Lecture: Race & Ethnicity
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 10
Opening
Picture three people. A hospital planner is deciding how many interpreters to hire. A hiring manager is looking at how a team recruits. A city council is reading new census tables. Each of them runs into the same ideas: what a race category measures, how an attitude differs from an action, and how a rule can carry bias that no single person intends.
Week 1 gave you the three perspectives and introduced Du Bois. Week 2 taught the four questions you ask of any figure. Week 5 showed that people build reality together, and Week 7 sorted people into layers. In this lecture I want to ask how one kind of category, race, became a basis for layering. We'll see race as something people built, define a minority by power, and tell an attitude from an action. Then we'll find bias in a procedure, read Du Bois, map how groups meet, try three lenses, and read the 2020 Census figures. Next week, in Week 11, the course turns to sex, gender, and sexuality with the same habits.
Let's start at a kitchen table, with a census form.
1. See race as something people built
Imagine one family filling in census forms across three generations. The grandparent's form offered a handful of race boxes and said to check one. The parent's form allowed more than one. The grandchild's form offers several boxes, write-in lines, and a separate question about Hispanic origin. The family's ancestry didn't change. The boxes changed around them.
That's the first idea. Race feels like a fact you can see. Sociologists treat it as something people built. Race is a socially constructed way of grouping people by perceived physical or social traits, whose categories differ between societies and change over time rather than resting on biology.
You can check that definition three ways. The categories differ from one society to another. They change over time, including from one census to the next. And the major social-science associations reject a biological basis for racial categories. The Census Bureau says the same about its own form: its race categories reflect a social definition of race, and each answer is self-identified, given by the person about themselves rather than assigned by someone else.
Built doesn't mean unreal. Remember Week 5's Thomas theorem: situations defined as real are real in their consequences. A category people built can still shape where you live and how you're treated.
Ethnicity is a different idea. Ethnicity is shared culture, such as language, religion, customs, and ancestry, that a group of people hold in common and pass down. Here's an analogy. Race is like a set of labels printed on a form by whoever designed it. Ethnicity is more like a family recipe, handed down by the people who cook it.
Pause and try this. A neighborhood association runs a festival in a shared heritage language, with recipes passed down through families. Is that race or ethnicity?
Ask whether it's a printed label or a shared heritage.
Here's the answer. Ethnicity. A shared language and customs are a heritage people hold in common, not a category of perceived traits.
2. Define a minority by power, not by size
Now picture a company town. Most people there work in the mine, rent their homes from the company, and can't vote on the town council. A smaller group owns the mine, the land, and the houses, and fills every council seat. Which group is the minority?
If you said "the smaller one," you counted heads. Sociologists count power. In 1945, Louis Wirth published "The Problem of Minority Groups," and he defined a minority group by its unequal treatment and subordinate position, not by its numbers.
So a minority group is a group defined by its unequal treatment and subordinate position in a society rather than by its size, so a larger group can be a minority group. The dominant group is the group that holds more power and advantage and whose ways are treated as the standard, whatever its size.
In the company town, the mine workers are treated unequally. They can't vote, and they don't own their homes. The owners hold the land, the jobs, and the council. So the larger group of workers is the minority group, and the smaller group of owners is the dominant group.
Pause and try this. In everyday speech, "minority" means fewer than half. What does Wirth's definition look at instead?
Think about the company town's council seats.
Here's the answer. Power and treatment. Wirth asks who is treated unequally and who holds a subordinate position, so the headcount alone never decides it.
3. Tell an attitude from an action
Let's go into a busy restaurant. One server privately believes that customers from one group tip poorly, but serves every table with the same care. Another server holds no such belief, yet seats customers from that group near the kitchen door, because the manager told the staff to. What each one thinks and what each one does point in different directions.
Sociology separates the thinking from the doing. Prejudice is an attitude: the beliefs and feelings a person holds about a group and applies to its members before knowing them. A stereotype is an oversimplified generalization about a group that is applied to everyone in it, ignoring the differences among its members. The first server's belief about tipping is a stereotype. Discrimination is an action: treating people unequally because of the group they belong to or are seen to belong to.
