Race and Ethnicity: The Key Concepts

Amy Ansell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134304745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Situating the study of race and ethnicity within its historical and intellectual context, this much needed guide exposes students to the broad diversity of scholarship within the field. It provides a clear and succinct explanation of more than 70 key terms, their conceptual evolution over time, and the differing ways in which the concepts are deployed or remain pertinent in current debates. Concepts covered include:

• apartheid
• colonialism
• constructivism
• critical race theory
• eugenics
• hybridity
• Islamophobia
• new/modern racism
• reparations
• transnationalism.

Fully cross-referenced and with suggestions for further reading, Race and Ethnicity: The Key Concepts is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. It will also be of great interest for those studying sociology, anthropology, politics, and cultural studies.

RACE AND ETHNICITY

The Key Concepts

ABORIGINAL

see Indigenous/Native

ACCULTURATION

see Assimilation

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Affirmative action is a policy geared toward the achievement of diversity and/or racial equality in institutional venues such as the workplace, the awarding of federal contracts, and university admissions. It is known in national contexts other than the US by alternate labels, such as ‘positive action’ in Britain and ‘employment equity’ in South Africa. Types of affirmative action policies also exist in multiethnic societies such as Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and India. The term first appeared in the US in a 1961 executive order issued by President Kennedy, but the policy remained immature until the mid-to-end of the decade as the civil rights movement reached its height. Some argue that the origins of affirmative action for African Americans date back to the New Deal. Most provocative is the thesis that affirmative action for whites began in the 1930s in the form of federal policies (such as labor standards and, after WWII, veterans’ rights, sponsored access to higher education, and housing policies) that systematically privileged the white majority (Katznelson 2005). It is this history of the accumulated benefits of being white (see whiteness), and the resulting racial disparities reinforced by government policies and practices, that justifies the policy of affirmative action for people of color today.

In the 1960s, the purpose of affirmative action was to give enforcement bite to the opportunities formally opened to African Americans, yet not yet fully actualized, in the wake of the demise of the system of institutionalized discrimination and segregation informally known as Jim Crow. The policy signaled a shift from the legal guarantee of nondiscrimination to a more proactive and race-conscious commitment to not only social and economic rights, but racial justice too. President Lyndon B. Johnson famously provided justification for this shift in a 1965 speech at Howard University: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair” (Bowen and Bok 1998: 6). The Executive mandate to vigorously open up new opportunities to previously excluded racial minorities (soon defined to include Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans as well) led to federal requirements for public educators, employers, and contractors to submit elaborate plans that included goals and timetables for ensuring deliberate efforts to recruit minority applicants. The policy has achieved sound results, measured in terms of higher percentages of minorities in the professions, public office, and elite colleges and universities, leading many to attribute the exponential growth of the black middle-class to the success of the policy.

Affirmative action has been mired in public controversy practically from its inception. After reaching its zenith in the late 1970s, backlash against the policy began in the 1980s and has continued apace, its foundation chipped away and reach restricted. The controversy owes in large part to the contradiction inherent in a policy that is social in conception (i.e., redressing historical injustice or increasing diversity) yet necessarily individual at the point of implementation. Whites who feel little or no accountability for the racist past assert that their individual right to equal protection under the law is wrongly violated by affirmative action. Neo-conservatives in the US denounce the policy as ‘reverse racism,’ maintaining that race is a morally irrelevant trait that should have no role in the policy formation process (Glazer 1975; Murray 1984; Eastland 1996; Cohen 1995; Connerly 2000). A small group of black neoconservatives argue further that the policy is harmful to its beneficiaries, academic standards, economic productivity, and to the health of race relations more generally (Sowell 2004; Steele 1990; Carter 1991). Similar arguments can be heard in national contexts such as Britain and South Africa where racial preferences are denounced for ‘re-racializing’ an ostensibly ‘post-racist’ social order, thereby constituting ‘positive discrimination’ or ‘reverse apartheid’ (Ansell 1997, 2004). Defenders of affirmative action, by contrast, laud the policy as a necessary response to, rather than cause of, the continued salience of racial identity and patterns of disadvantage. In the color-conscious view, race must be taken into account procedurally in order to get substantively beyond it. In countering the discourse of ‘reverse racism,’ a distinction is made between the historical application of race for exclusionary or discriminatory ends and its contemporary use in government equality-promoting policies. Any violation of the right to equal protection occurs as a function of the pursuit of this compelling societal interest, not prejudicial intent (see prejudice). In this view, abandonment of preferential policies in the context of enduring racial inequality would lend practically to the permanent inequality between racial groups.

