How to Use the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society

This encyclopedia is arranged with nearly 600 entries in alphabetical order. The individual essays range in length from 500 to 6,000 words (118 entries are more than 2,000 words), accompanied by more than 200 visuals, including photographs, tables, figures, and maps.

The Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society also addresses other issues of inequality that often intersect with the primary focus on race and ethnicity. Therefore, the reader will find relevant coverage in such areas as ability status, age, class, gender, and sexual orientation.

Each entry offers an overview of a particular topic with guides to additional exploration through further readings. Effort has been made to select materials generally available through college libraries and to include potentially useful Web sites.

The broad area of race, ethnicity, and society is highly interconnected. Hence, each entry refers the reader to other potentially useful entries through cross-references (“See Also”) at the end of the text of each entry. Thus, one will find the entry on “Adoption” refers one to “Transracial Adoption,” which in turn refers the reader to “Racial Identity.” These cross-references supplement the alphabetical format for quick ease of location that finds such strange companions as “Lebanese Americans” next to “Lee, Spike,” and “Santería” next to “Scapegoats.”

Another helpful and important feature in the encyclopedia is the Reader's Guide section, which appears in the front matter of each volume immediately after the List of Images. This additional guide to the contents of the three volumes is organized around 18 headings, and each entry in the encyclopedia is listed in at least one of these 18 subject areas. These categories or themes identify well-represented subject areas within the encyclopedia. More significant to readers, the headings provide an additional way to guide further study. So for example, one may want to know more about immigration and therefore first look at entries such as “Immigration and Gender” and “Refugees.” However, by considering the “Immigration and Citizenship” category in the Reader's Guide, users of the encyclopedia may see entries that they had not considered of use to them such as “Americanization,” “Ethnonational Minorities,” and “Remittances.”

Located at the end of Volume 3 are the appendices. Appendix A, “Data on Race and Ethnicity in the United States, 1820 to the Present,” includes historical trends, the most recent data, and projections into the future. Appendix B, “Internet Resources on Race, Ethnicity, and Society,” identifies more than 100 Web sites with a variety of perspectives on the issues contained in this encyclopedia.

The strength of any reference work rests on its authorship. In these three volumes, we have brought together the insights of 376 individuals from more than 230 colleges, institutes, and organizations. To our knowledge, this is the largest number of scholars brought together to write on race and ethnicity—three times the number that produced the classic Harvard Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnicity, published a generation ago (Thernstrom, 1980).

The 376 individual contributors come from fourteen countries—Australia, Canada, Croatia, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Japan, Northern Ireland, Samoa, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States, with more than 45 different states represented. Breadth of academic backgrounds is also illustrated by discipline backgrounds of the authors including African American Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Communications, Criminal Justice, Gender/Women's Studies, Geography, History, Latina/o Studies, Languages and Linguistics, Law, Media Studies, Native American/American Indian Studies, Political Science, Psychology, Public Policy, Scandinavian Studies, Slavic Studies, Social Work, Sociology, and Speech. In a later section, we will consider the credentials of the scholars we have assembled in greater detail.

The coverage is also broad in its historical perspective, ranging from “Kennewick Man” and the “Emancipation Proclamation” to “Hip-Hop.” Biographical entries have been judiciously chosen for people who are historically important, representative of a particular period or genre, and often, scholarly contributors themselves such as Vine Deloria, Jr., Harry Kitano, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

A central part of the encyclopedia is more than 120 entries covering specific ethnic, nationality, tribal, and racial groups in the United States. Each informative essay provides basic information for each group with cross-references to related groups, pertinent concepts, and relevant historical events. The groups included are those that have had the most impact on society. Individual entries on specific groups are supplemented [Page xlix]by broader treatments on Africans in the United States, Asian Americans, Caribbean Americans, Central Americans in the United States, Latin Americans in the United States, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders.

Supplementing this core selection of entries are more than 100 essays looking at race and ethnicity in societies on every continent and from countries ranging from Canada to Zimbabwe as well as including a number of topics viewed from a broader global perspective such as “Colonialism,” “Diaspora,” and “Guest Workers.” Throughout the encyclopedia, but particularly in the nation and nationality entries, efforts have been made to include the latest population data. The 2007 population estimates come from the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) and reflect the current 2007 data from the individual countries, UN estimates, or calculations by PRB demographers (Haub, 2007).

Scholarship: Breadth and Scope

Some encyclopedias are written by a handful of nonexperts who assemble information from already published reference works, but the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society is the work of some of the most distinguished authorities possible who offer insight on complex topics. We have Craig Calhoun, author of the seminal essay on cosmopolitanism, writing on that topic; Michael Banton, the dean of race relations scholarship in Great Britain, writing on ethnic conflict; Douglas Massey, author of American Apartheid, writing on that concept; former American Sociological Association President Joe Feagin and Jennifer Mueller writing on White racism; Tom W Smith, Director of NORC General Social Survey, writing on surveying intergroup relations; Maulana Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa, writing on that internationally recognized festival; James Loewen, author of Sundown Towns, writing on that topic; and Molefi Kete Asante, who coined the term Afrocentricity, writing on that concept.

