The Social Construction of Race in the U.S.

Census Classification and Racial Subjectivity

Click here to do an activity from PBS's Race Power of an Illusion where you have to categorize people like a census taker would have.  (Use Safari or a browser that enables Flash)

Here is a screenshot of the activity:

This subjective, visual categorization of people is how the US Census operated until 1970.

Not only was racial classification based on this subjective, visual categorization of people, but also the categories have changed over time. This is just one way that institutional policies constructed race differently throughout US history.

• Here is how the US census has changed in how it determines race over the years.
• This graphic from the PEW research center explains how the U.S. census has changed over the years:

The Supreme Court and Race
The Census Bureau is not the only U.S. institution that subjectively affected racial categorization over the years.  Because of the subjective nature of race in general and the census in particular, a number of Supreme Court Cases were forced to determine racial classification and policy.

Bhagat Singh Thind

Bhagat Singh Thind (1892-1967) was born in Punjab and came to America in 1913.  He attended the University of California at Berkeley and paid for it by working in an Oregon lumber mill during summer vacations. When America entered World War I, he joined the U.S. Army. He was honorably discharged on 16th of December, 1918 and in 1920 applied for U.S. citizenship from the state of Oregon. Several applicants from India had thus far been granted U.S. citizenship. 

He was applying based on the naturalization law at the time which was the 1790 United States Naturalization Law.  It stated the first rules to be followed by the United States in the granting of national citizenship. The law limited citizenship to immigrants who were "free white persons" of "good character".  The census forms allowed Singh to choose from these categories: White, Black, Mulatto, Chinese, American Indian.  His application for citizenship was challenged by the immigration office.  Singh argued that he was white from a state very close to Caucasus Mountains, the region where anthropologists believed that Caucasians emerged from.

As an individual, decide how you would rule:

____Singh is a white man who deserves citizenship. 

____Singh is not white and therefore does not deserve citizenship.

The Court determined that Thind was not white or Caucasoid, even though he did not fit into the other categories of race at the time (Mongoloid/Asian, Negroid/Black, American Indian).  Instead, the court ruled that because most people would say that he is not white, then he is not white. The court also ruled that this ruling applied to all Hindus - even though Thind was not Hindu!  He was Sikh.  This was just one way of many  that the legal system that shaped race throughout U.S. history.  Here are some others:

• 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (banned Chinese immigration and limited rights for those already here)
• Pace v. Alabama 1883 (miscegenation law - not overturned until 1967!)
• Ozawa v. U.S. 1922 (Japanese are not white)
• Thind v. U.S. 1923 (If you don't seem white, you are not)
• Lum v. Rice 1927 (Citizens who are Chinese don't have the right to attend white schools)
• Hirabayashi v. U.S. 1943 (Japanese may be imprisoned in camps during WWII)
• Korematsu v. U.S. 1944 (Americans can be held in prison or concentration camps because of their ethnicity and without due process.)

What are the results and evidence of race as a social construct in U.S. history?

From Harper’s Illustration:

“They are distinctly marked – the small and somewhat upturned nose, the black tint of skin…They are ignorant, and as a consequence thereof, are idle, thriftless, poor, intemperate, and barbarian…Of course they will violate our laws, these wild bisons leaping over the fences which easily restrain the civilized domestic cattle, will commit great crimes of violence, even capital offences, which certainly have increased as of late.”

Who are they talking about?





This caption and illustration show the subjectivity of race in the United States.  The Irish were not considered white.  Not only does this not make sense physically/biologically, but the caption reveals how subjective and social race was.  They were looked down on because of the jobs they did (dock labor), because of their religion (Catholic), because of their culture (alcohol use) and their social class (poor).  This subjectivity is just one example throughout the history of the United States.  Over the years, Italians, Greeks and other Southern Europeans faced discrimination because they were considered less desirable than Northern Europeans, but all of these people are considered "white" by today's standards.

Here are some sociology readings about how different groups have changed over time:

• My post on How Jews became white, which draws on Karen Brodkin's research.
• My post on How Asians became "model minorities" which draws on a number of sociologists including Janelle Wong, Ellen Wu, Min Zhou, and Jen Lee. 
• How whites learn to not think about race (Bonilla-Silva)
• How Italians became white; Vicious Bigotry and Reluctant Acceptance (NY Times)
• How Armenians became white.
• When the Irish weren't white.

