"Race" and the Construction of Human Identity

Race as a mechanism of social stratification and as a form of human identity is a recent concept in human history. Historical records show that neither the idea nor ideologies associated with race existed before the seventeenth century. In the United States, race became the main form of human identity, and it has had a tragic effect on low-status "racial" minorities and on those people who perceive themselves as of "mixed race." We need to research and understand the consequences of race as the premier source of human identity. This paper briefly explores how race became a part of our culture and consciousness and argues that we must disconnect cultural features of identity from biological traits and study how "race" eroded and superseded older forms of human identity. It suggests that "race" ideology is already beginning to disintegrate as a result of twentieth-century changes.     

"Interracial" Sex and Racial Democracy in Brazil: Twin Concepts?

Racial democracy is maintained in Brazil through both scholarly and popular discourses that consider "interracial" sex as proof of Brazil's lack of a racial problem. In this article, I scrutinize the discourse that asks, "How can we be racist when so many of us are mixed?" I argue that racial discourses are embedded in everyday interactions, but are often codified or masked. "Race" is especially pertinent to sexuality, yet the two have hardly been analyzed together. In fact, it is not the belief in a racial democracy that is at the heart of Brazilian racial hegemony, but rather the belief that Brazil is a color-blind erotic democracy. Using my ethnographic data, I illustrate that "race" is embodied in everyday valuations of sexual attractiveness that are gendered, racialized, and class-oriented in ways that commodity black female bodies and white male economic, racial, and class privilege. [Brazil, race, sexuality, poverty]     

Publishing "Equinox": Broadening Notions of Urban Youth Development after School

This ethnographic, instrumental case study (Stake 2003) of an atypical youth apprenticeship draws on sociocultural and critical theoretical lenses. Findings reveal that during an eight-month cycle, a paid apprenticeship provided a fertile context for 20 low-income, ethnically diverse, older youths to explore, reflect upon, compose, photograph, and ultimately publish their communities and worlds. These findings point toward a potential to deepen and broaden the theoretical perspective through which mainstream youth development is conceived. The author argues that adults' guided participation and youths' systematic engagement with multimodal literacies as identity work is a successful recipe for promoting critical youth development'a notion of youth development that not only acknowledges but also encourages youths' reflection on the intersection of race, class, gender, and power.     

Race,gender, and class in entrepreneurship: intersectional counterframes and black business owners

ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurship is often touted as an economic opportunity that embodies American ideals of individualism and financial gain. Yet social scientists have long noted divergent entrepreneurial outcomes among various groups. In this paper, we consider how race informs entrepreneurship for minority business owners. In particular, we focus on the ways black entrepreneurs use racial counterframes as a means of defining various aspects of the entrepreneurial experience. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of intersectional counterframes to show how black entrepreneurs understand business ownership as a response to categories that interact with not only to race, but other social group categories as well, such as gender. We argue here that these business owners use both counterframes to construct entrepreneurship not simply as a potential pathway to economic stability, but perhaps more importantly, as a response to existing inequality.     

"Showing roughness in a beautiful way": talk about love, coercion, and rape in South African youth sexual culture

Sexual violence within as well as outside sexual relationships has far-reaching public health and human rights implications and is a continuing focus of popular debate, media coverage, and research in postapartheid South Africa. Partly because it has been shown to affect individual vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, sexual violence has in recent years become framed as a global public health issue. International research efforts to document the scale of this personally and politically sensitive problem can encounter conceptual, definitional, and methodological difficulties that anthropology is well placed to assist in alleviating. This article offers an ethnographic exploration of the spectrum of practices relating to sexual coercion and rape among young people in a township in the former Transkei region of South Africa. Contextualizing meanings of sexual coercion within local youth sexual culture, the article considers two emic categories associated with sex that is "forced": ukulala ngekani: "to sleep with by force" or ukunyanzela: "to force," both usually used to describe episodes occurring within sexual partnerships; and ukudlwengula, used to describe rape by a nonpartner or stranger. The article discusses the semantic content of and differences between these two key categories, demonstrating that encounters described as "forced sex" encompass not only various forms of sexual coercion but also, particularly in the narratives of young men, instances of more consensual sex. Of importance, in turn, in defining an act as "rape" rather than as "forced sex" are the character of the relationship between the two parties and interlinked ideas relating to exchange and sexual entitlement, love, and the importance of "intention," violation, and "deserving" victimhood.     

