Racial Domination Notes

Chapter One: Race in the 21st Century * 7649 incidents of hate crime in 2004 alone (race accounted for 53%; 67% were against blacks) * Many still live in poverty and urban poor are living in substandard conditions * 7 million people in prison * Wealth: dictated by parents and whites are generally richer than blacks * Humans have low levels of genetic variation * Biological Determinism: Social and economic differences between races are the result of immutable, inherited and inborn distinctions * “bad science” * Been used to justify injustices and to naturalize inequalities * Race: a symbolic category based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to specific social and historical contexts, that is misrecognized as a natural category. This definition deserves to be unpacked. * Racial taxonomy: race-based classification system, delineates five major groups * 1. Native American and Alaskan natives * 2. Asians and Pacific Islanders * 3. African Americans (blacks) * 4. Hispanic (Latinos) * 5. Caucasians (whites) * Naturalization (20): signifies a metamorphosis of sorts, where something created by humans is mistaken as something dictated by nature * Ethnicity: refers to shared lifestyle informed by cultural, historical, religious and/or national affiliations * Nationality (21): equated with citizenship—membership in a specific politically delineated territory controlled by a government * Five Fallacies about Racism (27) * 1. Individualistic Fallacy: Thinks of racism as one thinks of a crime, and therefore divides the world into two types of people (those guilty of racism and those innocent) * 2. Legalistic Fallacy: assumes that abolishing racist laws automatically leads to the abolition of racism writ large and racism in practice * 3. Tokenistic Fallacy: assumes that the presence of people of color in influential positions is evidence of