The overall quality of scholarship in this reference work continues to be apparent to those with knowledge in the area of race and ethnicity. Many of the authors of the essays are acknowledged as the authorities. For example, consider entries written by Benigno Aguirre (Hurricane Katrina), Thomas Bouchard (Intelligence Tests), Roberta Coles (Family), Sharon Collins (Black Enterprise), Gary David (Arab Americans), Mary Jo Deegan (Chicago School of Race Relations), John Dovidio (Aversive Racism), Howard Ehrlich (Ethnoviolence), John Farley (Discrimination in Housing), Gary Fine (Robbers Cave Experiment), Douglas Hartmann (Measuring Whiteness), Ted Henken (Immigration and Race), Peter Kivisto (Religion), Donald Kraybill (Amish), Armand Mauss (Mormons and Race), Vincent Parrillo (Italian Americans), Fred Pincus (Reverse Discrimination), James Richardsen (New Religious Movements), Jason Shelton (Malcolm X), Sonia Soltero (Bilingual Education), Gregory Squires (Blockbusting), John Stone (Comparative Perspectives of Race), Jill Watts (Father Divine Peace Mission Movement), David Zarefsky (Abraham Lincoln), and many, many others.

Many of the contributors played the useful editorial role of suggesting important topics to be covered and potential experts whose contribution could be solicited. The editors gratefully acknowledge such assistance.

Terminology

We have striven to establish a common use of terms to cover the topics in the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society. Given the nature of the field, this is a challenging endeavor. We do acknowledge that words and categories have power and note this throughout this reference work. Ethnic and racial terminology is a complex and sensitive matter that transcends any purely scholarly discussion. We fully recognize the very real social significance it has for all the peoples discussed in this book, not to mention to the individuals who either detest any categorization or resent the many occasions they are misidentified.

For example, in some contexts terms such as “non-White” carry deep emotional scars (South Africa), whereas in some contexts in academic writing in the United States, this term is intended to be a useful, non-pejorative term (for example as in Bonilla-Silva, 2004). To those new to the field, it may seem puzzling and arbitrary that the U.S. Census Bureau's primary ethnic classification is “Hispanic” and “non-Hispanic” and that race includes such ambiguous geographical in origin categories as “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders” (American Anthropological Association, 1997; Office of Management and Budget, 1997).

Frankly, even to scholars immersed in the field, categorization remains a challenge that is also puzzling and arbitrary. Typically, we use terminology that is most acceptable to members of groups themselves. Having said that, we recognize the utility of such [Page l]collective terms as Asian Americans and Latinos is typically set aside in favor of more appropriate, specific descriptors, as Taiwanese Americans or Dominicans. Even what may seem as fairly specific social categories such as Italian Americans are too broad for those who self-identify as Sicilian or Genoan.

Native Americans and American Indians are used interchangeably. A 1995 national survey commissioned by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau found that both the terms enjoyed relative popularity among tribal people (49% endorsed American Indian and 37% expressed preference for Native American). However overwhelming such broad umbrella terms, the individual preference, used in this encyclopedia wherever possible, is to use more specific tribal identities such as Hopi or Ojibwa (Tucker, Kojetin, and Harrison, 1996).

Similarly, Hispanic and Latino are used interchangeably in the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society; some have argued there are different meanings for each, but there is no consensus about what those distinctions may be. As with American Indians, greater clarity comes from using more specific identifiers than from a broad, collective term such as Hispanic or Latino. Therefore, inspection of our list of entries will find sixteen separate groups from Brazilian Americans to Salvadoran Americans encompassed by the collective social category of Latinos or Hispanic Americans, although neither term is used as a self-descriptive term by the people in their home countries in Latin America or the Caribbean (Rodriguez, 2000).

Another aspect of terminology is the use of minority and majority. The use of minority is generally accepted in academic writings to describe all those groups who see themselves as distinct from the economically and politically dominant group, the majority, in terms of cultural or ethnic identity and is not intended to reflect some devaluation by outsiders. A group may also be identified as a minority even though it is in the numerical majority, as in the case of describing Black Africans in their own country during the apartheid era.

In the not-too-distant past, the term mixed-race was used only in the most disparaging way by the “chosen race” to cleanse itself of those people who were of mixed descent, however defined. This has changed in many societies including the United States, where people are being encouraged to not think in terms of old, rigid compartments. The census completed in 2000 was the first in the United States to allow for multiple categories; however, one could not self-classify as “biracial” or “multiracial” or “multiethnic.” Consequently, a significant number of entries confront the very real, and sometimes personal, issue of identity (Jones and Smith, 2001).

