Race and ethnicity have, during the centuries since the advent of the modern nation-state and the era of colonialism, profoundly shaped the social, cultural, economic, and political character of much of the globe. This includes both the wealthy nations of the world and the poor ones. Contrary to the predictions of modernization theorists and Marxists, both of which foresaw a future in which race and ethnicity would decline in significance as a consequence of the evolution of capitalist industrialization or the more overarching impact of the totality of modern institutions and practices, the historical record clearly reveals that divisions based on race and ethnicity remain a salient feature of contemporary social life in the twenty-first century.
Indeed, to categorize people in everyday conversations along the lines of racial or ethnic group affiliations is commonplace. Thus, in the US to speak of African Americans or blacks is to lump approximately 12 percent of the nation's population into one of the five prominently identified races in the nation. On the other hand, to speak about Swedish Americans or Italian Americans—equally commonplace—is to place millions of people into what are seen as the vast array of ethnic groups residing in the nation. A similar pattern can be seen in the UK, where the term “black” was used a few decades ago to describe the post-World War II immigrants coming largely from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, in this case the term black being used more broadly than in the US context. Over time, these two groups would be distinguished, respectively as Afro-Caribbeans and Asians. At the same time, the UK used the term ethnic or national group to refer to Scots and the Welsh, two groups with historic roots in the nation as deep as are those of the English.
In these examples of the way these two terms are used, there appears to be a distinction being made wherein race refers to biological or physiological differences, while ethnic refers to cultural differences. In practice, however, the two are often more interconnected, convoluted, and subject to historical change. Thus, Jews throughout Western Europe and North America were viewed in both racial and ethnic terms during the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. However, after the Holocaust, a pronounced shift occurred in all of these nations that resulted in locating Jews racially in the same racial grouping as the majority population, which meant that they were considered to be white. At the same time, they were defined as being a distinctive ethnic group within that racial category.
To complicate matters further, in some societies people are placed into categories in an either/or fashion. One is either white or black. Nowhere was this more evident than in the US for much of its history, where what became known as the “one-drop” rule prevailed. What this rule meant was that any person with the slightest amount of black ancestry would be considered black. In one illustration of this phenomenon, a woman in Louisiana who was 1/32 black and thus 31/32s white sought to have her race listed as white on her driver's license. The state denied that request and prevailed in the courts. The consequence of this approach is that a public recognition of race mixing is repressed. It should be noted that the mixed race individual is defined as being a member of the subordinate group, not the dominant group. This is a mode of categorizing people based on what is termed “hypodescent.”
Of course, race and ethnicity would not be such controversial topics if all that was involved was categorization. But the history of the use of these terms reveals that to categorize is to place people in a hierarchy that defines groups in terms of whether they are to be favored or not, privileged or not, empowered or not, economically advantaged or not, and so forth. Moreover, history also reveals that dividing people along racial and ethnic lines has generated forms of intra-group conflict, coercion, and violence, including in the most extreme forms of conflict attempts to exterminate an entire group. The genocidal campaigns that the world has witnessed during the past century, from the Armenian genocide after World War I to the ghastly attempt by the Nazi regime to destroy European Jewry, through to the campaign of extermination that Hutus undertook against the Tutsis in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia that sought to kill off the territory's Muslim community reveal the continual threat of barbarism in the modern world.
If this was the whole story, it would clearly be best to do whatever can be done to eliminate or reduce as much as possible ethnic and racial definitions. However, these forms of identity have not simply been a source of conflict, but have often been a more positive source of personal identity and group affiliation, offering people a way to create a meaningful life. A shared history and culture can provide people with a source of strength that can help them meet various challenges collectively.
Given the Janus face of race and ethnicity and their continuing importance, the challenge is to better understand them in order to promote that which is positive while combating the negative. Sociology and anthropology, the closest of social science relatives, have from their respective origins paid considerable attention to race and ethnicity, and thus contemporary scholars build on a long and productive tradition of empirical research and theoretical development. Indeed, the sheer volume of published works in this field can quickly overwhelm the student novice. This book is conceived with this fact in mind. Its purpose, quite simply, is to acquaint students and other interested readers with the sociological subfield devoted to the social scientific understanding of the forms and dynamics of racial and ethnic relations. In this regard, one caveat at the outset is in order. While the issues discussed below are applicable in any and all national contexts, our examples will chiefly be drawn from major English-speaking industrial nations, which will be the places that most of our readers will be most familiar with.
Before turning to four substantive topics addressing respectively prejudice and discrimination, the dynamics of inequality, ethnic conflict, and modes of incorporation of ethnic and racial groups, we spend time in this chapter clarifying what exactly the subject matter at hand is, beginning with a look at the nature of the relationship between race and ethnicity.