On classifying race in Brazil: example from a study of the functional ability of older people (60+)

How should race be categorized? This article investigates the usefulness of having three categories to describe a black-white racial continuum, focusing on Brazil and the functional ability of elderly (60+) people there. Ironically, even as the U.S. census has started to acknowledge mixed race again, much social research in Brazil has begun not to. Using 1998 national household survey microdata (PNAD) for Brazil, we find it advantageous to use a three-category scheme that separates a mixed black-white (pardo) status from black or white when examining the functional ability of elders. We also find the tantalizing possibility of a crossover in which browns actually have more functional ability than white counterparts after controlling for many demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic factors.     

贵州"过卯"水族的体质人类学研究

本文对贵州三都水族自治县“过卯”水族462人(男238,女224)进行了活体观察和测量。观察项目28个,测量项目64个。调查对象年龄20—55岁,三代均为“过卯”水族。分析结果表明:“过卯”水族属圆头型;男性狭面型,女性中面型;阔鼻型;宽手型,窄肩型,中腿型;男性瘦长体型,女性中间体型;男性亚中等,女性矮型身材。与我国南方其他24个少数民族群体聚类分析,结果显示“过卯”水族体质特征与湖南侗族、白裤瑶、贵州毛南族接近。贵州“过卯”水族属蒙古人种南亚类型,具有现代黄种人的容貌特征。     

On classifying race in Brazil: Example from a study of the functional ability of older people (60+)

Abstract

How should race be categorized? This article investigates the usefulness of having three categories to describe a black‐white racial continuum, focusing on Brazil and the functional ability of elderly (60+) people there. Ironically, even as the U.S. census has started to acknowledge mixed race again, much social research in Brazil has begun not to. Using 1998 national household survey microdata (PNAD) for Brazil, we find it advantageous to use a three‐category scheme that separates a mixed black‐white (pardo) status from black or white when examining the functional ability of elders. We also find the tantalizing possibility of a crossover in which browns actually have more functional ability than white counterparts after controlling for many demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic factors.     

Developing sociopolitical consciousness of race and social class inequality in adolescents attending progressive and no excuses urban secondary schools

Sociopolitical consciousness refers to an individual’s ability to critically analyze the political, economic, and social forces shaping society and one’s status in it. A growing body of scholarship reports that high levels of sociopolitical consciousness are predictive in marginalized adolescents of a number of key outcomes including resilience and civic engagement. The present study explored the role that urban secondary schools can play in fostering adolescents’ sociopolitical consciousness through a longitudinal, mixed methods investigation of more than 400 adolescents attending “progressive” and “no excuses” charter high schools. Analyses revealed that, on average, students attending progressive high schools demonstrated sizeable shifts in their sociopolitical consciousness of racial inequality, and students attending no excuses high schools demonstrated sizeable shifts in their sociopolitical consciousness of social class inequality. Qualitative interviews with participating students offered insight into the curriculum, programming, and practices that these youth perceived as contributing to these differences in their sociopolitical consciousness.     

The Gendered and Racialized Pathways of Latina and Latino Youth: Different Struggles, Different Resistances in the Urban Context

This article explores the student resistances that shape orientations to schooling. Drawing on a study of Latina/o youth, I examine how race and gender influence whether they perceive education as oppressive or useful in resisting oppression. The key lever that may alter their perceptions is how school and society treat Latinos differently from Latinas. This study shows how ethnography can inspire pedagogical practices that bolster urban students' resistances to the oppressive forces negatively impacting their education. [Latina/o youth, race, gender, resistance, urban education]     

Race, ethnicity, and health: can genetics explain disparities?