In a similar trend to the recognition of mixed backgrounds, many individuals and scholars embrace efforts to bring separate groups together in shared endeavors. Hence, we look in detail at panethnic movements ranging from La Raza to Pan-Indian and Pan-Asian movements.

Although the preceding discussion concerning terminology has focused on the United States, similar concerns about nomenclature of racial and ethnic groups are repeated throughout the world. In a study undertaken by the UN's Statistical Division, 63 percent of 141 national censuses incorporate some form of racial, ethnic, or nationality enumeration. It is very challenging to identify common categories except through the broadest classification systems. Consider the variety of ways that “indigenous,” “native,” or “aboriginal” are employed around the world. Yet another variation in terminology is how nations may officially cluster groups treated as distinctly different in other countries. For example, some nations group ethnic with dialect groups (Singapore), whereas other nations combine caste with ethnicity (Nepal). The reader is referred to the UN Statistical Division (2003) and Ann Morning's (2008) valuable synthesis for further insights into the complexity of terminology worldwide.

Suffice it to conclude, like the authors represented in this encyclopedia, that one should exercise care in use of racial and ethnic terminologies and acknowledge as best as one can different interpretations. Finally, special caution must be used when exploring race and ethnicity in societies that are new to the investigator.

Maps and Photographs

More than 90 maps specially designed in the three volumes assist the reader in getting a sense of place either of the source of nationalities or distributions of members of particular ethnic or racial groups. These illustrations offer the most accurate, recent impressions possible. Reflecting ongoing political disputes, however, boundaries are often a contentious issue. Although only small parcels of land were involved relatively speaking, Mexico and the United States did [Page li]not finally fix their shared border until a 1970 treaty that became effective in 1977. Other borders such as India-Pakistan remain very much in dispute, and even the autonomous existence of such states as Taiwan and Tibet are in dispute. With all this in mind, one should view maps with their intended purpose—general location and key features—rather than as the final word in geopolitical disputes.

Pictures speak volumes and, therefore, special care has been taken to select images to highlight topics. Rather than selecting a simple headshot of Malcolm X, for example, we undertook research to show him dining in a Harlem restaurant patronized by the Nation of Islam. Concepts that may not always be familiar to the reader are also illustrated with photographs accompanying the entries on the deficit model of ethnicity and ethnic enclave. For example, a photograph that shows Sioux tribal members staking claim to the abandoned Alcatraz Prison Island in 1969 accompanies the entry on the concept of “Red Power.” The captions themselves reflect the writing of the General Editor with assistance from entry contributors.

Acknowledgments

The development of a work of a million words is truly a collaborative effort. I am particularly grateful to my editorial team. Shu-Ju Ada Cheng in her role as Associate Editor shared responsibility for developing the list of entries and identifying potential contributors. In addition, she authored seven entries herself. Assistant Editor Kiljoong Kim also identified many of the contributors and provided advice on statistical and data-collection matters. He authored (or coauthored) five entries. The noteworthy credentials of my two colleagues are detailed elsewhere.

Sage Publications continues to provide the academic community immeasurable reference and scholarly materials. I am most pleased that this encyclopedia is a part of this invaluable program. Publisher Rolf Janke has taken a valued personal interest in this project from the very beginning. Diana Axelsen has been the driving force on a daily basis (including many weekends) behind these three volumes. Her official title of “Developmental Editor” does not adequately describe her many roles. Kate Schroeder, with the assistance of Carla Freeman, Robin Gold, and D. J. Peck, has transformed a collaborative writing project into a unified whole. Leticia Gutierrez oversaw the Web-based system that managed the drafts and queries to the hundreds of scholarly participants. Finally, among all the individuals at Sage, I close by acknowledging Jerry Westby, who knows the field and was very receptive to my proposal that a part of the Sage bookshelf should be this encyclopedia.

The resources of my home campus at DePaul University have been extremely important. Managing Editor Monique Billings has played an important support function to the editors. Reference Librarian Paula Dempsey has been invaluable in tracking down esoteric bibliographic entries. The Department of Sociology Program Assistant Valerie Paulson and student workers Jan Gorospe, Meaghan Kawaller, Rachel Hanes, Suzanne Hammond, and Lidia Yip assisted with manuscript preparation and production.

The scholarly content rests with the several hundred authors, but others helped in a broader fashion. Jean H. Shin, in his role as Director of the Minority Affairs Program at the American Sociological Association (ASA), assisted me in contacting minority scholars to solicit their participation as authors. Similarly, I reached contributors through the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities of the American Sociological Association.

In closing, we note that common elements in the definition of an encyclopedia are “authoritative” and “scholarship.” We would like to close by again acknowledging the work of the individual scholars who have combined to produce this single reference source covering race and ethnicity in society.