Download or read book Race and Human Diversity written by Robert L. Anemone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race and Human Diversity is an introduction to the study of human diversity in both its biological and cultural dimensions. Robert L. Anemone examines the biological basis of human difference and how humans have biologically and culturally adapted to life in different environments. The book discusses the history of the race concept, evolutionary theory, human genetics, and the connections between racial classifications and racism. It invites students to question the existence of race as biology, but to recognize race as a social construction with significant implications for the lived experience of individuals and populations. This second edition has been thoroughly revised, with new material on human genetic diversity, developmental plasticity and epigenetics. There is additional coverage of the history of eugenics; race in US history, citizenship and migration; affirmative action; and white privilege and the burden of race. Fully accessible for undergraduate students with no prior knowledge of genetics or statistics, this is a key text for any student taking an introductory class on race or human diversity. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Race in the Making written by Lawrence A. Hirschfeld and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race in the Making provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power. Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them. Starting from the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind, Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child's notion of race and across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes, whether in historical time or during childhood. After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children's (and occasionally adults') representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking.
Download or read book The Construction of Whiteness written by Stephen Middleton and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-04-13 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2017 This volume collects interdisciplinary essays that examine the crucial intersection between whiteness as a privileged racial category and the various material practices (social, cultural, political, and economic) that undergird white ideological influence in America. In truth, the need to examine whiteness as a problem has rarely been grasped outside academic circles. The ubiquity of whiteness--its pervasive quality as an ideal that is at once omnipresent and invisible--makes it the very epitome of the mainstream in America. And yet the undeniable relationship between whiteness and inequality in this country necessitates a thorough interrogation of its formation, its representation, and its reproduction. Essays here seek to do just that work. Editors and contributors interrogate whiteness as a social construct, revealing the underpinnings of narratives that foster white skin as an ideal of beauty, intelligence, and power. Contributors examine whiteness from several disciplinary perspectives, including history, communication, law, sociology, and literature. Its breadth and depth makes The Construction of Whiteness a refined introduction to the critical study of race for a new generation of scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students. Moreover, the interdisciplinary approach of the collection will appeal to scholars in African and African American studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, legal studies, and more. This collection delivers an important contribution to the field of whiteness studies in its multifaceted impact on American history and culture.
Download or read book Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture written by Lee D. Baker and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-03 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging “disappearing” Native American culture by curating objects, narrating practices, and recording languages. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee D. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. He investigates the role that ethnologists played in creating a racial politics of culture in which Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while African Americans did not. Baker argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century. As he explores the implications of anthropology’s different approaches to African Americans and Native Americans, and the field’s different but overlapping theories of race and culture, Baker delves into the careers of prominent anthropologists and ethnologists, including James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton, and Franz Boas. His analysis takes into account not only scientific societies, journals, museums, and universities, but also the development of sociology in the United States, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, and government entities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Supreme Court. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Baker tells how anthropology has both responded to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how its ideas have been appropriated (and misappropriated) to wildly different ends.
Download or read book White Women Race Matters written by Ruth Frankenberg and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Savage to Negro written by Lee D. Baker and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-11-23 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lee D. Baker explores what racial categories mean to the American public and how these meanings are reinforced by anthropology, popular culture, and the law. Focusing on the period between two landmark Supreme Court decisions—Plessy v. Ferguson (the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine established in 1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (the public school desegregation decision of 1954)—Baker shows how racial categories change over time. Baker paints a vivid picture of the relationships between specific African American and white scholars, who orchestrated a paradigm shift within the social sciences from ideas based on Social Darwinism to those based on cultural relativism. He demonstrates that the greatest impact on the way the law codifies racial differences has been made by organizations such as the NAACP, which skillfully appropriated the new social science to exploit the politics of the Cold War.