In 1949, Robert Merton crossed the two in "Discrimination and the American Creed." If you can have the attitude or not, and the action or not, you get four types. That's Merton's typology. The unprejudiced nondiscriminator has neither. The unprejudiced discriminator has no prejudice but treats people unequally anyway, often to go along with a rule. The prejudiced nondiscriminator holds prejudice but doesn't act on it. And the prejudiced discriminator has both.
Pause and try this. The second server holds no prejudice but follows the manager's seating order. Which of Merton's four types is that?
Ask two things: what does the server think, and what does the server do?
Here's the answer. An unprejudiced discriminator. There's no prejudice in the attitude, but the action treats customers unequally, which shows that discrimination can happen with no prejudice at all.
4. Find the bias in the procedure
Now a warehouse. It fills every opening through referrals from current staff. Workers recommend friends, cousins, and neighbors, and the manager hires from that list because it's fast. Nobody says or believes anything unkind about anyone. Yet if the current staff came mostly from one group's neighborhoods, the referral rule keeps hiring inside that group, year after year.
Where's the bias? You won't find it in anyone's head. You'll find it in the procedure. Individual racism is prejudice or discrimination based on race that a particular person carries out in their own attitudes or actions. Institutional racism, also called systemic racism, is disadvantage built into the rules and routine procedures of organizations, whatever the individuals in them believe.
This is Week 1's macro level at work. Individual racism happens between people, at the micro level. Institutional racism lives in the rules, at the macro level, and it can keep going after every prejudiced person has left. One caution, though. A rule that produces unequal results by group is something you show with evidence, such as the share of hires from each group over several years. Without that evidence, it's a hypothesis.
Pause and try this. In the warehouse, whose attitudes does the referral rule need in order to keep hiring inside one group?
Think about what the rule does on its own.
Here's the answer. Nobody's. The rule repeats the current staff's networks by itself, which is why institutional racism is bias in the procedure rather than in a person.
5. Read Du Bois
Week 1 placed W. E. B. Du Bois among the founders. Now his ideas move to the center. In 1903, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk. Its opening Forethought names the problem of the twentieth century as the problem of the color line, the division between races. Its first chapter describes double consciousness: the sense of always seeing yourself through the eyes of others.
Four years earlier, in 1899, Du Bois published The Philadelphia Negro. It's one of the first empirical community studies in American sociology. Empirical means the evidence was gathered in the field, not argued from an armchair. So Du Bois didn't only name the color line. He went out and measured life along it.
One honest note. Famous lines from that 1903 book are often quoted from memory and slightly wrong. So this course states Du Bois's ideas in its own words.
Students sometimes mix up double consciousness with Week 4's looking-glass self, because both involve seeing yourself through others. Cooley's looking-glass self, from 1902, describes how everyone forms a self from imagined judgments. Du Bois's double consciousness is his name, in a book about the color line, for always seeing yourself through others' eyes.
Pause and try this. Which Du Bois work is the empirical study of one community, and which gave the field the color line?
Match each idea to its year.
Here's the answer. The Philadelphia Negro, from 1899, is the community study. The Souls of Black Folk, from 1903, names the color line and describes double consciousness.
6. Map how groups meet
Picture four towns, each home to two groups. In the first, both groups keep their own languages and holidays and sit on the council as equals. In the second, the newer group's grandchildren speak only the main language and are hard to tell apart from everyone else. In the third, a highway and a set of rules keep the groups in separate neighborhoods, schools, and clinics. In the fourth, one group sets out to destroy the other.
Those are the patterns of intergroup relations, running from pluralism through assimilation and segregation to genocide. Pluralism means groups keep their distinct cultures while sharing one society as equals. Assimilation means a minority group takes on the dominant group's culture until it becomes hard to tell apart. Segregation keeps groups physically and socially apart. Genocide is the deliberate attempt to destroy a group of people.
Can contact change any of this? In 1954, Gordon Allport proposed the contact hypothesis: contact between members of different groups can reduce prejudice under some conditions. Picture a community garden where neighbors from both sides of a dividing street share plots and plan the harvest together. Now picture a crowded bus where riders share a seat every morning and never speak. Both are contact, but very different kinds, and the hypothesis doesn't promise that a shared bus is enough. Which conditions matter is what researchers keep testing.