For more on how race has changed, see Nell Irvin Painter's book called, "The History of White People." Here is a review on Salon.  All of these are examples of how race has changed over the years in America.  The meaning of being white changes because there is no empirical or objective way to define race.  It doesn't exist in any biological or empirical sense, it only exists as a social construction.

Sociological Mindfulness reflection: Is this new information to you? Is it difficult to process?  Why?

Watch this show making fun of how race is socially constructed.



See Ferris and Stein pages 224-225 for more info.

W.E.B. Dubois's Wages of Whiteness and Implicit Institutional Bias

HW: Read  Jonathon Metzel's Dying of Whiteness

Recapping racism, institutional, individual and explicit

We have been learning about the ways that the social construction of race has been used to gain and maintain power in society, also known as racism.  One type of racism is in the way that institutions have helped create and maintain power for the majority race, also known as institutional racism.  Another way that racism shows up is in individual racism as in the case of the tweets against Miss America, Nina Davuluri which claimed many things that were meant to prevent her from winning or being accepted as Miss America such as she is not a real American, she is Arab, or a terrorist, etc...  All of which are racist.  These direct forms of racism are also called explicit racism.  However, there is also a hidden, subconscious racism also called implicit racism.  


What is implicit racism?  What are some examples of it?

Prejudices and stereotypes exist in our subconscious.  These hidden biases are called implicit bias.  Although implicit bias can be about myriad topics (gender, occupation, age), it can also promote racism.  Here is an explanation from Teaching Tolerance:

While the brain isn’t wired to be racist, it uses biases as unconscious defensive shortcuts.  As human beings, we are not naturally racist. But because of the way our brains are wired, we are naturally "groupist." The brain has a strong need for relatedness.  This wiring for “groupism” usually leads the dominant culture (the in-group) in a race-based society to create “out-groups” based on race, gender, language and sexual orientation. A system of inequity is maintained by negative social messages that dehumanize people of color, women and LGBT people as “the other.” For folks in the in-group, the brain takes in these messages and downloads them like software into the brain’s fear system. This leads to implicit bias: the unconscious attitudes and beliefs that shape our behavior toward someone perceived as inferior or as a threatening outsider.

The passage above is connecting race to ingroups and outgroups that we learned about in unit 1.   It constructs a reality where whites feel and experience life differently because they are white.  White is the majority group in the United States so it comes with a feeling of power and belonging.  This is true even for whites who might not have a lot of real power in society - low-income whites with less education.  So, for them, even though they are at the lowest end of the social class ladder, at least they are white.  This is another reason why all of the groups in yesterday's lesson wanted to become white - not just for the institutional benefits, but also for the social status.  This type of racism was first written about nearly a hundred years ago by W.E.B. Du Bois.


Who is W.E.B. Du Bois?

From the NAACP history website, William Edgar Burghardt Du Bois became the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University (1895).  Du Bois became an assistant instructor in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. There he conducted the pioneering sociological study of an urban community, published as The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899). These first two works assured Du Bois’s place among America’s leading scholars.

From 1934 to 1944 Du Bois was chairman of the department of sociology at Atlanta University.  Du Bois published numerous works of academic research on African Americans.  His body of work was considered the greatest study of African Americans at that time and it still remains respected.


What is W.E.B. DuBois's Mental Wage of Whiteness?

From the Social Science Research Council (SSRC),

Du Bois famously argues that whiteness serves as a “public and psychological wage,” delivering to poor whites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a valuable social status derived from their classification as “not-black.” The claims embedded in this thesis—that whiteness provides meaningful “compensation” (Du Bois’s term) for citizens otherwise exploited by the organization of capitalism; that the value of whiteness depends on the devaluation of black existence; and that the benefits enjoyed by whites are not strictly monetary—shaped subsequent efforts to theorize white identity and to grasp the (non)formation of political coalitions in the United States.

An excerpt from DuBois is here:

Most persons do not realize how far [the view that common oppression would create interracial solidarity] failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers  that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest. 

