Six: Who We Are
The 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, upheld laws that legally enforced racial segregation in public facilities. Legally enforced segregation, or de jure segregation, remained the law of the land in the Southern United States until the mid-twentieth century. The transition away from segregation began in the military, when President Harry Truman signed a 1948 executive order calling for military desegregation. Prior to this, units of soldiers were actually organized, in part, by race; the Second World War, the United States fought with a racially segregated military. Perhaps the moment that really turned the tide away from segregation was the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education court case in 1954, which declared separate schools for black and white students unequal and therefore unconstitutional. I wrote an early draft of this chapter from an office and an apartment in Lawrence, Kansas while I was earning my Ph.D. at the University of Kansas, only a short drive from the historical landmark in Topeka commemorating this decision.
One of the great difficulties of talking about issues related to race and ethnicity involves figuring out precisely what we mean by each. Race refers to collections of people of common ancestry who share certain physical characteristics—hair type, color of eyes and skin, etc., while ethnicity refers to a group that shares common cultural or national traditions. These concepts overlap but are not the same. The 2020 U.S. Census had eight categories of "race, ethnicity, or origin": White, Hispanic or Latino or Spanish origin, Black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Middle Eastern or North African, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and Other. The Census Bureau has considered using the term "categories" instead of “race” or “ethnicity” or “origin.”
Difficulties arise immediately. People often use the terms Hispanic and Latino interchangeably. They’re both ethnicities, but they don’t mean the same thing—Latino/a refers to people from Latin America; Hispanic means “of Spanish-speaking origin.” Pollsters and colleges have leaned into the term Latinx to avoid the gender binary, and to capture the diversity of the ethnicity, but most people who are Latino or Latina don’t embrace this. Another problem with defining and classifying, making sure that social scientists are accurately describing people as they describe themselves. But people in Spain speak Spanish, so they are Hispanic, but Spain is in Europe, so they are not Latino. The official language of Brazil is Portuguese, so Brazilians are Latino but not Hispanic. Would a person from Spain or Brazil answer they are Hispanic on the Census Bureau survey?
The importance of different ethnicities can be clarified in other ways as well. "Asian" is one of the categories offered by the census, but Asia is the largest continent in the world. People from Japan are different, in terms of language, culture, shared history, and more, from people from Vietnam, Bangladesh, or Russia (all of these countries are in Asia, the largest continent on earth). The Census added the category "Middle Eastern or North African" only recently—for a long time, immigrants from Syria or Iraq or Pakistan were considered, or often self-identified as, "white." Indeed, the difficulties by no means end there: for example, Nigeria, located in West Sub-Saharan Africa along the Atlantic Ocean, is home to some 350 ethnicities, divided between thirty-six states. Africa is home to the greatest ethnic and human genetic diversity on earth, and the African states were mostly carved up by European imperialism, not by self-determined peoples, so Nigeria isn’t unique in this regard. And speaking of diversity, the category American Indian or Alaska Native itself contains a great deal of diversity, based on region, culture, and history.
Who decides? The Census approach is common in sociological research: with the recognition that the categories are simplistic, self-identity becomes important, or who you think you are. To a great extent, race and ethnicity are socially constructed. On the other hand, like with other social constructs, that doesn’t mean “anything goes”; I will face pushback if I self-identify with ethnic groups to which I do not belong, or to which I have only a tenuous connection or relationship. For example, ethnically speaking, many of my ancestors were from Norway, but some were from Poland; and I also have ancestors on both sides of my family who were Roma, nomadic groups referred to outsiders as Gypsies—going far enough back, the Romani people are from India. Contemporary U.S. society views me and treats me as white, and that’s the Census box I check.