Despite such long-standing controversy, no real public battle to overturn the policy emerged in the US until the mid-1990s. The California Civil Rights Initiative, or Proposition 209 as it appeared on the state ballot in 1996, succeeded in outlawing affirmative action programs in all state universities, followed by the unsuccessful anti-preference Dole-Canady Bill in Congress. For the most part, however, the battle over affirmative action has occurred in the legal arena. The critique of affirmative action has been partially affirmed by an increasingly conservative Supreme Court insistence that race preferences are permissible only if they serve a compelling goal and are narrowly tailored to achieving that goal. Application of this new standard of ‘strict scrutiny’ led to decisions such as Croson (1988) and Hopwood (1996) that have severely curtailed affirmative action programs, leading many to speculate that the Court would soon overturn the famous Bakke decision (1978) that allowed race to be taken into account as a, but not the, factor in university admissions. That moment came in 2003 when the Court agreed to hear a case (Grutter and Gratz) involving affirmative action programs at the University of Michigan. Several white students brought suit that their constitutional right to equal protection had been violated by what they alleged to be a quota system favoring the admission of lesser qualified minority students. The Supreme Court upheld the programs on the condition that they avoid outright numerical advantages for minority students, arguing along with amicus briefs submitted by noteworthy stakeholders such as the US military and business community that racial diversity should be upheld as a national priority. The decision ensures that affirmative action in the US will likely endure for the foreseeable future. Despite this partial victory for proponents of the policy, concern lingers over the consequences of the justificatory rhetorical shift, emergent in the 1990s and solidified in the Michigan cases, away from that of compensation for past discrimination and toward that of diversity, more politically palatable perhaps but also potentially more vulnerable to contestation and erosion.

Empirical and international comparative studies of affirmative action are essential to determining its future direction. Much of the literature is rhetorical and partisan, with a paucity of empirical studies examining its actual outcome (exceptions include Bowen and Bok 1998; Reskin 1998). International comparative studies are vital also for understanding differences between policies that target benefits to a disadvantaged majority versus minority population, for example, and also to ascertain how to minimize unintended consequences such as accentuated polarization or aiding the more advantaged segment of the targeted population. Comparisons also shed light on otherwise taken-for-granted issues. For example, examination of the politics of affirmative action for lower caste groups in India sheds light on the oddity in the US that not more resentment is mobilized by excluded white ethnics, or toward Latino and Asian American beneficiaries, many of whom are new immigrants and so not even resident during the discriminatory period for which the policy is meant to compensate (Skrentny 2002).

Related concepts: color-blindness, color-consciousness, reverse racism.

Further reading

Ansell (1997, 2004); Bowen and Bok (1998); Katznelson (2005); Skrentny (1996, 2002).

AFROCENTRISM

Afrocentrism is a paradigm of thought and agenda for emancipation that centers on African people, history, and culture. The term derives from the Latin ‘Afro,’ meaning African, combined with ‘centrism’ denoting a rebuttal to Eurocentric modes of thought. Eurocentrism is charged with projecting a false universality and denigrating the historical achievements and value systems of Africans. The unconscious adoption of such borrowed cultural terms by peoples of African descent is characterized as a sort of mental or psychological slavery, as adopting a Western worldview that makes Africans “spectators of a show that defines us from without” and complicity in accepting “footnote status in the white man's book” (Mazama 2001: 387). The remedy, according to Afrocentric scholars, is to understand and celebrate African culture and identity; to systematically displace European ways of thinking and refocus on African modes of thought and practice. Celebrated core values of African culture include spirituality and ethical concern, respect for community and nature, and cooperation over what is characterized as the materialism and individualism of Western culture.

The term Afrocentrism was first used by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1961 or 1962 in his proposal for an Encyclopedia Africana that never materialized due to his death in 1963. Even before the term itself appeared, various fragments of the concept enjoyed a long lineage, from the Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey and George M. James, to the black nationalism of the 1960s in the US and anti-colonial struggles abroad. Afrocentrism reached its fullest expression in the academy in the 1980s, and is closely associated with the work of Molefi Kete Asante, chair of African American studies at Temple University. Asante elaborated and systematized the concept into a full-blown intellectual approach, first in his 1980 book Afrocentricity (revised edition 1988), and then in subsequent books of his and others in the US and abroad that further developed and evolved the core themes. From the start, Afrocentrism has been controversial and hotly debated, but it has succeeded in the academy at least in establishing black studies departments, annual conferences, and outlets for scholarship such as the Journal of Black Studies.