Over the past decade, numerous studies have documented profound racial and ethnic disparities in disease in the United States. This essay examines how popular and scientific concepts of race and ethnicity converge with dominant understandings of genetics to inform the design and interpretation of research, public health policy, and medical practice. Although there is some acknowledgment in the biomedical community that racial and ethnic categories are social and not genetic, ideas about race and ethnicity that circulate in biomedicine are contradictory. Thus, in practice genetic explanations for observed differences are common both in the scientific literature and in popular media accounts of biomedical research. Such explanations naturalize racial and ethnic difference and create a conceptual barrier to developing a research program that explores the complex ways in which social inequality and experiences of racial discrimination interact with human biology to influence patterns of disease. Importantly, genetically based ideas lead to disease prevention policies that are bound to be ineffective.     

Race and the Concept of Progress in Nineteenth Century American Ethnology

While nineteenth century American ethnologists relied on the word "evolution" more than the word "progress" to define their theory of culture, their theory of evolution nonetheless implied a teleological projection that was no more than a paeon for Anglo-Saxon race achievement. Believing that failures in earlier stages of evolution had limited brain size and quality of the "inferior races," they suggested that, for all practical purposes, the Caucasian was the lone man in evolution. While the Caucasian maintained an active, progressive role in modifying the environment, the lower races broke into the modern world as mere "survivals" from the past, mentally and physiologically unable to shoulder the burdens of complex civilization. Ethnology became a means through which both scientists and social scientists sought to estimate the relative value of the races, delineate social categories, and help justify the dynamics of race legislation.     

Reestablishing "Race" in Anthropological Discourse

Anthropology, despite its historic role in both creating and dismantling the American racial worldview, seems barely visible in contemporary scholarly and public discussions of "race." The authors argue that race should once again be central to anthropological inquiry, that cultural and physical anthropologists must jointly develop and publicly disseminate a unified, uniquely anthropological perspective. They suggest ways to proceed and identify internal barriers that must be overcome before the anthropological voice can be heard.     

Male "macho" mammals exploiting females versus male "Don Juan" birds exploited by females: the opposite-sex exploitation (OSEX) theory

We hypothesize that the general differences in breeding systems between birds and mammals results from a different outcome of the between-sex arms race. The arms race has been won by male mammals that can impose their mating decision over females, but has been lost by male birds because of the extreme specialization of forearms that do not allow males to trap and hold females during copulation. Male birds compensate for their inability to force copulation by developing "Don Juan" behaviour to persuade females to accept copulation.     

Characterizing Race/Ethnicity and Genetic Ancestry for 100,000 Subjects in the Genetic Epidemiology Research on Adult Health and Aging (GERA) Cohort

Using genome-wide genotypes, we characterized the genetic structure of 103,006 participants in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California multi-ethnic Genetic Epidemiology Research on Adult Health and Aging Cohort and analyzed the relationship to self-reported race/ethnicity. Participants endorsed any of 23 race/ethnicity/nationality categories, which were collapsed into seven major race/ethnicity groups. By self-report the cohort is 80.8% white and 19.2% minority; 93.8% endorsed a single race/ethnicity group, while 6.2% endorsed two or more. Principal component (PC) and admixture analyses were generally consistent with prior studies. Approximately 17% of subjects had genetic ancestry from more than one continent, and 12% were genetically admixed, considering only nonadjacent geographical origins. Self-reported whites were spread on a continuum along the first two PCs, indicating extensive mixing among European nationalities. Self-identified East Asian nationalities correlated with genetic clustering, consistent with extensive endogamy. Individuals of mixed East Asian–European genetic ancestry were easily identified; we also observed a modest amount of European genetic ancestry in individuals self-identified as Filipinos. Self-reported African Americans and Latinos showed extensive European and African genetic ancestry, and Native American genetic ancestry for the latter. Among 3741 genetically identified parent–child pairs, 93% were concordant for self-reported race/ethnicity; among 2018 genetically identified full-sib pairs, 96% were concordant; the lower rate for parent–child pairs was largely due to intermarriage. The parent–child pairs revealed a trend toward increasing exogamy over time; the presence in the cohort of individuals endorsing multiple race/ethnicity categories creates interesting challenges and future opportunities for genetic epidemiologic studies.     