Download or read book Why Race Still Matters written by Alana Lentin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-22 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Why are you making this about race?' This question is repeated daily in public and in the media. Calling someone racist in these times of mounting white supremacy seems to be a worse insult than racism itself. In our supposedly post-racial society, surely it’s time to stop talking about race? This powerful refutation is a call to notice not just when and how race still matters but when, how and why it is said not to matter. Race critical scholar Alana Lentin argues that society is in urgent need of developing the skills of racial literacy, by jettisoning the idea that race is something and unveiling what race does as a key technology of modern rule, hidden in plain sight. Weaving together international examples, she eviscerates misconceptions such as reverse racism and the newfound acceptability of 'race realism', bursts the 'I’m not racist, but' justification, complicates the common criticisms of identity politics and warns against using concerns about antisemitism as a proxy for antiracism. Dominant voices in society suggest we are talking too much about race. Lentin shows why we actually need to talk about it more and how in doing so we can act to make it matter less.
Download or read book A Troublesome Inheritance written by Nicholas Wade and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well. Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traits—thrift, docility, nonviolence—have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These “values” obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.
Download or read book The Cultural Construction of Race written by Marie M. De Lepervanche and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of papers dealing with race and racism in varying contexts; papers by Andrew Martens and Gillian Cowlishaw annotated separately.
Download or read book The Meaning of Whitemen written by Ira Bashkow and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A familiar cultural presence for people the world over, “the whiteman” has come to personify the legacy of colonialism, the face of Western modernity, and the force of globalization. Focusing on the cultural meanings of whitemen in the Orokaiva society of Papua New Guinea, this book provides a fresh approach to understanding how race is symbolically constructed and why racial stereotypes endure in the face of counterevidence. While Papua New Guinea’s resident white population has been severely reduced due to postcolonial white flight, the whiteman remains a significant racial and cultural other here—not only as an archetype of power and wealth in the modern arena, but also as a foil for people’s evaluations of themselves within vernacular frames of meaning. As Ira Bashkow explains, ideas of self versus other need not always be anti-humanistic or deprecatory, but can be a creative and potentially constructive part of all cultures. A brilliant analysis of whiteness and race in a non-Western society, The Meaning of Whitemen turns traditional ethnography to the purpose of understanding how others see us.
Download or read book Gods of the Upper Air written by Charles King and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world. A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced." What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity. Boas's students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today. Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.
Download or read book Races of Mankind written by Marianne Kinkel and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1930, Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History commissioned sculptor Malvina Hoffman to produce three-dimensional models of racial types for an anthropology display called the Races of Mankind. In this exceptional study, Marianne Kinkel measures the colossal impact of the ninety-one bronze and stone sculptures on perceptions of race in twentieth-century visual culture, tracing their exhibition from their 1933 debut and nearly four decades at the Field Museum to numerous reuses, repackagings, reproductions, and publications that reached across the world. Employing a keen interdisciplinary approach, Kinkel taps archival sources and period publications to construct a cultural biography of the Races of Mankind sculptures. She examines how Hoffman's collaborations with curators and anthropologists transformed the commission from a traditional physical anthropology display to a fine art exhibit. She also tracks influential exhibitions of statuettes in New York and Paris and photographic reproductions in atlases, maps, and encyclopedias. The volume concludes with the dismantling of the exhibit at the Field Museum in the late 1960s and the redeployment of some of the sculptures in new educational settings. Kinkel demonstrates how the Races of Mankind sculptures participated in various racial paradigms by asserting fixed racial types and racial hierarchies in the 1930s, promoting the notion of a Brotherhood of Man in the 1940s, and engaging Afrocentric discourses of identity in the 1970s. Despite the enormous role the sculptures played in representing race in American visual culture, their history has been largely unrecognized until now. The first sustained examination of this influential group of sculptures, Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman examines how the veracity of race is continually renegotiated through collaborative processes involved in the production, display, and circulation of visual representations.
