Download or read book The Ethnic Myth written by Stephen Steinberg and published by Boston : Beacon Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic work, sociologist Stephen Steinberg rejects the prevailing view that cultural values and ethnic traits are the primary determinants of the economic destiny of racial and ethnic groups in America. He argues that locality, class conflict, selective migration, and other historical and economic factors play a far larger role not only in producing inequalities but in maintaining them as well, thus providing an insightful explanation into why some groups are successful in their pursuit of the American dream and others are not. -- amazon.com.
Download or read book The Ethnic Myth written by Stephen Steinberg and published by New York : Atheneum. This book was released on 1981 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You hold in your hand a dangerous book. Because it rejects as it clarifies most of the current wisdom on race, ethnicity, and immigration in the United States, The Ethnic Myth has the force of a scholarly bomb. --from the Introduction by Eric William Lott In this classic work, sociologist Stephen Steinberg rejects the prevailing view that cultural values and ethnic traits are the primary determinants of the economic destiny of racial and ethnic groups in America. He argues that locality, class conflict, selective migration, and other historical and economic factors play a far larger role not only in producing inequalities but in maintaining them as well, thus providing an insightful explanation into why some groups are successful in their pursuit of the American dream and others are not.
Download or read book The Ethnic Myth written by Stephen Steinberg and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2001-01-16 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You hold in your hand a dangerous book. Because it rejects as it clarifies most of the current wisdom on race, ethnicity, and immigration in the United States, The Ethnic Myth has the force of a scholarly bomb. --from the Introduction by Eric William Lott In this classic work, sociologist Stephen Steinberg rejects the prevailing view that cultural values and ethnic traits are the primary determinants of the economic destiny of racial and ethnic groups in America. He argues that locality, class conflict, selective migration, and other historical and economic factors play a far larger role not only in producing inequalities but in maintaining them as well, thus providing an insightful explanation into why some groups are successful in their pursuit of the American dream and others are not.
Download or read book The Ethnic Myth written by Stephen Steinberg and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Myth of Ethnic War written by V. P. Gagnon, Jr. and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground."—from The Myth of Ethnic War V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict. Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon's view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon's noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.
Download or read book The Myth of Race written by Robert Wald Sussman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biological races do not exist—and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today. The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned “Aryans,” as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization—policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas’s new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why—when it comes to race—too many people still mistake bigotry for science.
Download or read book The Race Myth written by Joseph Graves and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-06-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Graves’ integration of science and objective analysis with popular biological assumptions of race makes this an enlightening and provocative work.”—Booklist DOES RACE AS WE KNOW IT REALLY EXIST? Preeminent evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves proves once and for all that it doesn’t. Through accessible and compelling language, he makes the provocative argument that science cannot account for the radical categories used to classify people, and debunks ancient race-related fallacies that are still held as fact, from damaging medical profiles to misconceptions about sports. He explains why defining race according to skin tone or eye shape is woefully inaccurate, and how making assumptions based on these false categories regarding IQ, behavior, or predisposition to disease has devastating effects. Demonstrating that racial distinctions are in fact social inventions, not biological truths, The Race Myth brings much-needed, sound science to one of America’s most emotionally charged debates.
Download or read book The Myth of the Jewish Race written by Raphael Patai and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this carefully researched analysis, Raphael and Jennifer Patai begin by defining race. They then develop the idea of the existence of "races" through history. In rich and fascinating detail, the authors consider the effects of intermarriage, interbreeding, proselytism, slavery, and concubinage on the Jewish population from Biblical times to the present. New material explores the psychological aspects of the Jewish race issue, the Jewish psyche, and the consequences of the 1975 United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. A revised and updated scientific section on the measurable genetic, morphological, and behavioral differences between Jews and non-Jews supports the conclusion that the idea of a "Jewish race" is, indeed, a myth.