Afrocentrism received wide public attention in the late 1980s following the publication of Black Athena (1987) by Cornell University professor Martin Bernal. Bernal asserts the Afroasiatic roots of Western civilization by claiming, first, that dynastic Egypt was a black civilization and, second, that ancient Greece and Rome appropriated many of the intellectual and technological achievements of Egyptian culture without giving due credit to these black origins. Bernal here builds on earlier scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop who in the 1970s had claimed that mainstream Egyptology has suppressed black contributions to world history due to conscious or unconscious Eurocentric biases. Bernal's book reignited this controversy that ostensibly revolved around the origins of ancient civilization but in reality touched on current contentious issues to do with multiculturalism, identity politics, race, pedagogy, and academic standards. One of Bernal's most vocal critics is Mary Lefkowitz, a classics professor who wrote a book refuting the thesis of Black Athena that characterizes Afrocentrism in the sub-title as “an excuse to teach myth as history.” Another fierce critic is history professor Clarence Walker who derides Afrocentrism as a dangerous form of groupthink or therapeutic mythology designed to restore the self-esteem of black Americans but sorely lacking in scientific merit. Walker goes so far as to echo white conservatives who charge Afrocentrism with countering one form of racism with another.

The nagging question of reverse racism within Afrocentric currents of thought amplifies what are in fact differing interpretations of the concept among Afrocentric scholars. These differences can be distilled down to the question of whether the centering of the experiences of peoples of African descent necessarily entails inverting white supremacy. Representing one extreme is Leonard Jeffries who writes of ‘sun people’ versus ‘ice people’ in the context of his doctrine of melanism that holds that the darker pigment of African people bestows unto them superior intelligence. The more rigorous scholarship of Asante and his colleagues represents the other end of the spectrum, wherein Afrocentrism seeks more moderately to delimit the claims of Eurocentrism as part of a pluralist multiracial vision of society. Asante (1987: 87) writes: “While Eurocentrism imposes itself as universal, Afrocentrism demonstrates that it is only one way to view the world.”

It is probably not a coincidence that Afrocentrism emerged in the 1980s as the integrationist goals of the civil rights era began to fade. As one variant of an emergent identity politics, Afrocentrism contributed to applications as varied as social work, spirituality, and education. The latter is probably most in the public eye, with some educational districts in which blacks are the majority adopting Afrocentric curricula. And many debates continue with still new ones added, amongst the most recent surrounding the presumed relationship between Africans and African Americans. Conflicts between African immigrants and African Americans in the US have received more scholarly attention of late (Waters 2000), as have the unmet expectations of African Americans returning ‘home’ to Africa where they are sometimes regarded simply as Americans. The most public face of Afrocentrism abroad has been President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Mbeki has touted an African Renaissance culturally, yet found his government in a public relations disaster as it refused to deliver antiretroviral drugs to pregnant women on the basis of an Afrocentric-sounding refusal of the Western scientific consensus that HIV causes AIDS.

Related concepts: (racial/ethnic) identity, identity politics, postcolonialism.

Further reading

Asante (1987); Howe (1998); Lefkowitz (1996); Mazama (2001); Walker (2001).

ANTI-RACISM

Anti-racism is a term that has been used to refer to the set of ideas, movements, and policies that have been adopted to counter racism. From a historical perspective, modern arguments against racism can be traced back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the struggles over slavery and colonialism. Such arguments may not be seen as anti-racist from the perspective of the present as they were shaped by the dominant ideas of the time about race and difference, meaning that the enunciation of arguments against racism often went hand-in-hand with the articulation of racist ideologies. Contemporary forms of anti-racist politics have emerged as a visible social and political force in the period since the 1960s. In the context of the struggles against racial segregation in the US and the apartheid system in South Africa, there was a noticeable growth in ideas and movements that openly articulated opposition to all forms of racism. Today, in liberal democratic societies around the world, there is a public commitment, in terms of official government policies at least, to the promotion of anti-racism and multiculturalism at all levels of political and social institutions.

Anti-racism has taken a number of forms over the years. Some anti-racist activity overlaps with multiculturalism in that the focus is on affirming diversity and cross-cultural understanding. Other activity is oriented to consciousness-raising, especially in respect to educating whites as to their role in perpetuating racism, unwittingly or not. Some anti-racist programs focus on everyday racism in various institutional contexts, such as schools and the workplace. Still others mobilize around combating extreme right-wing movements such as neo-Nazi and neo-fascist organizations. Each form is distinct in its analysis of racism and how to overcome it, and each reflects the particular national context in which it is situated. In France, for example, organizations such as SOS Racism have sought to counteract the influence of neo-fascist movements operating there, as well as the social and economic exclusion faced by first- and second-generation migrant communities. In the US, the majority of anti-racist action is oriented to education, diversity awareness, and consciousness-raising about the ways in which race and racism still impact contemporary society.

Some critics of contemporary anti-racism, such as Taguieff (2001), have warned that anti-racist political discourses are in danger of becoming a kind of ‘do...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• RACE AND ETHNICITY
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of key concepts
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• THE KEY CONCEPTS
• Bibliography
• Index