick: ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism)
Eurocentrism — Treating European and European American experience as the standard against which every other is measured. (first used: 3. Notice the measuring stick: ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism)
Prejudice — An attitude: a fixed, usually negative prejudgment about a group and its members. (first used: 4. Split the attitude from the action: prejudice versus discrimination)
Discrimination — An action: unequal treatment of people because of their group. (first used: 4. Split the attitude from the action: prejudice versus discrimination)
Individual discrimination — One person's act of unequal treatment. (first used: 5. Sort by who or what does it: three levels)
Institutional discrimination — Unequal treatment produced by an organization's rules or routine practices, whether or not anyone intends it. (first used: 5. Sort by who or what does it: three levels)
Structural inequality — Unequal outcomes built up across many institutions over time, so that disadvantage carries forward even after a single rule ends. (first used: 5. Sort by who or what does it: three levels)
Intersectionality — Crenshaw's (1989) term for the way overlapping categories, such as race and sex, produce experiences that neither category alone describes; it is not the adding together of identities. (first used: 7. Meet intersectionality: overlap, not addition)
Federal categories — The race and ethnicity categories the federal government sets for collecting data, written exactly as the issuing body writes them. (first used: 8. Read the form again: the federal categories)

Summary

Race is a social classification with real effects, not biology.
Ethnicity is shared heritage; nationality is citizenship; a nation is a self-governing people.
Racialization is one act of attaching racial meaning; racial formation is a category's whole history.
Ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism are about whose standard counts as normal.
Prejudice is an attitude; discrimination is an action.
Individual discrimination is one person's act; institutional discrimination is a rule or routine; structural inequality builds up across institutions over time.
Intersectionality is overlap, not addition.
The federal categories are the issuing body's categories for collecting data, not biological groups.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

A youth soccer league's coach privately believes players from one ethnic group are less disciplined. He gives every player equal minutes and says nothing. Sort the case and explain your choice.
A city library requires a utility bill in your own name to get a library card. Many renters in shared housing have no bill in their own name, and most of them come from one group. No librarian holds any bad feeling. Sort the case and explain your choice.
A new neighbor says, "I'm a citizen of one country, my family speaks two languages at home, and I check one box on forms." Match each part of the sentence to nationality, ethnicity, or race.
A classmate says, "A Latina engineer faces sexism plus racism, so you add them up." Explain what intersectionality would say instead.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

This is prejudice. Ask the attitude-versus-action question. The coach holds a fixed, negative prejudgment, which is an attitude. He treats every player the same, so there is no unequal treatment and no discrimination. If he cut one group's minutes, the case would become individual discrimination.
This is institutional discrimination. The unequal result comes from a written rule that the library applies to everyone, and no librarian needs any ill will. That matches the definition: unequal treatment produced by an organization's rules, whether or not anyone intends it. The case is not structural inequality, because it is one organization's rule, not outcomes built up across many institutions over time.
"A citizen of one country" is nationality, legal membership in a state. "Speaks two languages at home" points to ethnicity, shared language and heritage. "Checks one box on forms" is a race classification, the society's sorting, which the neighbor answers on the form. Each part answers a different question, which is why the three words are not synonyms.
Intersectionality says her experience is not two separate problems stacked up. Being a woman and being Latina overlap, and the overlap can produce treatment that a check for sex alone or for ethnicity alone would miss. Crenshaw's point is that the overlap creates its own experience, so adding one category at a time cannot find it.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, the quiz, the discussion, and the assignment. Next week, assimilation is the first model of belonging you test.

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