There is at the moment a discussion about whether it's a mistake to talk about racial or ethnic groups (Brubaker 2004). The rub, according to those who have called this common practice into question is that two things tend to happen when we discuss ethnicity or race in terms of groups: groups are essentialized and they are viewed as homogeneous. To say they are essentialized means that groups are seen as fixed and determinate, and not subject to change over time. The concern about homogeneity points to the fact that to speak about a group can imply that it can be seen as referring to all members of the group without regard to internal differences. We understand the concerns of those who have advocated for a way of viewing ethnicity and race that takes us “beyond groupism” (Brubaker 2004: 11), but think that it is not only unlikely that people will abandon referring to groups, but unnecessary to do so since properly understood, such language is a convenient shorthand.
The question to be addressed in this section concerns the relationship between racial groups and ethnic groups. As Figure 1.1 illustrates, we will examine three different answers to the question. The first suggests that racial groups and ethnic groups are two different types of group. The second position claims that while racial and ethnic groups are usually distinct, in some circumstances they are overlapping. The third views racial groups as a subset of ethnic groups.
An immediate issue arises in any effort to decide which of these three perspectives is more persuasive. Are we interested in determining how ordinary people understand the relationship, or are we trying to make an assessment based on an analytical perspective useful for sociological inquiry? While both are reasonable ways of answering the question, we are concerned here with these terms as sociological concepts. That being said, it is often difficult for sociologists to neatly separate everyday usage from sociological concepts, due to the fact that the latter is derivative of and embedded in the former.
Race was used far earlier than ethnicity in everyday discourse. The beginning of modern notions of race coincided with the European colonization of the world, at which time contact, conflict, and the oppression of people from the “New World” with different physical features and different cultures led to an ongoing debate about the human character of the “other.” European commentators, using their own civilization as a standard by which other civilizations would be judged, tended to find them wanting. Their ethnocentric perspective on the world sometimes led them to conclude that the “other” was not fully human. At other times, they distinguished their “civilized” world from that of the “barbarians.” It was the rare humanist who could see through this viewpoint. However, a minority opinion shared the enlightened perspective of the great sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne, who in his essay “Of Cannibals” (written in response to seeing a cannibal brought to France by an explorer) wrote,
Figure 1.1: The relationship of racial groups to ethnic groups: competing conceptual models.
I think there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in
(Montaigne 1958: 152)
The ethnocentrism that Montaigne tried to challenge succeeded in shaping our understanding of race. The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus offered the first of numerous “scientific” efforts to classify the human population by breaking it into various races. Specifically, he divided humankind into four major racial groups: white, red, yellow and black. While this might at some level be seen as a reasonable broad generalization about differences in skin coloration, he meant it to be far more than a mere description of differences in physical appearance. In his view, the physical differences were deeply interconnected with differences in temperament, intelligence, and moral worthiness. Linnaeus assumed that racial differences could speak to determining who was capable of reason and who was not, who was morally responsible and who was not, who was fit for leadership and who was destined to be led, and who was understandably the conqueror and who was the conquered.
This sort of thinking characterized the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as witnessed in Comte Arthur de Gobineau's The Inequality of Human Races (1915[1853–1855]). Gobineau's work set the tone for a century of writing on race, where the goal was not only to classify people along racial lines, but to highlight the presumed superiority of some groups and the inferiority of others. He was especially interested in differentiating strong and weak groups, contending that because the strong exhibited a willingness to migrate, they would inevitably conquer the weak, and in the process bring to them the benefits of civilization. Billed as science, what Gobineau actually produced was an ideological defense of European colonialism.
Such thinking permeated Social Darwinian ideology, with its belief in societal evolution and emphasis on the survival of the fittest. It offered a critique of those seeking to launch some form of a welfare state, wherein all of the members of a society would be accorded as fundamental rights a certain bedrock standard of living. According to Social Darwinists, to do so would amount to undermining the overall health of the society by preventing its weak and unhealthy elements from being eliminated naturally. This political worldview painted a picture of incessant struggle and conflict, a world that was “red in tooth and claw.” Such a perspective could lead to the promotion of such draconian positions as the suggestion supported by Franklin Giddings, prominent American sociologist and officer in the Immigration Restriction League, to force poor immigrants into workhouses where they would be prevented from producing any more children. It also fit in well with the Eugenics movement, first advocated by Sir Francis Galton (half-cousin to Charles Darwin), that sought to employ genetics to improve the human race through selective breeding.
Racialist thinking divided the peoples occupying the European continent further into subsets of the white race, with a division between the Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean that was developed by William Z. Ripley (1899) being one such prominent example. The purpose of making such distinctions was not simply to determine difference, but to rank those differences on a racial hierarchy. Ripley and his peers always placed the Teutonic race on the top of the hierarchy and the Mediterranean race on the bottom. Considerable energy was devoted to attempting to place various groups into these categories. In this task, some groups proved to be especially problematic, such as Jews and Lapps. The former seemed not to fit into any of the three races, while the latter was suspected of having ancient origins in Asia.