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. (Black Reconstruction [1935], 700-701)

Dubois wrote this in 1935, but I still think it applies to today.  For example, when reading about the racist tweets towards Nina Davuluri, it sends the message that she might be pretty and successful, but she is not and will never be a real American.  For the millions of poor whites who feel powerless, that small act of racism might make them feel good about being white, being a "true American."


Peggy McIntosh's Contribution to Dubois

Then, about 50 years later, Peggy McIntosh wrote a piece called the Invisible Knapsack that explained these "hidden wages" show up in a number of different ways in everyday life.  McIntosh called these "privileges".  This is where the term "white privilege" came from.   The essence of McIntosh's claim is that whites can live their daily life in the United States without having being judged for their race.  This includes meeting new neighbors, shopping, getting a promotion, etc... All of these are more likely to be viewed with individualism for whites and race-related for everyone else.  Essentially, it is saying that minority race becomes a master status for everyone who is not white.  McIntosh is not saying that whites have been handed everything on a silver spoon or that they have not worked hard for what they have.  She is simply saying that race is not a factor that white people have to overcome to be successful.  See this post for more about white privilege.

How can White Privilege be Measured Empirically? 

Michael Harriot, and MBA, measures the privilege in dollars in my other post here.  He quantifies the privilege that was created by the racism that was begun in 1619 with the beginning of slavery in this land and the laws beginning in 1705 that institutionalized that racism.  Now the legacy is not directly or legally tied to race, but it still exists, implicitly.  Below is a summary from Harriot's article (linked above):

Education In 2012, the U. S. Department of Education reported that about 33 percent of all white students attend a low-poverty school, while only 6 percent attend high-poverty schools. In comparison, only 10 percent of black students attend a low-poverty school, while more than 40 percent of black students attend high-poverty schools.  This means that black students are more than six times more likely than white students to attend a high-poverty school, while white students are more than three times more likely than black students to attend a low-poverty school.  And, in 2015, a research scientist named David Mosenkis examined 500 school districts in Pennsylvania and found that—regardless of the level of income—the more black students, the less money a school received.
WorkAccording to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of Friday, April 7, the unemployment rate for African Americans was nearly double that of whites (8.1 percent for blacks, 4.3 percent for whites).  A 2015 study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that whites with the exact same résumés as their black counterparts are hired at double the rate. In fact, a white man with a criminal history is more likely to be hired than an African American with no criminal past.  the Economic Policy Institute—examined 2015 data and discovered that at every level of education, whites were twice as likely to have jobs as blacks.  Researchers at EPI found that black men with 11-20 years of work experience earned 23.5 percent less than their white counterparts, and black women with 11-20 years of experience were paid 12.6 percent less than white women with the same experience. This disparity is not getting smaller. The wage gap between black and white workers was 18.1 percent in 1979, and steadily increased to 26.7 percent in 2015. When Pew Research controlled for education and just looked at income data, white men still surpassed every other group.
MarketA John Hopkins study (2008) showed that supermarkets were less prevalent in poor black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods with the same average income, leading to increased food costs. News organization ProPublica recently found that car-insurance companies charge people who live in black neighborhoods higher rates than people in predominantly white areas with the same risk.  When it comes to credit, it is even worse. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, The Atlantic reports, “even after controlling for general risk considerations, such as credit score, loan-to-value ratio, subordinate liens, and debt-to-income ratios, Hispanic Americans are 78 percent more likely to be given a high-cost mortgage, and black Americans are 105 percent more likely.” Even banks as large as Wells Fargo have lost cases for up-charging minorities.  According to the Wall Street Journal, large auto lenders have paid more than $200 million since 2013 to settle lawsuits for charging minorities higher rates, but in November, both Democrats and Republicans voted to reduce regulations on the financial institutions that offer auto loans. The National Consumer Law Center filed a 2007 lawsuit that exposed how “finance companies and banks put in place policies that allowed car dealers to mark up the interest rates on auto loans to minorities based on subjective criteria unrelated to their credit risk.”

How Does Implicit Racism Show Up in Everyday Life?

The wages of whiteness and privilege show up in other indirect and subconscious ways too. Look at the following pictures and captions which both appeared in the press after Hurricane Katrina.  Here is one example of racism showing up in the media:



How are these images examples of racism or implicit bias?


