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

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition

Why this matters

A nurse filling in a clinic intake form and a hiring manager writing a job posting both need this week's ideas: an attitude is not an action, and a category is not biology.

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.

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.

Focus

What do race, ethnicity, and discrimination mean, and how do you tell their kinds apart?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

[ ] keep race, ethnicity, and nationality apart
[ ] tell racialization from racial formation
[ ] sort a case as prejudice, individual or institutional discrimination, or structural inequality
[ ] read the federal categories as categories people chose, not biology

To-do

Plan your week

Read Chapter 2 (~35–45 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes).
Do the practice exercises (15–25 minutes).
Do the Community History Workshop (about 90 minutes), discussion, and assignment.
Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: sort one everyday scenario by this week's concepts and give the reason.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor early if stuck.

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