Search Results

This chapter introduces the problems of the roles racial differences play in the workplace. It discusses the changes in the way Americans talk about race and what pragmatic and progressive voices say that they want since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Never before has such a wide variety of employers, advocates, activists, and government leaders in American society discussed the benefits of racial diversity and the utility of racial difference in such a broad range of contexts. Thus, the chapter points out the emerging discourse of race as a qualification for employment, and briefly details the many issues as well as the role of established laws on such an issue. It also lays out the conceptual foundations upon which the following chapters will be based on.

Today's activists have not given up on the goal of multiracial community, but they have learned from the experiences of the 1960s to make a more conscious effort to address the inevitable tensions that underlie multiracial work. Nevertheless, the “weight of history and institutions” remains. This chapter discusses how activists attempt to address these challenges and negotiate these dilemmas, looking at lessons learned in building multiracial collaborations capable of working toward racial justice. Activists find that whites can ignore racial differences, working out of color-blind assumptions, and stress becoming aware of and addressing racial differences openly within multiracial collaborations. However, whites can also make the opposite error of essentializing race. They can become so overly self-aware of racial differences that they fail to deal with people of color as fellow human beings and lose their own sense of themselves.

This chapter explores Martin Luther King's views on civil disobedience as expressed in the memorable Letter from Birmingham Jail. The message contained in the Letter is that racial difference is nothing more than similarity disguised. The Letter deconstructs the myth that racial equality exists in America by first confirming the existence of racial differences, then rejecting the notion of ‘difference made legal’, a concept King considered to be the basis of unjust laws. King accomplished this deconstruction by playing a highly sophisticated structural and stylistic game of semiotics.

Using data from the 1976 and 1978 National Longitudinal Surveys of young men and young women, this chapter examines racial differences in the magnitude and composition of wealth and the reasons for them. On average, young black families hold 18 percent of the wealth of young white families, and hold their wealth in proportionately different forms. Even after controlling for racial differences in income and other demographic factors, as much as three quarters of the wealth gap remains unexplained. The chapter concludes that racial differences in intergenerational transfers and, to a lesser extent, barriers to the accumulation of business and home equity most likely play a role.

This chapter examines the triumph of culture over race as the basis of the study of human nature. It suggests that a general urge to know, combined with a professional and scientifically derived willingness to accept new information and insights, were among the forces behind the transformation in outlook that removed race in particular and biology in general from the study of human behavior. In addition, the acceptance of racial differences as an explanation for human behavior denied equality of opportunity.

This chapter examines British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace's thoughts about human nature. Wallace was known to share with Charles Darwin the credit for discovering natural selection as the motive force of evolution. However, he later changed his mind and conducted studies to prove that human beings had escaped from the operation of natural selection. The substance of his scientific argument related directly to the issue of racial differences. The disagreement between Darwin and Wallace on the question of race can be seen in their divergent conceptions of the mentality of primitive peoples.

Professionals who interview children for possible sexual abuse tend to be white and middle class. At the same time, children and families who require assessment for sexual abuse are increasingly from diverse backgrounds. Professionals need to develop special skills to interview cross-culturally. This chapter describes the need for interviewers to take into account race, class, culture, subculture, religious, and language differences when interviewing children. How these differences can pose barriers for evaluators and strategies for enhancing agency and professional cultural competence are covered.

This chapter investigates whether the gains achieved during the era of the civil rights movement have been sustained. It examines whether legal changes and shifts in racial attitudes decreased black and white differences in social and economic status. The chapter begins by discussing changes in the nation's racial composition in the 1960s and 1990s. Next, it discusses the liberalization of white attitudes about the principles of equal opportunities for blacks. Racial differences in the era of immigration are also examined. Finally, the chapter discusses shifts in the recent past that are consistent with the ideals and programs of the civil rights revolution.

This chapter examines the results of a focused mental experiment wherein a nationally representative sample of American Christians was asked to ponder their response to the idea of their churches raising expectations on the financial giving of Christians. The idea in doing this is that having ordinary Christians all over the United States run this mental experiment in their heads will provide yet another angle on understanding how Christians think and feel about the issue of religious and charitable financial giving. The results showed that American Christians are ready and waiting to give ten percent of their after-tax income if only their churches were to ask them firmly to do so; earning higher incomes does not make American Christians more generous with their money; and racial differences among American Christians influence the matter of raising expectations of financial giving.