As historian Nell Irvin Painter (2010) has stressed, these and similar efforts aimed at creating classificatory schemes of racial categorization were never done in a disinterested attempt to depict human diversity. Rather, the project was always designed to advance the argument on behalf of the existence of racial hierarchies as permanent, biologically rooted features of human diversity. As such, the project's purpose was to determine standards for adjudicating racial superiority and inferiority along the lines of intelligence and moral character. As such, racialist thinking served as a powerful ideological tool justifying oppression and exploitation. It provided a rationalization for European colonialism, for slavery, and for the subjugation of indigenous peoples by the charter members of settler nations such as Australia, Canada, and the US.
Werner Sollors (1986) has pointed out that the word ethnicity didn't come into common usage until the 1930s, which coincides with the rise of Nazi Germany, whose official ideologues embraced the sort of racialist thought we've been describing. As a way of distancing themselves from the racism inherent in racialist thinking, some scholars tried to implement an alternative language. Michael Banton (1987: xi) points to the case of two prominent anthropologists, Sir Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon, who “criticized mistaken racial doctrines and proposed the use of ‘ethnic group’ in place of ‘race’ when discussing the social aspect, because the adjective ‘ethnic’ more clearly indicated a concern with social differences.”
Note what they were proposing. They did not necessarily want to discard the term “race,” but instead wanted to limit its use to the nonsocial, which one can assume meant the biological. Huxley and Haddon were not alone in turning to ethnicity. The prominent figures associated with the Chicago School of Sociology, especially W. I. Thomas and Robert E. Park, increasingly sought to distance themselves from biologically rooted explanations by employing accounts rooted in culture and social structure. By the publication of the landmark Yankee City studies in the 1940s, led by Chicago sociologist W. Lloyd Warner (1963), it was clear that ethnicity was in vogue. However, the more social scientists used the term, the more it entered everyday language. A few years after World War II ended, Everett C. Hughes (1971[1948]: 153) described the term “ethnic group” as a “colorless catch-all much used by anthropologists and sociologists,” going on to predict that as it was increasingly “taken up by a larger public,” scholars would have to seek yet another serviceable term.
Six decades later, we haven't followed Hughes’ advice, but instead continue to debate the merits of race versus ethnicity and seek to sort out their relationship. With this brief historical excursus on origins of these two terms completed, we turn below to an assessment of the merits of each of the three competing positions.
Perhaps the most influential scholars to make the case for distinguishing racial groups from ethnic groups are Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in Racial Formation in the United States (1994). In their view, ethnic groups should be used to refer to those groups of voluntary immigrants who left their homelands in various points in Europe for the US, while race is especially apt in discussing African Americans and Native Americans. The rationale for making this distinction is that these groups have had very different historical experiences. While voluntary immigrants from Europe often confronted prejudice and discrimination, they experienced nothing resembling the oppression and marginalization that involuntary migrants who were forced into slavery experienced or that the victims of colonial domination were forced to endure. Distinguishing between ethnic and racial groups is meant to serve as a reminder of the vastly different histories of voluntary immigrants versus others. Omi and Winant appear to want to locate Latinos and Asians in the race category, though in many respects their histories more closely resemble their immigrant counterparts from Europe. It is true that they did confront far more intense nativist hostility and have had a considerably more difficult time finding a foothold in their new homeland than was the case with European-origin groups, but they were for the most part voluntary labor migrants (the history of Mexicans in the US is complicated, and thus the qualifier).
Although Omi and Winant operate from a social constructionist perspective, their work appeared before the arrival of “whiteness studies,” which sought to indicate that many European immigrant groups were not, upon arrival, seen as white. Rather, through a process of political and social claims-making, many of these groups engaged in a long process of, to use the words of the preeminent whiteness studies historian David Roediger (2005), “working toward whiteness.” Omi and Winant's lack of attention to the racialized language used to depict many—though not all—European immigrant groups when they first arrived in America led them to make a distinction that the historical evidence is hard to sustain.
An additional problem with Omi and Winant's argument is that despite their social constructionist perspective, there is a tendency to essentialize race. Unlike the presumed fluidity of ethnic identities, race seems at their hands to take on a much more unchanging character. The underlying problem we have with their argument is that it confuses a historical distinction with an analytical one. It conflates analytical categories with everyday applied uses of both terms. It is for this reason that we don't find this dichotomous position to be very convincing.