But even the notion of what it means to be white has changed significantly over the past century or so. My great-grandparents on my father's side arrived in the United States in the early twentieth century, refugees emigrating from Poland during the First World War. Members of both his family and my mother’s family were Roma; some emigrated at this time to escape violence and persecution. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Polish immigrants were not considered "white,"—they, as well as some Italian, Greek, Irish, and Russian immigrants, were called "swarthy," tending to have different hair and eyes, skin tones, and other features when compared to immigrants from Western and Northern Europe. Additionally, my great-grandparents, like many people hailing from Poland (then and now) were Roman Catholic, and the United States (at least in the east and central regions) was a majority-Protestant nation. In the early twentieth century, anti-Catholic sentiment was high, and Catholic immigrants were actively persecuted (the Romani people have also been frequently targeted for persecution, though this is more commonplace in Europe).
How then did I become "white," and what happened to those other aspects of my ethno-cultural heritage? There is a tendency to suggest that the United States is "a nation of immigrants." Though the United States is home to people who hail from (or whose ancestors hail from) nearly every part of the world, it is also home to millions of Native Americans, who were here thousands of years before the arrival of the first European colonists. The twentieth century can be divided roughly in half in terms of race and ethnicity based on prevailing use of metaphors. The metaphor used to describe the population of the United States before the 1960s tended to be that of a "melting pot." Immigration before the mid-twentieth century was defined in terms of assimilation, the process by which folks such as my Polish, Norwegian, and Roma ancestors blended into a broader American culture that predated their arrival. This process does not take place in some straightforward fashion. The large influx of Catholic immigrants did ultimately come to make Catholicism an increasingly mainstream thread of American identity. Part of assimilation involves learning to speak the “dominant” language of the society into which one is being assimilated—in this case, English. Typically, first-generation immigrants are bilingual, or fluent in two languages, or multilingual, speaking multiple languages fluently. There were still the remnants of Scandinavian and Polish idioms and turns of phrase in the everyday language of my grandparents and parents, but my parents were monolingual, as am I, speaking only one language, which is not unusual for second- and third-generation immigrants in the U.S.
Around the end of the 1960s, the metaphor began to change. For many, the "melting pot" metaphor is now dated, even uncomfortable—many now would argue that the present American cultural landscape better resembles a "patchwork quilt." The tendency after the 1960s was toward multiculturalism, support for the presence, and preservation, of multiple cultures and ethnicities within a single society. There are many reasons for this set of changes, and of course the debate regarding assimilation and multiculturalism still rages, in its many forms, in the United States today.
One compelling example relates to the “English-only” debate—that is, some view English as an important cultural core, or essence, of U.S. culture, and therefore defend the assimilationist view that English should be expected in U.S. schools and public communication. Others have pushed back, citing studies that suggest that learning multiple languages improves children’s cognitive ability, and correlates with higher ambition and self-esteem. English is a de facto language of the U.S., but was not reinforced by law until March 1, 2025, when English was designated the official language of the U.S. by executive order.
These conversations are overlaid with renewed conversations about religion—though the U.S., unlike many countries, does not have an established religion, and never did, social scientists recognize a distinct if unofficial facet of the U.S. in civil religion, or the social embodiment of a religion, Christianity, as part of U.S. culture. This prompts me to introduce another distinction here, between a state, which is a political formation, a “monopoly on legitimate violence within a particular territory” and a nation, which is a social-psychological construct, involving a people and how they see themselves. They, like race and ethnicity, overlap but are not the same. States are a construct that comes out of a particular place and time; nations are about self- and collective identity, a nation is a “people” who have a shared sense of history, culture, struggle, and perhaps destiny. This is, again, where norms come from—a group of people with a shared sense of who they are and what they’re supposed to be doing to survive together in place. Ethno-nationalism is a belief that nation and state and ethnic group should be synonymous; the KKK who perhaps persecuted my Polish Catholic great-grandparents defined them as not conforming to whiteness (being “swarthy”) and Christianity (being Catholic, not Protestant) hold an ethno-nationalist ideology. Another layer of the cultural tensions in the U.S. at present involves a growing majority who are multicultural, or who embrace multiculturalism to varying degrees; and a minority (for the first time) who adhere to a definition of the U.S. as culturally white and Christian.
