Lecture: Core Concepts: Race, Ethnicity, and Racialization
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 2
Opening
Think about the last form you filled in that said "check all that apply." It might have been a job application or a clinic's intake sheet. There was a short list of boxes, and you had to find yourself in it. A nurse filling in a clinic's intake form meets that same list. So does a hiring manager writing a job posting, and so does a family wondering why a bank lent on some streets and not others. Each of them has to tell an attitude from an action, and a category someone chose from a fact of biology.
In Week 1, you met ethnic studies as a field. You learned that it began with student strikes in 1968 and 1969, that it studies four core fields and the connections among them, and that every reader has a position that shapes what they notice. You also learned the field's first question about any record: who made it, whom it served, and whom it affected. In this lecture, I want you to ask that question about the categories themselves. Next week, in Week 3, you'll use these concepts to compare theories of belonging, so the words we build here will carry a lot of weight.
Here's the plan. We'll separate race, ethnicity, and nationality. We'll watch a racial meaning get attached and then trace a category's longer history. We'll name the habit of treating one group as the standard. Then we'll split attitudes from actions and sort actions by who or what does them. We'll hear one of those concepts in a voice from the course archive, meet intersectionality, and end where we started, with the form.
1. Separating race, ethnicity, and nationality
Picture a family reunion in a park. A grandmother cooks the dishes her own mother taught her and speaks two languages. Her grandson was born in another country and became a citizen last year. If someone walks up and asks the grandson, "What are you?", he could give three different answers, because there are three different questions hiding in that one.
The first question is about how a society sorts people by how they look. That's race. Race is a social classification of people by perceived physical difference, made and changed by societies over time. It isn't a set of natural biological groups, but the inequality organized around it has real effects. I want you to hold both halves of that sentence. "Social" doesn't mean "unreal." A classification people made can still decide where a family may live.
The second question is about heritage. Ethnicity is a shared identity based on ancestry, language, religion, customs, or a sense of common origin. The grandmother's recipes and languages belong here.
The third question is about political belonging. A nation is a self-governing people with its own territory, government, and history, which is the sense this course uses for Native nations, which govern themselves now. Nationality is legal membership in a state, which is citizenship. The grandson's nationality changed when he became a citizen, and his ethnicity didn't change at all.
Pause and try this. Two people share the same ancestry and home language, but they hold citizenship in different countries. Do they share an ethnicity, a nationality, or both?
Think it through before I go on.
Here's the answer. They share an ethnicity but not a nationality. Ancestry and language are heritage, which is ethnicity, while citizenship is nationality, and theirs differ.
That's why these three words are never synonyms in this course.
2. Watching a meaning get attached, then tracing its history
Imagine a job posting for a front-desk clerk. It says applicants must be "native English speakers." Read that slowly. Fluent English is a skill, and anyone can learn it. Being a native speaker is about where and how a person grew up. If an employer then hears an accent and treats it as a sign of which group someone belongs to, a racial meaning has been attached to something that wasn't 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. It's one act of attaching meaning.
A category also has a long history made of many such acts. Laws, agencies, courts, and everyday life all help make a category, change it, and fight over it. Omi and Winant gave that long history a name in 1986, in their book Racial Formation in the United States. Racial formation 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. 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. You'll trace that history in Week 13. For now, notice that the categories have moved, and that law and policy moved them.
Pause and try this. Which concept does the federal directive's history show, racialization or racial formation?
Give it a moment.
Here's the answer. It shows racial formation. A set of categories created in 1977 and changed in 1997 and 2024 is the long history of categories, not one act of attaching meaning.
So keep the scale in mind: racialization is one move, and racial formation is the whole story of a category.
3. Noticing the measuring stick
Think about a school calendar. Some holidays are days off, and others are 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.
That habit has two names. 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.
Here's a short story. A cooking show tastes a family recipe that's been passed down for generations and calls it "exotic." Then it tastes a casserole and calls it "classic." No one on the show sounds angry. Still, one tradition has been made the baseline, and the other has been made the departure. When your own group's food is the baseline, that's ethnocentrism. When European or European American food is the default for everyone, that's Eurocentrism.
Pause and try this. Does Eurocentrism require that someone feel hostile toward another group?
Take a second with that.
Here's the answer. No, it doesn't. Eurocentrism is about which experience is treated as the default, so a calendar or a reading list can carry it with no hostile feeling at all.
That's worth remembering, because it's the first hint of a bigger idea: unequal treatment doesn't always start in someone's heart.
4. Splitting the attitude from the action
Imagine a store with a posted return policy and two clerks at the counter. One clerk privately believes customers from a certain group are more likely to cheat, and still treats every customer the same. The other clerk asks only some customers for a receipt. These two clerks are doing different things.
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, and the other happens to a customer.
This course practices with an illustrative concept-sorting set, a group of everyday scenarios written for teaching. They describe no real person or place. Scenario P1 goes like this. A shopper privately assumes that a new neighbor from another country will not keep up the yard, but says and does nothing.