An intermediate position can be found in the work of Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann in their widely-cited Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (2007). In their view, race and ethnicity should be viewed as different though not always mutually exclusive. Their argument can be summarized as follows:
(Cornell and Hartmann 2007: 26–32)
Despite these differences, Cornell and Hartmann contend that there are empirical instances in which race and ethnicity overlap and cannot be distinguished as neatly as Omi and Winant sought to do. They offer a number of examples that challenge the differences noted above. Thus, in Belgium, the major societal dividing line is between the Flemish and Walloon ethnic communities, rather than being predicated on race. They can point to cases where ethnicity is assigned by others, with the members of the group having little say in the matter. In short, instead of the sharp distinction of the previous account, this one blurs the boundaries.
That being said, the chief problem noted for the first model applies here as well. Once again, the problem is that Cornell and Hartmann conflate historical and analytical approaches to the subject, shaping the latter by the former.
In providing an alternative to these two approaches, treating race as a subset of ethnicity is an effort to offer an analytical model that can be distinguished from historical or everyday uses. It does so by treating ethnicity as a concept with a fairly explicit definition. What did sociologists and anthropologists have in mind when they began to use this “colorless catch-all” term? In the first place, it referred to groups that shared a common history—real or perceived—and with it a sense of a common geographic origin. It also refers to a shared culture, which is a broad term that can include within it traditions, folkways, values, symbols, language, and religion. Moreover, given that ethnicity is a boundary creating construct, it refers to a belief among group members and outsiders alike that it constitutes a distinctive community formation. Finally, and this is key, race can be seen as one other potential component of ethnic identity and group definition.
To the extent that in any particular instance race is highly salient, it is appropriate to speak of a racialized ethnicity. In this regard, race would be similar to religion, as we shall see in the next section. In some instances, religion is a particularly significant aspect of an ethnic identity, while in other instances it is not. For Jews in the US, religion is a crucially vital aspect of ethnic identity, while for Germans it is less so. Such is also the case with race. Clearly US history has been profoundly shaped by the unequal and inequitable relationship between Americans of African descent and those of European origin. A parallel situation does not exist in Canada, where the major divide between the nation's two “charter groups,” British Canadians and French Canadians is not predicated on the understanding that their differences are based on race.
A key virtue of treating race as a subset of ethnicity is that it prevents viewing the former in terms of nature and the latter in terms of culture. Historian Linda Nicholson (2008: 11–20) has observed that during the nineteenth century, when racialist thinking took on a “scientific” cast, the emphasis was on the naturalness of race, which meant that racial groups were posited to exist in a fixed and unchanging racial hierarchy. While advocates for the first two positions discussed above seek to avoid such naturalizing tendencies in their effort to treat race and ethnicity from a social constructionist perspective, it is our sense that maintaining the distinction they seek to does not serve that purpose well.
Instead, by speaking of racialized ethnicity, it is clear that what is at stake entails coming to terms with socially created and embedded notions about group differences predicated on observable physiological differences that are defined as having consequences for innate ability, moral character, and persistent inequality. In short, from this perspective race can be seen for what it is: a definition of the situation that, to the extent that it is embraced by large numbers of people, will have real consequences in the social world.
British cultural sociologist Paul Gilroy (2000: 1) has challenged those who want to maintain a distinction between race and ethnicity, arguing that it is preferable to consider
patterns of conflict connected to the consolidation of cultural lines rather than color lines and is concerned, in particular, with the operations of power, which, thanks to ideas about “race”, have become entangled with those vain and mistaken attempts to delineate and subdivide humankind.
In even more explicit terms, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson (1997: 173) contends that, “The term race itself should be abandoned … and the distinction between ‘race’ and ethnicity should be abandoned as meaningless and potentially dangerous.”
The suggestion advanced herein is not to abandon the term race, but to understand it in context. Ethnicity, quite simply, is the umbrella term that encompasses race, religion, language, and other factors that can, depending on the particular case, play a greater or lesser role. In this regard, we concur with Sandra Wallman (1986: 230) that race is but one element to be used as an ethnic boundary marker, others including language, religion, shared history, shared traditions, and a common geographic origin; and with Susan Olzak (1992: 25, emphasis in the original) when she contends that “race is a specific instance of ethnicity, defined by membership based on what are assumed to be inherited phenotypical characteristics.” Similarly, Floya Anathias (1992: 421) is correct in claiming that “ ‘race’ categories belong to the more encompassing category of ethnic collectivity.” Moreover, as Steve Fenton (1999: 4) has observed in a passage that succinctly summarizes our position, “The term ‘ethnic’ has a much greater claim to analytical usefulness in sociology because it is not hampered by a history of connotations with discredited science and malevolent practices in the way the term ‘race’ is.” One of the implications of this position is that when race does prove to be an especially important aspect of ethnic identity, the focus will be less on race per se than on racism and its consequences. This is what Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown (2003) had in mind in arguing for refocusing research from an emphasis on “race relations” to racism.
