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Summary SOCIOLOGY 222 NOTES
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Social Identifications and Inequalities: RACE (and gender)Session 1 - Reflecting on you and race
After introductions, the course begins by posing questions about what race is and how the
students understand race:
Questions
1. If you were to describe race to an outsider from another planet what would you say?
2. If you were asked what your race was, what would you say?
3. If you know what race you are, how do you know it?
4. Are you in or could you imagine having a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship with
someone of another race? If so why? And which race, if any, could you imagine your
boyfriend/girlfriend being? If not, why not?
5. How would you describe racism to an outsider? And what examples, if any, might
you use to illustrate racism?
Session 2 – What is race
Race is something fundamental.
It tells you who someone is, that binds people into groups.
Race is a social construct that humans have made in order to control people by
grouping people in categories of colour.
Jane Elliot Experiment
- This was made in the United States in the late 1960s and focuses on a social
experiment in which a primary teacher working in a primary school in the deep South
of the US decides to divide her class according to the eye colour of her learners.
She announces that blue eyed children are more clever than green eyed and starts
to treat them very differently in terms of eye colour, praising the blue-eyed children in
her class and being very patronizing towards the green-eyed children. She does this
over a couple of days and the video takes a fly on the wall view of the classroom and
shows how the learners respond to being labelled and stereotyped in negative or
positive ways, according to eye colour.
- Jane Elliot decided to do this because she wanted to encourage the learners in her
class (in this case white boys and girls) to empathize with (put themselves in the
shoes off) people from other races (in this case black people) who experienced
discrimination based on skin color every day. At the time in the deep south in the
United States where Jane Elliot was teaching a system of racial segregation was
, operating similar to apartheid in South Africa. Blacks and whites were given different
jobs, allocated housing in different areas, required to travel by different transport and
expected to go to different schools.
- Jane Elliot decided to do this because she wanted to encourage the learners in her
class (in this case white boys and girls) to empathise with (put themselves in the
shoes off) people from other races (in this case black people) who experienced
discrimination based on skin colour every day. At the time in the deep south in the
United States where Jane Elliot was teaching a system of racial segregation was
operating similar to apartheid in South Africa. Blacks and whites were given different
jobs, allocated housing in different areas, required to travel by different transport and
expected to go to different schools.
- Jane Elliot decided to do this because she wanted to encourage the learners in her
class (in this case white boys and girls) to empathise with (put themselves in the
shoes off) people from other races (in this case black people) who experienced
discrimination based on skin colour every day. At the time in the deep south in the
United States where Jane Elliot was teaching a system of racial segregation was
operating like apartheid in South Africa. Blacks and whites were given different jobs,
allocated housing in different areas, required to travel by different transport and
expected to go to different schools.
Questions
1. Why did Jane Elliot divide her class into blue eyed and brown eyed children?
2. How did she treat them differently according to these labels?
3. What effect did these labels have on the ways the children related to each other,
worked, related to Jane Elliot?
4. What do you think of the ethics of doing (or not doing) an exercise like this?
5. How do the findings from this social experiment lend support to the idea that ‘race’
and (racism) are not natural and that race has no biological basis but is socially
constructed or produced?
6. Jane Elliot claimed that she produced a microcosm of a racist society in her
classroom. How true do you think this is?
7. What are the limitations of this social experiment in encouraging white children to
‘empathise’ with black people as targets of discrimination?
8. What implications does this Jane Elliot's social experiment carry for thinking about
race?
o
, Session 3 – A class divided
Race is often seen as something we’re born with.
To say that people belong to different races implies that we can divide them into
different species like we can with the cat family.
To say that people belong to different races implies that we can divide them into
different species like we can with the cat family.
However, most sociologists criticize the very concept of race and argued that race
has no biological basis as it seems to have.
Sociologists have challenged
the view that race is the
same as skin colour.
Race is not something people have like a particular colour of skin. How black do you
have to be in order to be ‘black’?
Rather race is a social rather than a biological identity; it is a form of categorising
people; is a process of dividing people as if they are different (superior or inferior);
species and colour is just one social marker of race.
Constructing Race
- What is Race?
o A verb.
o Race is a process of classifying people as if they belong to a different species
and then ranking these ‘species on a hierarchical scale. This process is
referred to by sociologists as racialisation.
o Race is not natural. It is a social construction.
o Race is not something we are born with.
o Race is not something we have.
o Race is not the same as skin color.
o Race is an idea (not a biological fact, it has no scientific basis) which serves
to legitimate and justify huge inequalities.
o There are different markers (in different societies) of race. Skin colour is only
one marker. People may classify themselves and others into races based on
physical characteristics such as skin colour facial features hair texture and
body shape. Such differences are superficial. People may defend racial
hierarchy with the assertion that one category is inherently better than
another though no sound scientific research supports such beliefs.
- What is not race?
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