Now I’m going to say some things that are controversial, both to fellow sociologists and to the average reader. Typically a chapter about race would involve a lot of stuff about racism. But what is racism, and how is it defined so that we can detect, examine, analyze it in the context of social science? The narrowest definition of racism would be a specific attitude or belief that one’s own race is inherently or naturally superior to other races. When Hitler took power in Nazi Germany and declared his own people, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Anglo-Saxons, the "master race," this is a clear, uncontroversial racism. When people in the nineteenth and early twentieth century determined intelligence or ability by measuring human skulls or different facial features, this was scientific racism (more accurately pseudoscientific racism, given that anthropological theory and evidence does not support these methods or conjectures). Going back further, many of the early conquistadores, who came to the United States in the sixteenth century in search of treasure and fame, believed the First Peoples of the Americas were sub-human, fit only for slavery or death.
Racism may overlap with other ideologies or attitudes, and is used in so many contexts, that it may cause confusion rather than clarity. Ethno-nationalism and other kinds of strong nationalism, or the belief in the unique destiny of a particular people or ethnic group, may fit easily with racism, but aren’t the same thing. Xenophobia, or an unreasonable fear of foreigners or outsiders, may result in dehumanizing treatment of immigrants and ethnic minorities, but isn’t necessarily predicated on overt racist beliefs or attitudes. Ethnocentrism, or evaluating other peoples through the standards of one’s own, may lead to or reinforce racist beliefs, but it’s actually a common human issue that we social scientists have to be particularly aware of.
One of the earliest influences on thinking more deeply about issues of race and racism in the U.S. was W.E.B. DuBois. In his 1935 work Black Reconstruction in America, DuBois argued that low-paid white laborers ultimately received a public and psychological wage, a form of prestige and social standing denied to Black laborers from the same social stratum. He theorized the development of a double-consciousness, a “peculiar sensation” of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt or pity” (1982:44), anticipated certain strands of social psychology by decades (including the symbolic interactionist tradition) and shed a harsh light on the experience of being African American around the beginning of the twentieth century. Max Weber himself, who had a reputation for “cool objectivity,” took a trip to the U.S. with his wife, feminist scholar and theorist Marianne Weber in the early twentieth century, and was deeply troubled by the “racial caste system” he found there (incidentally, he talked with DuBois and other socially-concerned scholars during his visit, more here). DuBois’ history gives an evocative way to think about the experience of race and ethnicity “from within,” as an experienced and lived social reality (akin to the lasting discomfort of finding oneself to be deviant, or outside a set of social norms, for largely ascribed reasons beyond one’s control).
Concepts that overlay with race and ethnicity, and the conflicts and complexities that arise, are prejudice—the unreflective, hasty, irrational, or simplistic belief about a person or a group of people—and discrimination, or treating people unequally based on their group identity. There are several advantages to focusing on these two concepts over some of the others I mentioned. For one, prejudice can capture elements of social life that include, but are not limited to, race and ethnic identity.
For another, prejudice can be measured more readily (whereas unless people are extremely outspoken or overt about the depth of their racism, it is hard to know). Take, for example, the Pew Research “feeling thermometer,” which can indicate how people feel—warmer to cooler—toward particular religious groups, a measure of how close or distant people feel from other people. “Warmest” feelings as of 2017 were toward Jews and Catholics, more chilly to neutral feelings were toward Atheists and Muslims, with a lot of variation by age group. One issue this raises is social desirability bias, or the fact that human beings may exaggerate or even lie on surveys, perhaps without realizing it, in order to conform to social norms deemed desirable. How likely is a person to admit racial prejudice on a survey if they think the people analyzing the survey find racial prejudice deviant and abhorrent? Sometimes you have to compare how people actually behave to what they say to compensate, doing multiple studies from different vantage points and with different methods—this is how we found out that U.S.-Americans underestimate how much alcohol they drink and data tend to overestimate how often they attend religious services.