Download or read book Man s Most Dangerous Myth The Fallacy of Race written by Ashley Montagu and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DR. ASHLEY MONTAGU’S book possesses two great merits rarely found in current discussions of human problems. Where most writers over-simplify, he insists on the principle of multiple and interlocking causation. And where most assume that “facts will speak for themselves,” he makes it clear that facts are mere ventriloquists’ dummies, and can be made to justify any course of action that appeals to the socially conditioned passions of the individuals concerned. These two truths are sufficiently obvious; but they are seldom recognized, for the good reason that they are very depressing. To recognize the first truth is to recognize the fact that there are no panaceas and that therefore most of the golden promises made by political reformers and revolutionaries are illusory. And to recognize the truth that facts do not speak for themselves, but only as man’s socially conditioned passions dictate, is to recognize that our current educational processes can do very little to ameliorate the state of the world. In the language of traditional theology (so much more realistic, in many respects, than the “liberal” philosophies which replaced it), most ignorance is voluntary and depends upon acts of the conscious or subconscious will. Thus, the fallacies underlying the propaganda of racial hatred are not recognized because, as Dr. Montagu points out, most people have a desire to act aggressively, and the members of other ethnic groups are convenient victims, whom one may attack with a good conscience. This desire to act aggressively has its origins in the largely unavoidable frustrations imposed upon the individual by the processes of early education and later adjustments to the social environment. Dr. Montagu might have added that aggressiveness pays a higher dividend in emotional satisfaction than does coöperation. Coöperation may produce a mild emotional glow; but the indulgence of aggressivness can be the equivalent of a drinking bout or sexual orgy. In our industrial societies, the goodness of life is measured in terms of the number and intensity of the excitements experienced. (Popular philosophy is moulded by, and finds expression in, the advertising pages of popular magazines. Significantly enough, the word that occurs more frequently in those pages than any other is “thrill.”) Like sex and alcohol, aggressiveness can give enormous thrills. Under existing social conditions, it is therefore easy to represent aggressiveness as good. Concerning the remedies for the social diseases he has so penetratingly diagnosed, Dr. Montagu says very little, except that they will have to consist in some process of education. But what process? It is to be hoped that he will answer this question at length in another work. ALDOUS HUXLEY
Download or read book Ethnic Options written by Mary C. Waters and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-08-09 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mary Waters' admirable study of Americans' ethnic choices produces a rich social-scientific yield. Its theoretical interest derives from the American irony that while ethnicity is 'supposed to be' ascribed, many Americans are active in choosing and making their ethnic memberships and identities. The monograph is simultaneously objective and attentive to subjective meaning, simultaneously quantitative and qualitative, and simultaneously sociological and psychological. Her research problems are well-conceived, and her findings important and well-documented. As ethnicity and race continue in their high salience in American society and politics, sound social-scientific studies like this one are all the more valuable."—Neil Smelser, co-editor of The Social Importance of Self-Esteem "One of the most sensible and elegant books about ethnicity in the United States that has ever been my great pleasure to read."—Andrew M. Greeley, University of Chicago "Skilled in both demographic and interviewing methods, Mary Waters makes ethnicity in contemporary America come alive. We learn how people construct their identities, and why. This is sociological research at its very best, and will be of interest to policy makers and educated Americans as well as to students and scholars in several disciplines."—Theda Skocpol, Harvard University "Perhaps the most intriguing question in the study of the 'old (European) immigration" is how the 4th, 5th and later generations who are the offspring of several intermarriages are choosing their ethnic identities from the several available to them. Professor Waters' clever mix of quantitative and qualitative research has produced some thoughtful and eminently sensible answers to that question, making her book required reading for students of ethnicity. Her work should also interest general readers concerned with their or their children's ethnic identity—or just curious about this yet little known variety of American pluralism."—Herbert J. Gans, Columbia University "Waters has produced a work with broad theoretical implications. The title . . . may be regarded as one of the first serious attempts to understand the dynamics of postmodern societies. Waters shows that ethnicity becomes transformed from as ascriptive into an achieved status, a voluntary construction of individual identity and group solidarity. Waters also shows that, in America at least, this increased flexibility is unavailable to racial minorities."—Jeffrey C. Alexander, University of California, Los Angeles "A theoretically informed and theoretically driven fine-grained analysis pooling ideas and issues in both ethnography and demography."—Stanley Lieberson, Harvard University "Thanks to Ethnic Options we have a much better understanding of the social and cultural significance of responses to the ancestry question on the 1980 census. By combining in-depth interviews with analysis of census data, Mary Waters puts flesh on the demographic bare bones. Her findings suggest that ethnicity is becoming less an ascribed trait, fixed at birth, than an 'option' that depends on circumstance, whim, and increasingly, the ethnicity of one's spouse."—Stephen Steinberg, author of The Ethnic Myth
Download or read book The Myth of the Jewish Race written by Alain F. Corcos and published by Lehigh University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a youth, the author, who had two Jewish grandparents, was defined as a Jew by Vichy France; his parents, however, refused to register the family as Jews. (In March 1944 Corcos and his brother fled to Spain and joined the Allied Forces in North Africa.) States that antisemites consider Jewishness to be inherited and to embody inferior, evil traits. This view is based on two false biological premises: that there are pure races of humans, and that some races are superior to others. Rejects these premises by considering modern biology and Jewish history. The latter indicates that the Jews cannot be a race, due to their lack of sexual isolation; diversity among Jews is a result of both intermarriage and proselytism. Sees the Spanish "limpieza de sangre" statutes and the Inquisition as precursors of Nazi racism. Observes that sometimes Jews have joined antisemites in accepting biological determinism. Intermarriage in countries such as China, India, and the USA has led to considerable biological diversity among Jews and to the reduction of diversity between Jews and non-Jews, if such diversity existed at all. Stresses that if antisemites have worried about "contamination" of their "race" by the Jews they have already missed the boat since Jews have mixed with non-Jews for many centuries.