Pause and try this. Is P1 prejudice, discrimination, or both?
Run the attitude-and-action test in your head.
Here's the answer. It's prejudice. The shopper holds a negative prejudgment, which is an attitude, but says and does nothing, so no one is treated unequally.
Students often blur these two because they so often travel together. The test keeps them apart.
5. Sorting by who or what does it
Now look only at actions, because they come in 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.
Here are three more scenarios from the sorting set. In 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 that's individual discrimination. In 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. In 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. That outcome is built up across housing, wealth, and schools, so it's structural inequality.
The whole set holds 15 keyed scenarios: 4 for prejudice, 4 for individual discrimination, 4 for institutional discrimination, and 3 for structural inequality. There are also 3 borderline cases that we discuss and never key, so you'll read 18 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 allows? Careful readers disagree, and that disagreement is part of the lesson.
Pause and try this. In N1, does anyone at the bank need to be prejudiced for grade D applicants to be turned down?
Think about who is doing the work.
Here's the answer. No one needs to be. Every loan officer can follow the written rule with no ill will, and the rule, applied evenly, still turns down every grade D applicant.
That's the cure for a common wrong turn, the idea that racism is only about one person's intent.
6. Hearing the concept in a voice
Week 1 introduced the course's oral-history archive. It's an illustrative collection from an unnamed public library, written for this course, and its narrators are named only by role and decade. One excerpt, E2, comes from a woman whose family moved north in the Great Migration in the 1940s. She was interviewed in the 1990s. Her family left in 1943, and on the train they had to sit in the car set aside for Black passengers until they were out of the South.
Then she says something I want you to hear carefully: "In the new city nobody told us where to sit, but there were neighborhoods where the bank would not lend to us." Her mother summed it up in three words: "different, not finished."
Let's read that line the way the field reads any account. It says a bank wouldn't lend in some neighborhoods. It was made by a narrator remembering, decades later. It affected her family and anyone who lived in those neighborhoods. It leaves out the bank's written rules and its dates. An interview tells you how a rule felt to live with; it can't prove what the rule said.
Pause and try this. Which of the three levels of discrimination does her line about the bank describe?
Match it to one of the scenarios from the sorting set.
Here's the answer. It describes institutional discrimination. A lender refusing loans by neighborhood, as a rule, is the same pattern as N1.
You'll meet the history of those lending maps in Week 7. For now, you can name the concept she lived.
7. Meeting intersectionality
Picture a company that hires Black workers for its factory floor and hires women for its front office. Now a Black woman applies and is turned away. A check for race discrimination finds Black employees on the floor. A check for sex discrimination finds women in the office. Both checks come back clean, and she's still turned away.
A legal scholar named that gap. Crenshaw wrote an article in 1989 called "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum. She 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. The term she introduced is intersectionality: overlapping categories, such as race and sex, produce experiences that neither category alone describes.
Here's an analogy that helps. Two roads cross at an intersection. A traffic report that only covers one road at a time will never mention the crash in the middle, where the roads overlap. That's why intersectionality is about overlap, not addition. Saying "she faces race discrimination plus sex discrimination" treats her case as two separate problems stacked up. Crenshaw's point is that the overlap creates its own experience.
Pause and try this. Why can't you find the applicant's problem by adding a race-only check to a sex-only check?
Hold onto the two clean results for a second.
Here's the answer. Because both checks came back clean. Adding two clean results still gives a clean result, so only a look at the overlap can see her case.
You'll apply this idea across many more categories in Week 14.
8. Reading the form again
Let's go back to the form. The 2024 federal categories are 7 minimum categories in one combined question, and you may select all that apply. They are American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Hispanic or Latino; Middle Eastern or North African; Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander; and White. In this course, we write them exactly as the issuing body writes them, and we call them the federal categories, never "the races."
Read the list the field's way. It was made by the federal government for collecting data on broad groups. It affects everyone who fills in a federal form. It leaves out most ethnicities, nations, and languages, which it groups under broad headings. And the issuing side tells you what it thinks the list 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."
Pause and try this. According to the Census Bureau's own words, are its race categories a biological definition of race?
Recall the last part of that quotation.
Here's the answer. No, they aren't. The Bureau says the categories reflect a social definition and are not an attempt to define race biologically.
So a box on a form is a choice someone made, and the field always asks who made it and what it leaves out.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Race is a social classification with real effects, ethnicity is shared heritage, and nationality is citizenship. Racialization is one act of attaching racial meaning, and racial formation is a category's whole history. Ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism are about whose standard counts as normal. Prejudice is an attitude, and discrimination is an action. Discrimination can be one person's act or an organization's rule, and structural inequality builds up across institutions over time. The archive's E2 let you hear institutional discrimination from the inside. Intersectionality is overlap, not addition. And the federal categories are the issuing body's categories, not biology.
Later in this module, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, the quiz, the discussion, the assignment, and the Community History Workshop give you the chance to sort and read with these words yourself. Next week, in Week 3, the course turns to theories of belonging, starting with assimilation as a model of how groups join a society.
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