Sources : Notable Selections in Race and Ethnicity

Part 1. Basic Concepts

CHAPTER 1. Race and Ethnicity

1.1. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, from Racial Formations in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s

"When European explorers in the New World `discovered' people who looked different than themselves, these `natives' challenged then existing conceptions of the origins of the human species, and raised disturbing questions as to whether all could be considered in the same `family of man.'"

1.2. Beth B. Hess, Elizabeth W. Markson, and Peter J. Stein, from "Racial and Ethnic Minorities: An Overview," in Beth B. Hess, Elizabeth W. Markson, and Peter J. Stein, Sociology

"Self-determination and economic self-sufficiency cannot be achieved easily when the most basic needs, such as adequate education, housing, and health care, have not yet been met."

1.3. John Hope Franklin, from "Ethnicity in American Life: The Historical Perspective," in John Hope Franklin, ed., Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988

"If the principle of ethnic exclusiveness was propounded so early and so successfully in the history of the United States, it is not surprising that it would, in time, become the basis for questioning the ethnic backgrounds of large numbers of prospective Americans, even Europeans."

CHAPTER 2. Prejudice and Discrimination

2.1. Robert K. Merton, from "Discrimination and the American Creed," in Robert M. MacIver, ed., Discrimination and National Welfare

"Once we substitute these three variables of cultural ideal, belief and actual practice for the customary distinction between the two variables of cultural ideals and actual practices, the entire formulation of the problem becomes changed. We escape from the virtuous but ineffectual impasse of deploring the alleged hypocrisy of many Americans into the more difficult but potentially effectual realm of analyzing the problem in hand."

2.2. William Julius Wilson, from "The Declining Significance of Race," Society

"Race relations in the United States have undergone fundamental changes in recent years, so much so that now the life chances of individual blacks have more to do with their economic class position than with their day-to-day encounters with whites."

2.3. Joe R. Feagin, from "The Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places," American Sociological Review

"The sites of racial discrimination range from relatively protected home sites, to less protected workplace and educational sites, to the even less protected public places."

CHAPTER 3. Racism

3.1. Louis L. Knowles and Kenneth Prewitt, from "Institutional and Ideological Roots of Racism," in Louis L. Knowles and Kenneth Prewitt, eds., Institutional Racism in America

"The [racist] policy can be understood only when we are willing to take a hard look at the continuing and irrefutable racist consequences of the major institutions in American life."

3.2. Elizabeth Martínez, from "Beyond Black/White: The Racisms of Our Time," Social Justice

"All this suggests that we urgently need some fresh and fearless thinking about racism at this moment in history."

3.3. Nancy Stein, from "Affirmative Action and the Persistence of Racism," Social Justice

"There is a reservoir of resentment and bitterness in much of white America, particularly among white men, against any effort to eliminate discrimination by giving preferential treatment to people of color, who are seen as undeserving or as having already benefited enough from such programs."

Part 2. Theoretical Orientations to the Study of Race and Ethnicity in the United States

CHAPTER 4. Adaptation

4.1. Milton M. Gordon, from "Assimilation in America: Theory and Reality," Daedalus

"Three ideologies or conceptual models have competed for attention on the American scene as explanations of the way in which a nation… has absorbed over 41 million immigrants and their descendants from variegated sources and welded them into the contemporary American people. These ideologies are Anglo-conformity, the melting pot, and cultural pluralism."

4.2. Ruth W. Grant and Marion Orr, from "Language, Race and Politics: From `Black' to `African-American,'" Politics and Society

"[T]he `African-American' label may mask the role of racism in our history and weaken, rather than strengthen, the political claims of this distinctive minority."

4.3. Lewis M. Killian, from "Race Relations and the Nineties: Where Are the Dreams of the Sixties?" Social Forces

"In his last presidential address to SCLC,… King urged again, `Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin.' How sorely pained he would be were he to witness the state of ethnic relations today!"

CHAPTER 5. Conflict

5.1. William Ryan, from Blaming the Victim

"The generic process of Blaming the Victim is applied to almost every American problem."

5.2. Edna Bonacich, from "Inequality in America: The Failure of the American System for People of Color," Sociological Spectrum

"The United States is an immensely unequal society in terms of the distribution of material wealth, and consequently, in the distribution of all the benefits and privileges that accrue to wealth--including political power and influence."

5.3. Leslie Inniss and Joe R. Feagin, "The Black `Underclass' Ideology in Race Relations Analysis," Social Justice

"The concept of the underclass, as it has developed in the last decade, is highly political and represents a defining of the problems of Black poor in ways that do not involve an indictment of the existing structure of U.S. society."

Part 3. Race and Ethnicity in American Institutions

CHAPTER 6. The Educational Institution

6.1. Noel Jacob Kent, from "The New Campus Racism: What's Going On?" Thought and Action

"We must not underestimate the mutual hunger for honest talk across racial bunkers."

6.2. Bobby Wright and William G. Tierney, from "American Indians in Higher Education: A History of Cultural Conflict," Change

"The earliest colonial efforts to provide Indians with higher education were designed to Christianize and `civilize' the Indians, saving them from the folly of their `heathenish' and `savage' ways."

6.3. Jonathan Kozol, from Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

"A 14-year-old girl with short black curly hair says this: `Every year in February we are told to read the same old speech of Martin Luther King. We read it every year. "I have a dream...." It does begin to seem--what is the word?' She hesitates and then she finds the word: `perfunctory.'"