All this being said, it is difficult to break from using the altogether commonplace “race and ethnicity” couplet. In what follows we will continue to write about race and ethnicity, but only because it is a familiar shorthand, easier than writing over and over again “ethnicity, including racialized ethnicity.” Moreover, both race and ethnicity are categories of practice, which means that we need to consider how they are defined and used both in the everyday discourse of ordinary people—both members of the dominant society and members of minority groups—and in the creation of official government classificatory schemes (Brubaker 2004: 31).
Race and ethnicity are social constructions. This phrase is often used by academics when discussing the nature of race and ethnicity. But what does it mean? What is the significance of this notion? One of the most important aspects of this idea is that both race and ethnicity are dependent upon the particular social and historical contexts in which they occur. We observe race and ethnicity all around us, in our daily lives, at school, at work, in the media. With race and ethnicity all around us, it is easy to assume that they are natural, inherent categories that have always existed and will always exist, virtually unchanged. As noted earlier, we refer to the tendency to view race and ethnicity in this way as “essentializing” them.
When people do so, they assume that the racial and ethnic categories they use and understand are the same across societies and over time. However, anyone who has examined the history of the ways each term has been used will quickly be disabused of such a belief. Historians and social scientists have offered us clear evidence that these two concepts, indeed, have changed over time, acquiring different meanings and leading to widely varied consequences.
figure 1.2 is a photo that came from an exhibit entitled “Race: Are We So Different?” that traveled around science museums across the US a few years ago. On each person's shirt are the various labels that the US Census Bureau has used at various times since the first census in 1790 up to and including the 2000 census (the exhibit took place prior to the 2010 census). A cursory examination of the photo reveals that the categories have not remained constant. Thus, the prefix “free” that described the person in the left of the back row in the first census was subsequently dropped, the assumption being that if one was white, one was free. Sometimes the words change but the category remains the same: thus, as the Civil War began, a person was black, while immediately after World War II that person was a Negro. Four decades later, and the person was again black. As this example indicates, these categories reflect, at least in part, changes in public opinion, which at various junctures the government needs to take seriously.
Figure 1.2: Changing census terminology.
The person in the far right of the back row reveals yet another way that categories change. In the first census of the twentieth century, this individual would have been classified as Japanese, referring to a specific nationality or ethnic group. However, by the last census of that century, the category had become panethnic with the use of the term “Asian.” Finally, while the person second from the left in the back row was in the past defined solely in terms of a presumably racial category, in 1980 that person was listed as Hispanic black—a term that seeks to combine what the Census Bureau viewed as an ethnic and a racial category.
In short, this photo offers plenty of evidence that racial and ethnic categories are not immutable givens. Rather, they have been socially constructed. In this example, the government played the dominant role in the process, with a behind the scenes role played by the public at large. However, this isn't the whole story. If ethnic and racial groups are created, the people who become members of these collectivities also play a role in their development—sometimes a dominant role, sometimes not.
Another example that derives from an approach to this field known as whiteness studies, a topic we will discuss in the next chapter, can be observed by examining the complex story of immigration to the US for certain white ethnic groups, beginning with the Irish. Many European immigrants were not considered to be white when they first arrived in America, and what ensued was a struggle to “become white.” While it is true that in the twenty-first century, Irish Americans are considered without question to be white, when Irish immigrants arrived in the early nineteenth century, they were subject to many of the same stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination imposed upon disadvantaged, non-European origin groups. There were fears of Irish immigrants marrying native-born whites and established groups in society at the time questioned their morals and values (Ignatiev 1995).
In addition to variations across time, a comparison of racial and ethnic categories across societies shows that race and ethnicity also vary by place. Some nations, such as Brazil and a number of Caribbean countries, do not operate with a view of race that is constructed in binary terms, such that a person is either white or black. Instead, these nations recognize the reality of racial mixing and thus have constructed categories to account for this reality. Thus, the term “mulatto,” which refers to a person of mixed white/European and black/African parentage is a commonly used term (in Brazil “pardo” is used as a synonym for mulatto). Less commonly used, but used nonetheless, are the terms “quadroon” and octoroon,” referring respectively to individuals who are one-fourth black and one-eighth black. Meanwhile, the term “mestizo” describes an individual who is the product of white/European and indigenous/Indian ancestry.
South Africa during the era of apartheid constructed a racial system consisting of four groups: whites (which consisted chiefly of Boers, or people of Dutch ancestry, and the British), blacks, coloreds (the term used for people of mixed black and white ancestry), and Indian, a category that reflected the significance of immigrants from India in South Africa's history. These examples stand in contrast to the hypodescent system in the US that was described earlier in the chapter.