Pause and try this. In which of the four towns do the groups stay distinct while sharing one society as equals?
Think about the languages and the council seats.
Here's the answer. The first town. Keeping distinct cultures while sharing power as equals is pluralism; in the second town, where one group becomes hard to tell apart, that's assimilation.
7. Run one census form through three lenses
Back to the kitchen table. A household of four is filling in the census race question. One parent checks one box. The other checks two. The teenager writes in a heritage that matches neither list.
Structural functionalism, at the macro level, asks what job shared categories do: when everyone answers the same questions, a society can count itself and plan. Conflict theory, also macro, asks who draws the categories, since they've changed from one census to the next, and who gains or loses when they change. Symbolic interactionism, at the micro level, asks what checking a box means to the teenager writing in a heritage, and how others will read that answer.
None of the three is the right one. They're complementary lenses that answer different questions at different levels. Your job is to run all three and name each one's level.
Pause and try this. Which lens asks what checking a box means to the person filling in the form, and at what level does it work?
Think about the teenager at the table.
Here's the answer. Symbolic interactionism, at the micro level. It looks at the meaning a person attaches in a face-to-face moment, while the other two read the form at the macro level of the whole society.
8. Read the 2020 Census shares
Now the real numbers, read with Week 2's four questions. The source is the Census Bureau's 2021 release on the 2020 Census.
First, what's measured? Two separate self-identified questions, one on race and one on Hispanic origin. Over whom? Everyone counted in the 2020 Census. A decennial census counts a country's entire population once every ten years, rather than surveying a sample.
Here are the race shares, in the Bureau's own labels. White alone, 61.6%. Black or African American alone, 12.4%. Asian alone, 6.0%. American Indian and Alaska Native alone, 1.1%. Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, 0.2%. Some Other Race alone, 8.4%. And Two or More Races, 10.2%. Added together, they come to 99.9, which is 100% once you allow for rounding. So the race categories form one whole.
Now Hispanic origin. Hispanic origin is asked separately from race, so Hispanic or Latino people can be of any race. Hispanic or Latino, of any race, was 18.7%, or 62,100,000 people. If you add that share to the race shares, you get 118.6. That's more than 100, which tells you the two questions overlap. They were never one pie.
Next, the labels. Alone counts people who reported one race and no other. Alone or in combination counts people who reported that race by itself or with at least one other race. White alone was 61.6%, and White alone or in combination was 71%. The gap is 9.4 percentage points, the people who reported White along with another race. Those two shares overlap, so you never add them.
What changed? Two or More Races is the category for people who reported more than one race. It rose from 2.9% in 2010 to 10.2% in 2020, a rise of 7.3 percentage points, so the share was about 3.5 times its 2010 level. The count went from 9,000,000 to 33,800,000. But the Census Bureau attributes the change partly to improved question design and coding. So part of that rise is a change in how the question was asked and read, not only a change in the population.
What don't these figures show? Why the population has this composition, anything about you or any one person, or whether any group is treated unequally. Correlation or cause? Neither. A share describes composition. It's one count in one year.
Pause and try this. Someone draws a single pie chart with a Hispanic slice sitting beside the race slices. What's wrong with that picture?
Remember the 118.6.
Here's the answer. Hispanic origin is a separate question, and Hispanic people appear in every race category. Adding the shares gives 118.6, more than 100, so the two sets of shares can't be stacked into one pie.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Race is a category people built, and ethnicity is a heritage people share. A minority group is defined by power and treatment, not by size. Prejudice is an attitude, discrimination is an action, and Merton crossed them into four types. Institutional racism lives in procedures, whatever people believe. Du Bois named the color line and double consciousness, and he studied a real community. Intergroup relations run from pluralism to genocide, and contact can reduce prejudice under some conditions, a hypothesis still being tested. Each perspective reads a census form at its own level. And the census race shares and the Hispanic share come from two questions, so you read the label before you add.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz, then the discussion, the assignment, and the Sociology in Action Workshop. Next week, in Week 11, the course turns to sex, gender, and sexuality, a second category people built, and reads the earnings ratio that comes with it.
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