I want to float a conjecture here about prejudice. We are all prejudiced. Me. You. Everyone. To varying degrees. Contrary to the platitude that no one is born prejudiced, suspicion of outsiders, may have had collective survival value for human beings through the distant past, when an encroachment of one group upon the territory of another could have far-reaching and deadly consequences. The problem with prejudice, with suspicion of outsiders, is that as societies become bigger, more urbanized, more multicultural, it no longer has survival value, and becomes a social liability. It’s also admittedly true that as a scholar, someone devoted to scientific study, I think questioning, challenging, overturning beliefs one holds that are hasty, irrational, or not based in fact is a valuable thing independently of its social value. But instead of thinking about prejudice as something people learn, how does it change the story if we think of prejudice, suspicion of people who are different from us, as partly an outgrowth of human beings as social critters, something that we must learn to imperfectly confront, examine, discard?
And going further, if prejudice and discrimination are different things, is it possible to do one without the other. Enter sociologist Robert K. Merton’s typology, with four categories which help pull apart the relationship between prejudice and discrimination. For Merton, an active bigot is prejudiced, and discriminates, while a timid bigot is prejudiced but does not discriminate. A fair-weather liberal discriminates without being prejudiced, while an all-weather liberal is neither prejudiced, nor discriminates (a category, I have already suggested, I suspect is empty). Since prejudice is an attitude and discrimination is an action, we can better figure out which is which, and how they relate to one another, in this scheme. Not everyone’s behavior follows from their beliefs in a rigid or obvious way—that is part of what make sociology challenging (and makes both social science and life fascinating). There are multiple problems with this typology (I have argued elsewhere why I don’t think liberal is the opposite of prejudiced) but Merton’s effort represents an attempt to capture the different, and sometimes complex, relationship between human beings' attitudes toward one another, and behaviors which might, or might not, follow from them.
Prejudice and discrimination are useful terms and concepts because they can be used to describe issues that may include race and ethnicity but they are broad and flexible enough to apply to other arenas in which attitudes and behaviors toward others different from oneself are important. Prejudice, and discrimination, might unevenly impact people of different races and ethnicities, as well as genders, religions, social classes, political affiliations, sexual orientations, levels of education, and more. Neither prejudice nor discrimination, unlike racism, can include race and ethnicity, and more. And it’s possible for discrimination to exist at the institutional level, as part of the broader social fabric, even without individual people being actively prejudiced. It’s also possible to tease out, to some degree, when you have overtly bad actors in various sectors, who are bigoted or racist, from when there is something more systemic going on. Back to Mills—is this more of a personal problem or a public issue? And in taking aim at this, I set the stage for the next chapter, a focus more explicitly on law, crime, and punishment.
Image Credit: Separate and unequal water fountains on a Birmingham, AL Army Base, https://www.army.mil/article/200456/water_fountains_symbolize_1960s_civil_rights_movement
Important Words
Assimilation
Bilingual
De facto
De jure
Discrimination
Double-consciousness
Ethnicity
Ethnocentrism
Ethno-nationalism
Monolingual
Multilingual
Nation
Nationalism
Prejudice
Race
Racism
Self-identity
Social desirability bias
State
Xenophobia
Sit With It: Big Questions
Think about how the word racism is used here versus in public conversations. How do the ways in which we use words like racism shape the study of, and advancement of policy, in terms of social problems involving race and ethnicity?
Consider the possibility possibility of institutional discrimination that doesn’t require overtly discriminatory individual attitudes. How do these ideas shift the conversation around prejudice, racism, and discrimination? Are there problems, limitations, or blind spots to this approach?
If prejudice is not learned, but is something to be imperfectly “un-learned,” what are some ways that social science study and research might change a person’s views of other groups of people?
