Week 10 — Race & Ethnicity

Why this matters

A hiring manager reviewing how a team recruits and a city council reading new census tables both meet this week's ideas.

In plain language

Almost every form you fill out asks you to check a box for your race and your ethnicity, and this week asks what those boxes really measure. You will learn that race (a way of grouping people by how they look or are seen) is a category people built, not a fact of biology. You will also see that ethnicity (a shared heritage, such as a language or a faith) is something different. You will learn to tell prejudice (an attitude) from discrimination (an action), and to spot unfairness built into a rule rather than a person. Then you will read the real 2020 Census figures one careful step at a time.

• Already covered: Weeks 1 to 9 built the perspectives, the four data questions, culture, the self, groups, deviance, and inequality.
• This week: race as a built category, minority groups, prejudice versus discrimination, institutional racism, and the 2020 Census shares.
• How they connect: Week 2's four questions now read the census race and Hispanic-origin shares.
• Where we're going next: Week 11 reads gender with the same habits.

Focus

Who drew the boxes on the forms we fill in, and what do they measure?

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

• [ ] tell race from ethnicity and define a minority group by power
• [ ] tell prejudice from discrimination and use Merton's four types
• [ ] find the bias in a procedure, not only in a person
• [ ] read the 2020 Census shares without stacking two questions

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 10 (about 45 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Sociology in Action Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: explain why the 2020 race shares and the 18.7% Hispanic share cannot be one pie.

You've got this

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

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