Download or read book Modern Hatreds written by Stuart J. Kaufman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnic conflict has been the driving force of wars all over the world, yet it remains an enigma. What is it about ethnicity that breaks countries apart and drives people to acts of savage violence against their lifelong neighbors? Stuart Kaufman rejects the notion of permanent "ancient hatreds" as the answer. Dissatisfied as well with a purely rationalist explanation, he finds the roots of ethnic violence in myths and symbols, the stories ethnic groups tell about who they are. Ethnic wars, Kaufman argues, result from the politics of these myths and symbols—appeals to flags and faded glories that aim to stir emotions rather than to address interests. Popular hostility based on these myths impels groups to follow extremist leaders invoking such emotion-laden ethnic symbols. If ethnic domination becomes their goal, ethnic war is the likely result. Kaufman examines contemporary ethnic wars in the Caucasus and southeastern Europe. Drawing on information from a variety of sources, including visits to the regions and dozens of personal interviews, he demonstrates that diplomacy and economic incentives are not enough to prevent or end ethnic wars. The key to real conflict resolution is peacebuilding—the often-overlooked effort by nongovernmental organizations to change hostile attitudes at both the elite and the grassroots levels.
Download or read book Myths and Memories of the Nation written by Anthony D. Smith and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1999 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nations and nationalism remain powerful phenomena in the contemporary world. Why do they continue to inspire such passion and attachments? Myths and Memories of the Nation explores the roots of nationalism by examining the myths, symbols and memories of the nation through a 'ethno-symbolic' approach. The book reveals the continuing power of myth and memory to mobilise, define and shape people and their destinies. It examines the variety and durability of ethnic attachments and national identities, and assesses the contemporary revival of ethnic conflicts and nationalism. The book analyses the depth of ethnic attachments and the persistence of nations to this day.
Download or read book The Southern Hospitality Myth written by Anthony Szczesiul and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association and the reasons for its perseverance often seem unclear. Anthony Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so particular as the social habit of hospitality—which is exercised among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular practices—and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of an entire region of the country. Historians have offered a variety of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly in light of the region’s historical legacy of slavery and segregation.
Download or read book Making Sense of Mass Education written by Gordon Tait and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Sense of Mass Education provides a comprehensive analysis of the field of mass education. The book presents new assessment of traditional issues associated with education - class, race, gender, discrimination and equity - to dispel myths and assumptions about the classroom. It examines the complex relationship between the media, popular culture and schooling, and places the expectations surrounding the modern teacher within ethical, legal and historical contexts. The book blurs some of the disciplinary boundaries within the field of education, drawing upon sociology, cultural studies, history, philosophy, ethics and jurisprudence to provide stronger analyses. The book reframes the sociology of education as a complex mosaic of cultural practices, forces and innovations. Engaging and contemporary, it is an invaluable resource for teacher education students, and anyone interested in a better understanding of mass education.
Download or read book National Myths written by Gérard Bouchard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Myths are a major, universal sociological mechanism which is still rather poorly understood Demonstrates the relevance and the potential of myths as a research area Provides a timely shift in the usual focus of national studies, which typically centers on ethnicity, immigration, integration, citizenship, cultural diversity and nationalism Demonstrates the nature and the functioning of myths in contemporary societies, as a nexus of meanings that feed identities, memory and utopias Contributions from international authors
Download or read book White privilege written by Bhopal, Kalwant and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2018-04-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why and how do those from black and minority ethnic communities continue to be marginalised? Despite claims that we now live in a post-racial society, race continues to disadvantage those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Kalwant Bhopal explores how neoliberal policy making has increased rather than decreased discrimination faced by those from non-white backgrounds. She also shows how certain types of whiteness are not privileged; Gypsies and Travellers, for example, remain marginalised and disadvantaged in society. Drawing on topical debates and supported by empirical data, this important book examines the impact of race on wider issues of inequality and difference in society.