Download or read book Ethnicity as a Political Resource written by University of Cologne Forum »Ethnicity as a Political Resource« and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is ethnicity viewed by scholars of different academic disciplines? Can its emergences be compared in various regions of the world? How can it be conceptualized with specific reference to distinct historical periods? This book shows in a uniquely and innovative way the broad range of approaches to the political uses of ethnicity, both in contemporary settings and from a historical perspective. Its scope is multidisciplinary and spans across the globe. It is a suitable resource for teaching material. With its short contributions, it conveys central points of how to understand and analyze ethnicity as a political resource.
Download or read book Whitening Race written by Aileen Moreton-Robinson and published by Aboriginal Studies Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whitening Race comes to fruition at a time in world history and global politics when questions about race require critical investigation and engagement. Since the 1990s international scholars have developed a powerful cultural critique by making whiteness an analytical object of research. Whiteness has become the invisible norm against which other races are judged in the construction of identity, representation, subjectivity, nationalism and the law. With its focus on Australia, the book engages with relations between migration, Indigenous dispossession and whiteness. It creates a new intellectual space that investigates the nature of racialised conditions and their role in reproducing colonising relations in Australia. Aileen Moreton-Robinson has brought together scholars from a range of disciplines: philosophy, cultural and gender studies, education, social work, sociology and literary studies. All engage critically with the location of the social and discursive construction of whiteness.
Download or read book Cultural Melancholy written by Jermaine Singleton and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A daring cultural and literary studies investigation, Cultural Melancholy explores the legacy of unresolved grief produced by ongoing racial oppression and resistance in the United States. Using acute analysis of literature, drama, musical performance, and film, Singleton demonstrates how rituals of racialization and resistance transfer and transform melancholy discreetly across time, consolidating racial identities and communities along the way. He also argues that this form of impossible mourning binds racialized identities across time and social space by way of cultural resistance efforts. Singleton develops the concept of "cultural melancholy" as a response to scholarship that calls for the separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis, excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures, and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic theorization. In doing so, he weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency. Wide-ranging and theoretically bold, Cultural Melancholy counteracts the racial legacy effects that plague our twenty-first century multiculture.
Download or read book Immigration Assimilation and the Cultural Construction of American National Identity written by Shannon Latkin Anderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the 20th century, there have been three primary narratives of American national identity: the melting pot, Anglo-Protestantism, and cultural pluralism/multi-culturalism. This book offers a social and historical perspective on what shaped each of these imaginings, when each came to the fore, and which appear especially relevant early in the 21st century. These issues are addressed by looking at the United States and elite notions of the meaning of America across the 20th century, centering on the work of Horace Kallen, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Samuel P. Huntington. Four structural areas are examined in each period: the economy, involvement in foreign affairs, social movements, and immigration. What emerges is a narrative arc whereby immigration plays a clear and crucial role in shaping cultural stories of national identity as written by elite scholars. These stories are represented in writings throughout all three periods, and in such work we see the intellectual development and specification of the dominant narratives, along with challenges to each. Important conclusions include a keen reminder that identities are often formed along borders both external and internal, that structure and culture operate dialectically, and that national identity is hardly a monolithic, static formation.
Download or read book The Cultural Construction of London s East End written by Paul Newland and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Newland's illuminating study explores the ways in which London's East End has been constituted in a wide variety of texts - films, novels, poetry, television shows, newspapers and journals. Newland argues that an idea or image of the East End, which developed during the late nineteenth century, continues to function in the twenty-first century as an imaginative space in which continuing anxieties continue to be worked through concerning material progress and modernity, rationality and irrationality, ethnicity and 'Otherness', class and its related systems of behaviour.The Cultural Construction of London's East End offers detailed examinations of the ways in which the East End has been constructed in a range of texts including BBC Television's EastEnders, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, films such as Piccadilly, Sparrows Can't Sing, The Long Good Friday, From Hell, The Elephant Man, and Spider, and in the work of Iain Sinclair.