One further comparative illustration serves to reveal just how nationally specific official categorizations of race actually are. At the beginning of the current century, the United States government specified five broad racial groups: White, American Indian (plus Alaskan Natives), Blacks (or African Americans), Asians (including Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders), and Some Other Race. Note that Hispanic or Latino was not defined as one of the racial categories. Rather, it was defined as an ethnic identity. In terms of ethnicity, people were asked if they were Hispanic/Latino or non-Hispanic/non-Latino. Thus all respondents were asked two questions, one that located themselves ethnically and the other racially. During the same timeframe, the Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom specified the following racial categories in England and Wales (they used a somewhat different set of categories for Scotland and Northern Ireland): White, Mixed, Asian or Asian British, Black or Black British, and Chinese or Other Ethnic Group. Note, for example, how differently the term Asian is used in the two national contexts. Meanwhile, in France the government has refused to collect census data on racial groups, in fact making such an effort illegal. Thus, at the moment as an official governmental category of practice, there are no ethnic or racial groups in France (recently, the government of Nicolas Sarkozy has created a commission to see if this policy ought to be reconsidered).
Given these variations across time and place, it is reasonable to expect that the content of racial and ethnic categories will continue to change in order to address novel circumstances. Looking at the US, there is currently a widely-held notion circulating among the public that the country will become “majority non-white” by 2050. But it is important here to note that this assumption is based on present understandings of racial and ethnic categories and on population projections of current trends. How will racial and ethnic categories be defined when the US is no longer a “majority white” society? An even better question to ask may be what “white” will look like in 2050? Who will be part of the “white” racial group? Who will not? Asking these questions help us to remember the social construction of these categories.
Herbert Gans (1999) has suggested that whereas in the past, the broadest division in the nation was between whites and nonwhites, which largely came down to a division between European-origin peoples and everyone else, what might be happening at the beginning of the current century, he speculated, was a new divide: between blacks and non-blacks. What this would mean is that those of European-origin would be joined in one large bloc by Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans, leaving the 14 percent of the population that is black in a category by itself.
If racial and ethnic identities are social constructions, does this mean that biology is irrelevant? One particular place where this question has been posed concerns the current debates about genetics, DNA, and racial profiling. In recent years, scientific advances, including those associated with the Human Genome Project, have allowed genetic markers and information to enter both the courtroom and the doctor's office. Information from DNA samples at crime scenes is being used with increased frequency to attempt to identify the race or ethnicity of suspects. The medical community is using genetic information to identity racial and ethnic differences in susceptibility to various diseases and differences in responses to medications, which has led to the introduction of “designer drugs” targeted to specific racial and ethnic groups. For example, the drug BiDil is being specifically marketed as a prescription drug for African Americans with cardiovascular disease, it being the first drug to receive the approval of the Food and Drug Administration “exclusively for a racially identified population” (Lee 2005: 2136).
Troy Duster (2003, 2006) suggests that we need to place these scientific advances into historical context. In previous eras, other forms of the “science of race” were purported to offer biological accounts of racial differences regarding such things as intelligence and moral character. All have subsequently been debunked as empirically false. These include practices such as phrenology, which refers to the measurement of head shape, size, and other characteristics of the skull to study human behavior and innate intelligence. The Eugenics movement is another example of science used to justify racist practices, offering a presumed scientific justification for the control and the perpetual subordination of disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. Today there is a consensus that these earlier efforts to create a science of race turned out to be instances of pseudo-science.
However, while there is general consensus that the biological essentialism of race generated from phrenology and Eugenics was not correct, scholars and the public in general are far less certain about how to view the findings of contemporary genetic research. Will we look back at the end of the twenty-first century and agree that science finally “got race right?” Or, as Duster (2003: 10) ponders, is it possible that the use of genetics and DNA in forensics, racial profiling, and medicine constitutes the “specter of an early twenty-first century equivalent of phrenology?” At the moment, it is impossible to answer that question with a sufficient degree of certainty to eliminate the concerns raised by Duster. While it is clear that the research done to date by pharmocogenomics researchers has steered clear of the concerns of earlier generations for adjudicating presumed differences in intelligence and moral character predicated on race, and some fellow scientists have expressed reservations about the merits of race targeting treatments for various physical diseases.
At the same time, though a minority position today, there continue to be efforts aimed at using science to prove that various racial minorities in the Western nations are inferior to whites. In the US, such efforts have received the sponsorship of right-wing funding institutions such as the Bradley Foundation and the Pioneer Fund. Perhaps the most influential and controversial product of this funding was the 1994 book authored by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve. One of the conclusions that would have no doubt disturbed their counterparts from an earlier era was that although whites were considered to have discernable higher average levels of intelligence than blacks and Latinos, in fact Asians had higher levels of intelligence than whites. The bottom-line conclusions drawn by the authors was that intelligence was the best predictor of socioeconomic success and that given the fact that it was to large extent genetically determined, nothing could be done to change that fact. The inevitable policy conclusion was reminiscent of the Social Darwinians of a century earlier, for like Herbert Spencer in the UK and William Graham Sumner in the US, Herrnstein and Murray argue against the welfare state for its efforts to ensure the survival of the least fit.