The Unfolding of Language as <Emphasis Type="Italic">Hysteron Proteron</Emphasis>: Heterochrony and Extended Connectivity

In this paper it is championed that a two stages hypothesis for the evolution of language must take into account a qualified approach to heterochrony and the available information from the archaeological record. As it seems, a protracted childhood and youth was already at work in Homo erectus, but early postnatal brain growth (usually called secondary altriciality) was only available to Homo sapiens. According to these facts, the term hysteron proteron is given here to the reversal that sets off linguistic capacity during the first three years of life, upon the ancient abilities for social, natural and technological knowledge, which were already established during the last 2 Mya BP. The unfolding of linguistic capacity creates the typical effect that ontogeny reverses phylogeny: since late postnatal brain growth, quite recent in evolution, launches in ontogeny before the phylogenetically old processes of playing and learning take place during childhood and youth. Full symbolic abilities may be explained as emerging from older semiotic competences based on iconicity (figuration) and indexicality (metonymy), which would have presumably sustained human life for millennia. Furthermore, it is argued that the formation of linguistic categories follows from that overlaying of extended connectivity linked to early postnatal brain growth, inasmuch as it entangles and transforms previous iconic and referential information: i.e. the ancient semiotic capacities for proprioception, embodiment, extended mimesis and pragmatic knowledge, shaping a sort of self-organization process that provides the formal and semantic properties we find in articulated languages.     

At the crossroads of conspicuous and concealable: what race categories communicate about sexual orientation

We found that judgments of a perceptually ambiguous social category, sexual orientation, varied as a function of a perceptually obvious social category, race. Sexual orientation judgments tend to exploit a heuristic of gender inversion that often promotes accuracy. We predicted that an orthogonal social category that is itself gendered, race, would impact both sexual orientation categorizations and their accuracy. Importantly, overlaps in both the phenotypes and stereotypes associated with specific race and sex categories (e.g., the categories Black and Men and the categories Asian and Women) lead race categories to be decidedly gendered. Therefore, we reasoned that race categories would bias judgments of sexual orientation and their accuracy because of the inherent gendered nature. Indeed, both gay and straight perceivers in the United States were more likely to judge targets to be gay when target race was associated with gender-atypical stereotypes or phenotypes (e.g., Asian Men). Perceivers were also most accurate when judging the sexual orientation of the most strongly gender-stereotyped groups (i.e., Asian Women and Black Men), but least accurate when judging the sexual orientation of counter-stereotypical groups (i.e., Asian men and Black Women). Signal detection analyses confirmed that this pattern of accuracy was achieved because of heightened sensitivity to cues in groups who more naturally conform to gendered stereotypes (Asian Women and Black Men). Implications for social perception are discussed.     

Generational change and how we conceptualize and measure multiracial people and “mixture”

Until relatively recently, in countries such as the U.S.A. and U.K., individuals could only opt for “single race” categories with which they identified. However, in the 2000 decennial census, respondents in the U.S. were able to choose more than one racial category, while in 2001, a “Mixed” box (with further subcategories) was provided in the England and Wales census for the first time. But the very success of this racial project in these countries has spawned a number of questions for policy-makers and academics who theorize, enumerate and study the experiences of multiracial people. With demographic changes such as generational change, who counts as multiracial or mixed race? This question has yet to receive significant attention. Although mixing is becoming more commonplace, the question of who counts as multiracial is far from straightforward, especially as we look down the generational pipeline.     

"They See Us as Resource": The Role of a Community-Based Youth Center in Supporting the Academic Lives of Low-Income Chinese American Youth

Based on a 15-week ethnographic-based research, this article examines the role of a community-based youth center in supporting the academic lives of Chinese American youth from low-income families in an east coast city I call "Harborview." This study demonstrates the significant role that community-based organizations play for low-income immigrant youth in providing them with social capital. This study also challenges the portrayal of Asian Americans as model minorities who do not face any barriers.  [Asian American education, community-based organizations, out-of-school-time programs, social capital]