This chapter turns to the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans retold the biblical story of the “curse of Ham” as a fantasy to promote the notion of racial purity, which contradicted the social reality of interracial reproductive sex that prevailed throughout slavery. It contends that nineteenth-century Americans clung to the so-called curse of Ham or curse of Canaan as a religious fantasy that attempted to negate interracial sex as foundational to the origins of race and instead propagated a fantasy about racial purity. This fantasy was the field in which identities were forged, subjugations articulated, and desire structured. And by making the familial form universal and perpetuated by the (sovereign and nonsovereign) sexual transmission of race, it held out a singular humanity cut by racial inequality.

The primary purpose of this book is to explore how scientists' concepts of race are transmitted to the public through formal education as well as other institutions. The scientific enterprise is vital to American thinking about race because its claims are often the bedrock upon which academic, business, and government interpretations of the nature of race purport to rest. The medical tests used by companies such as Genzyme Genetics are primed by scientists' research. Science in the United States today is largely equated with “knowledge of nature,” especially as it is acquired through a specialized process. Racial differences are certainly shaped by families, friends, neighbors, and peers. But in a society where racial classification pervades bureaucratic life, people's everyday experiences in settings such as schools, companies, state agencies, and medical offices also leave their mark on the nations of race.

Freudian theory has specific, original engagements with racial difference, albeit often entwined with its theorizations of sexual difference and sexuality. In many nineteenth-century and modernist U.S. novels, minor, ignoble black characters manage both structural, novelistic failures and moral failures on the part of white protagonists. “Africanist” figures thus free both white protagonists and presumptively-white readers from the necessity of acknowledging weakness, cowardice, and other threatening emotional and moral realities, such as non-normative sexuality. William Faulkner's Sanctuary, published in 1931 but first drafted contemporaneously with the publication of “Womanliness as Masquerade,” articulates similar questions to Riviere's about women's sexuality, psychic experience, and fantasized racial blackness, albeit in fictional mode. Faulkner half-facetiously described Sanctuary as a cynical effort to make much-needed money, and in particular to cash in on the public's desire for sex and violence.

Cultural subordination is defined here as the suppression of important black values or folk ways—questions and concerns of keen importance to blacks—in the American mainstream culture. Like juridical subordination, cultural subordination is animated by post-Jim Crow norms that perform important rhetorical and regulatory functions in civil rights discourse—racial omission (traditionalism), racial integration (reformism), racial solidarity (limited separation), and social transformation (critical race theory). After defending the belief that blacks do have a distinct set of values that transcend class stratification, and after discussing the legitimacy of cultural diversity in American society, this chapter crafts four models of cultural diversity defined by these post-Jim Crow norms—cultural assimilation (traditionalism), biculturalism (reformism), cultural pluralism (limited separation), and transculturalism (critical race theory). It then proceeds to explain how most of these visions of cultural diversity subordinate legitimate black values. Deploying these models to purposefully enhance our racial democracy, which lies at the root of cultural diversity, can reduce (but not entirely eliminate) racial subordination in the American mainstream culture.

This chapter argues that efforts to create racial and ethnic classifications have led to numerous insights, particularly that the process is arbitrary, subjective, context-specific, purpose-driven, and imprecise. The process is atheoretical in that there is no coherent theoretical factor that underpins classifications. Topics discussed include the challenges of studying racial and ethnic differences without creating stigma or inequity; devising population groups using the concepts of race and ethnicity — historical and contemporary examples; analysing the facets of race and ethnicity that population groupings are based on; and the development of population groupings into comprehensive classifications of race and ethnicity, past and present.

This chapter uses the artwork of Kip Fulbeck as a lever to pry open some of the thornier matters surrounding the twinned issues of recognition and state-sponsored discipline. Fulbeck's most famous work, The Hapa Project, is included in the traveling anthropological exhibit “Race: Are We So Different?” The chapter puts Fulbeck's artwork in dialogue with the history of race-based scientific photography and argues that the exhibit's representation of multiracial Asian Americans can provide a counternarrative to the re-racialization of genetic science. Thus, Fulbeck's work demonstrates how audiences might view multiracial visual culture less as an antidote to racial hierarchies and more as a tool that can break open the smooth surface of naturalized and transcendent notions of racial difference.