Critics did more than challenge the political implications of the book, which among other things would call for the end of welfare benefits to the poor, the dismantling of affirmative action programs, and an array of other programs targeted to disadvantaged populations—both along racial and class lines. In addition, social scientific critics turned their sights on the science behind The Bell Curve and after careful analyses found it to be in a variety of ways bad science, perhaps even like the work of an earlier period, pseudoscience (Fischer, et al. 1996). Despite all of the efforts by Herrnstein and Murray's sponsors to claim that they had no hidden political agenda, but were simply letting the chips fall where they may, in fact it was clear that the rationale for sponsoring such work in the first place was to bring science into the service of a right-wing agenda aimed at destroying the welfare states that all of the world's liberal democracies had established in the second half of the twentieth century in order to seek to address the problems and inequities that result from the unacceptably high levels of social inequality that result from capitalist economies if not constrained by state intervention.
What is nationalism and what is its relationship to ethnicity? In answer to the first question, nationalism can be defined quite simply as an ideology that defines a collectivity composed of people who are seen to be part of the same political community. The basis for the existence of a community can rely on language, religion, ethnicity, or what are seen to be shared civic values—or various combinations of these features. Not surprisingly, depending on the specific society and historical period in question, the answer to the second question will vary widely. There are places and times where ethnicity and nationalism seem to be fused together, in societies where there is a significant level of ethnic commonality (or at least perceived commonality) across the nation at the time. In these cases, ethnicity plays a role in forming and solidifying national identity. Nations that have until fairly recently been quite ethnically homogeneous include the Nordic countries, with Iceland, due to its small size and remoteness, being one of the purest examples. Far more typical, however, are situations where there is ethnic diversity within nations, leading to a decoupling of ethnicity and nationalism, or at least a minimizing of the significance of the connection. At the other end of the spectrum from a country such as Iceland are the historic settler nations, which include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US. Of course, the level of diversity and the nature of the link between ethnic groups and national identity not only varies by place and time, but also by the perception and social location of the observer.
One way to begin to understand the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism is to look at the historical formations of nations and the role that ethnicity may or may not have played in these formations. In The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Anthony D. Smith (1986: x) argues that in the formation of modern nations, “the ‘roots’ of these nations are to be found, both in a general way and in many specific cases, in the model of ethnic community prevalent in much of the recorded history across the globe.” Smith's argument is that the traditions, values, symbols, and other cultural material found collectively within groups of people provide some of the materials necessary for modern nations to develop. Smith then uses the term “ethnie” to refer to the ethnic communities and symbols that played a foundational role in the creation of modern nations.
From his perspective, the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism is historical, functional, and sequential. While Smith believes that ethnic communities played a role in forming nations in the past, this historical relationship between ethnicity and nationalism is not well suited to explain the relationship of ethnicity and nationalism in these same nations today.
A significant factor in trying to understand the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism is whether nationalist ideology is defined in civic or ethnic terms. A focus on this distinction can lead to a productive typology of nationalist ideologies, which highlights how and where ethnicity plays an important role in the nation. This typology of the different kinds of nationalist identity can be found in Milton Esman's An Introduction to Ethnic Conflict (2004: 41–42) in which he discusses three different variations of nationalist ideology, highlighting how and where ethnicity plays an important role:
Each of these three variations, or ideal-types of nationalist ideology, has different implications for the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism. The concept of ideal-types is mentioned here because these three variations are more pure and distinct than we expect to find when actually mapping this typology onto existing modern nations. Many nations, the US and France being two examples, believe in the ideology of civic nationalism, where every person regardless of ethnicity can be a full citizen, and yet these nations often have long histories of political and social exclusion limiting which groups of people can take full advantage of the rights and responsibilities contained within citizenship. Among the nations that continue to maintain an ideology predicated on ethnic nationalism Japan stands out as an especially vivid example.
