Chapter 11. Race and Ethnicity
11.1. Racial, Ethnic, and Minority Groups
While many students may be accustomed to conflating the terms race, ethnicity, and minority group, these three terms have distinct meanings for sociologists. The idea of race refers to superficial physical differences, like skin colour, that a particular society considers significant; ethnicity is a term that describes shared culture; and a minority group is subordinate, or lacking power in society regardless of skin colour or culture of origin. Subaltern groups are minorities that have difficulty expressing an identity outside of the definitions imposed on them by a dominant or colonial culture.
What Is Race?
Historically, the concept of race has changed across cultures and eras, eventually becoming less connected with ancestral and familial ties, and more concerned with superficial physical characteristics. In the origins of race science, theorists posited categories of race based on various geographic regions, ethnicities, skin colours, facial structures, and more. Their labels for racial groups often connoted regions (Mongolia and the Caucasus Mountains, for instance) or denoted skin tones (black, white, yellow, and red, for example). A common notion is the five race theory that can be traced back to the early race science of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). Blumenbach suggested that humans were one species but could be categorized into five racial categories: African, European, Asian, Oceanic, and Native American (Bhopal, 2007).
However, this typology of race, developed during early racial science, has fallen into disuse in sociology, and racialization (the social construction of race) is a far more useful way of understanding racial categories. Races are complex sociocultural entities rather than genetically distinct categories. According to this school of thought, race is not a biologically meaningful term as humans are estimated to share 99.9% of their DNA (National Human Genome Research Institute, 2018). Rather, certain groups become racialized through a social process that marks them for unequal treatment based on perceived physiological differences or phenotypes. When considering skin colour, for example, the social construction of race perspective recognizes that the relative darkness or fairness of skin is an evolutionary adaptation to the available sunlight in different regions of the world. It speaks to geographical ancestry, but the amount of melanin (a pigment that determines skin colour) in the skin is relatively insignificant in itself. It is a minor trait that evolved independently of other genetic factors that might influence health, intelligence or behaviour.
Although a 2018 poll revealed that 53% of Americans believed that biology either totally (33.8%) or somewhat (18.8%) determines racial identity (Tillery, 2018), the use of skin colour to mark significant racial difference tends to be based on socioeconomic assumptions. In the 19th and early