CHAPTER 7. The Political Institution

7.1. Leobardo F. Estrada et al., from "Chicanos in the United States: A History of Exploitation and Resistance," Daedalus

"The military conquest of the Southwest by the United States was a watershed that brought about the large-scale dispossession of the real holdings of Mexicans and their displacement and relegation to the lower reaches of the class structure."

7.2. Su Sun Bai, from "Affirmative Pursuit of Political Equality for Asian Pacific Americans: Reclaiming the Voting Rights Act," University of Pennsylvania Law Review

"Dismantling the subtle and effective discriminatory barriers against Asian Pacific Americans' voting rights demands an affirmative commitment to the political equality of Asian Pacific Americans."

7.3. Frank Harold Wilson, from "Housing and Black Americans: The Persistent Significance of Race," in William Velez, ed., Race and Ethnicity in the United States

"In the absence of increased federally articulated housing programs to proactively and affirmatively address inequities of access and costs, the emergent patterns of contemporary housing deprivation experienced by the poor across races will increase in significance."

CHAPTER 8. The Economic Institution

8.1. Reynolds Farley, from "Blacks, Hispanics, and White Ethnic Groups: Are Blacks Uniquely Disadvantaged?" American Economic Review

"After examining the characteristics of fifty racial-ethnic groups, I found that the Vietnamese and Puerto Ricans were more impoverished than blacks and, in terms of per capita income, Mexicans and American Natives were similar to blacks."

8.2. George E. Tinker and Loring Bush, from "Native American Unemployment: Statistical Games and Coverups," in George W. Shepherd, Jr., and David Penna, eds., Racism and the Underclass: State Policy and Discrimination Against Minorities

"American social structures must recognize their culpability in the codependent relationship in which subtle racist institutional structures use statistical devices in order to conceal massive social deficiencies in Indian communities."

8.3. Havidán Rodríguez, from "Population, Economic Mobility and Income Inequality: A Portrait of Latinos in the United States, 1970-1991," Latino Studies Journal

"[A]n economic hierarchy exists within the Latino population with Cubans occupying the most advantaged position and Puerto Ricans experiencing severe economic difficulties. Mexican Americans have not experienced the economic mobility of Cubans but their economic status falls above that of Puerto Ricans."

CHAPTER 9. The Legal Institution

9.1. Robert Staples, from "White Racism, Black Crime, and American Justice: An Application of the Colonial Model to Explain Crime and Race," Phylon

"In America the right to justice is an inalienable right; but for Blacks it is still a privilege to be granted at the caprice and goodwill of whites, who control the machinery of the legal system and the agents of social control."

9.2. Adalberto Aguirre, Jr., and David V. Baker, from "A Descriptive Profile of Mexican American Executions in the Southwest," The Social Science Journal

"During the `peak' period in Mexican American executions, New Mexico hanged six Mexican bandits (designated occupation) on two separate days in June 1916. None of the ages of these bandits are known, but their surnames were Alvarez, Castillo, Garcia, Rangel, Renteria, and Sanchez."

9.3. Marc Mauer and Tracy Huling, from Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later

"[T]o the extent that African Americans are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, to what degree is this a function of their being disproportionately low-income?"

Part 4. Race and Ethnicity in Popular Culture and Community

CHAPTER 10. Culture

10.1. Robert Staples and Terry Jones, from "Culture, Ideology and Black Television Images," The Black Scholar

"Television, controlled by American advertisers, regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, and influenced by the American public, has chosen to adopt a white American cultural ideology based on the glorification of white norms, mores, and values."

10.2. Ralph C. Gomes and Linda Faye Williams, from "Race and Crime: The Role of the Media in Perpetuating Racism and Classism in America," The Urban League Review

"Today, the dawn of the 1990s, African Americans continue to protest the images portrayed of them in the press."

10.3. Richard E. Lapchick and David Stuckey, from "Professional Sports: The Racial Report Card," Center for the Study of Sports in Society Digest

"Whether sport can lead the way to improved race relations remains a question that is unanswered in the early 1990s."

CHAPTER 11. The Race and Ethnic Community

11.1. Richard Delgado, from "Words That Wound: A Tort Action for Racial Insults, Epithets, and Name-Calling," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review

"The racial insult remains one of the most pervasive channels through which discriminatory attitudes are imparted. Such language injures the dignity and self-regard of the person to whom it is addressed, communicating the message that distinctions of race are distinctions of merit, dignity, status, and personhood."

11.2. Robert D. Bullard, from "Race and Environmental Justice in the United States," Yale Journal of International Law

"Low-income and minority communities have borne a disproportionate share of the nation's environmental problems."

Part 5. The Future of Race and Ethnic Relations in the United States

CHAPTER 12. Future Prospects

12.1. Derrick Bell, from "Racism Will Always Be With Us," New Perspectives Quarterly

"We must advocate an infusion of tragedy into our American culture, an understanding of our past and the limits of our shared future."

12.2. Christopher Bates Doob, from Racism: An American Cauldron

"At the moment American culture is a racist culture. This condition is undeniable, regrettable, but potentially changeable."

12.3. Michael A. Olivas, from "The Chronicles, My Grandfather's Stories, and Immigration Law: The Slave Traders Chronicle as Racial History," St. Louis University Law Journal

"Critical minority renderings of United States racial history, immigration practices, and labor economy can have… compelling results,… recounting what actually happened in all the sordid details."

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