Ethnicity plays a clear and central role in ethnonationalism, where one particular group of people forms a nation state. In these cases, the ethnic identity and culture of this group often plays a significant role in the development of the state. In describing this type of nationalist ideology, Esman discusses the role and place of minority ethnic groups in these nations and explains that the nation “may tolerate minorities in its midst” (Esman 2004: 41). But how minority ethnic groups are actually treated in nations built on an ethnonationalist identity varies greatly. Within nations with a syncretic nationalist identity, ethnicity is clear and visible in that the challenge is to bring together multiple groups of people into one nation. Esman (2004: 43) provides the example of the UK as a multinational state composed of English, Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish peoples. In this example, the ethnic identities of the various peoples are clear while “political elites have attempted, and with some success, to cultivate an overarching British identity that would coexist with and gradually supersede the national sentiments of its component peoples.” The level of success needs to be tempered by the realization that the Scottish National Party remains committed to leaving Britain and becoming an independent country, while the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland are a not-too-distant memory. Another example is Spain, where Basques and Catalans constitute two significant mobilized ethnonationalist communities, and here again the central Spanish state has only partially succeeded in convincing most Basques and Catalans that they can maintain their distinctive identities while simultaneously identifying as Spanish.
The relationship between ethnicity and nationalism is clearly complex, as well as always grounded in particular historical and social contexts. Nonetheless, typologies of nationalism such as these can help make sense of the varied roles of ethnicity within nations. Knowledge of the traditional groups of people that existed regionally prior to nation formation, the ideologies employed when nation formation occurred, the ethnic history of the nation, and the current state of ethnic groups within the nation can all provide clues as to the nature of the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism in any particular example. From a social constructionist perspective, societies should be viewed as changing over time and so even if we can successfully map out the connections between ethnicity and nationalism today, studying the past reminds us that there is always the possibility that these connections will be reformulated in the future.
In some instances, religion is a relatively insignificant aspect of ethnic identity, while in other cases it is of central importance. A frequently used term to describe the latter is religio-ethnic group, which implies a tight connection between religious affiliation and ethnic identity. This is but one of several possible linkages. Based on various efforts to create a typology of possible linkages, we can distinguish four different types: ethnic fusion, ethnic religion, religious ethnicity, and ethnic autonomy (Kivisto 2007). These are summarized in Table 1.1.
In the first group, religion serves as the fundamental basis of ethnicity. Examples of groups characterized by ethnic fusion are Hasidic Jews, the Amish, and Hutterites. In maintaining the powerful link between religion and ethnicity, such groups typically pay a price insofar as they end up remaining rather small, insular groups that do not reach out to outsiders by seeking to make them insiders. In general, this type is representative of a rather small percentage of any society.
In contrast, ethnic religion and religious ethnicity are quite common. Examples of ethnic religion include the Greek Orthodox, Dutch Reformed, and Scottish Presbyterian communities. In these cases, ethnicity has a long historical link to religion, though is not as meshed as with ethnic fusion. Rather, the key to this type is that ethnicity serves to reinforce and strengthen religious identity. The reverse is the case for the third type, religious ethnicity. Here religion serves as a particularly important aspect of defining ethnic identity. This can be seen in the cases of Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics as well as Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish Lutherans. The linkage in religious ethnicity is more historically contingent than in instances of ethnic religion, and therefore more subject to change. Thus, the linkage between Scandinavian ancestry and Lutheranism in America is rooted in history, but today's Lutheran churches are less Scandinavian than they once were, in part due to the inclusion of other groups, including blacks and Latinos, but more significantly due to the widespread phenomenon of intermarriage among European-origin groups.
Table 1.1: Types of connections between ethnicity and religion
| Type | Characteristics | Example |
Ethnic fusion |
Religion major foundation of ethnic identity |
Amish |
Ethnic religion |
Ethnicity serves to reinforce and define religious identity |
Greek Orthodox |
| R eligious ethnicity |
Religion belief and practice colored by ethnic identity |
Irish Catholics |
Religion and ethnic disjuncture |
Religion an inconsequential component of ethnic identity |
Romany |
The fourth type depicts a situation where the linkage between religion and ethnicity is weak, tenuous, or nonexistent. An example of an ethnic group that is defined without significant reference to religion is the Romany—more commonly known previously as Gypsies.
It is important to note that while this typology is helpful insofar as it can offer a comparative portrait of the differing linkages between ethnicity and religion, such portraits capture the situation at a particular moment in time. As the example of changes within Lutheranism suggests, the linkages are capable of change over time, especially for ethnic religion and religious ethnicity. To the extent that people engage in religious switching, the linkages between ethnicity and religion are subject to ongoing revision.
Before sociologists can study any topic, it is essential that the topic be adequately defined. This has been the objective of this chapter, which began with an extended discussion of a perennial debate among scholars in the field regarding the precise nature of the relationship between race and ethnicity. Three commonly used approaches were reviewed, with an argument advanced for viewing race as a subset of ethnicity and with the introduction of the idea of racialized ethnicity. From there, we discussed what it means to view race and ethnicity as socially constructed. This led to further definitional clarification in the two discussions that rounded out the chapter, one concerning the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism and the other addressing the relationship between ethnicity and religion. With this basic conceptual framework in place, we can proceed to explore the central issues in each of the following four chapters with a shared vocabulary.