What color dress is Mrs. Obama wearing in this picture?


This picture featuring Michelle Obama was published with a caption saying that she wore a "flesh-colored" dress. Are they implying that Michelle's skin is not flesh?  I don't think so, but this is an example of the privilege of being white; white skin is considered normal/flesh-colored.  This is just one of many privileges of being white in a culture that sees white as normal, desirable or better than other "colors".  This type of privilege is often unnoticed, subconscious, implicit.  But, it has a big impact.
Here is another example from Johnson and Johnson.  Note that the bottle says, "Normal to Darker skin," implying that there is normal skin and then there is darker skin which is implicitly abnormal. And, here are some privileges related to Christmas.  Sometimes these subtle instances of racism are called "microaggressions".  Here are 25 microaggressions from buzzfeed.



Police Surveillance and Implicit Bias from the Sociologist Toolbox
Part of the privilege of being white and implicit bias of not being perceived as white is the idea of belonging.  Similar to Nina Davuluri who was perceived as not American
Here are a number of examples (A NY Police Lt., Harvard U. President, State Senator Obama)

In 2018, police across the United States have been urged to investigate black people for doing all kinds of daily, mundane, noncriminal activities. This year alone, CNN has reported on police have been called on African-Americans for:

Operating a lemonade store

Golfing too slowly

Waiting for a friend at Starbucks

Barbecuing at a park

Working out at a gym

Campaigning door to door

Moving into an apartment

Mowing the wrong lawn

Shopping for prom clothes

Napping in a university common room

Asking for directions

Not waving while leaving an Airbnb

Redeeming a coupon

Selling bottled water on a sidewalk

Eating lunch on a college campus

Riding in a car with a white grandmother

Babysitting two white children

Wearing a backpack that brushed against a woman

Working as a home inspector

Working as a firefighter

Helping a homeless man

Delivering newspapers

Swimming in a pool

Shopping while pregnant

Driving with leaves on a car

Trying to cash a paycheck

And these are just the incidents that CNN has reported. There are no doubt many others.  A review of news headlines this year shows that police were also called on other people of color. But it seemed to happen most often to black people: black people just going about their business.

A Girl Like Me
https://youtu.be/YWyI77Yh1Gg
Watch the following video and explain what evidence it provides that explicit bias exists and promotes racism and implicit bias exists and promotes racism.

What evidence does the video provide that explicit bias exists and promotes racism?

What evidence does the video provide that implicit bias exists and promotes racism?

The Police Officer's Dilemma from University of Colorado at Boulder

And another example of implicit bias is from the University of Chicago's Joshua Corell who showed how people react in a split second when they confront someone with a weapon. Soc Images explains it here.  See here for a link to the game and conclusions.

The Kirwan Institute from The Ohio State University

The Ohio State University does extensive research on implicit bias through their Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.

The institute publishes a yearly review of the state of implicit bias research.  You can find that here.

Kirwan Institute and Medicine

Kirwan's 2017 research shows that even doctors and patient health are affected by implicit bias.  The research is supported by the American Association of Medical Colleges.  You can download it here.






University of Chicago School of Economics and Labor Market

Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan published a study of implicit bias and the labor market in The American Economic Review called Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination?

Labor Market and Felonies

From the NY Times, When a Dissertation Makes a Difference shows not only how unconscious bias can play a role in hiring in a most inequitable way, but also how sociology can make a difference that influences policy.

As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Devah Pager studied the difficulties of former prisoners trying to find work and, in the process, came up with a disturbing finding: it is easier for a white person with a felony conviction to get a job than for a black person whose record is clean.

Sociology of Education and School Discipline

Edward Morris and Brea Perry's research found that discipline in school for subjective offenses might be shaped by implicit bias.  See their research published in the ASA's journal here or here.


What Would You Do? 

And this video showing how people are more quick to be suspicious and to call the police if they see a black man committing the same crime as a white man.











Who is affected by this explicit bias?  Is it only whites?

What are microaggressions? 

This article from American Psychologist explains microaggressions and the implications of them for clinical therapists.  See the table below for an explanation of different microaggressions.