Race

Race, Class, and Ethnicity

Most biologists and anthropologists now agree that there are no biological characteristics or genetic patterns capable of classifying a person as belonging to a certain race. Yet while race lacks scientific grounding, belief in its reality determines many aspects of social conduct. Race is therefore best understood as a social and cultural construction, the result of a historically conditioned process of racialization by which individuals automatically attempt to differentiate people according to what a culture constitutes as different races. It also involves the association of certain cultural and social traits with certain races. Frequently, racialization accompanies a sense of culturally belonging to a certain race; that is, participation in a group history, a set of cultural practices, and shared experiences.

The process of racialization often interacts with the process—equally social, cultural, and historical in nature—of constructing gendered identities. Crucial to the establishment of both racial and gendered identities are encounters with those who are perceived as “other”—those individuals or groups who come to embody characteristics seen as alien to one's own racialized and gendered identity. When this process exists alongside imbalances of power between such groups, as it usually does, the dominant group (white men, through much of American history) often ascribes the less powerful group a set of undesirable characteristics that define it as inferior and unsuitable for positions of public authority, responsibility, or power. For example, women and racial minorities have been labeled childish, irresponsible, excitable, irrational, “natural,” and corporeal since the foundation of the colonial territories, and they have, thereby, been restricted in their opportunities and access to jobs and services. By contrast, whiteness and maleness have often been associated with adulthood, responsibility, calmness, rationality, culture, and intelligence, all characteristics that have generally been highly valued. It is important to recognize, therefore, that just as masculinity cannot be understood without reference to femininity, racial identities defined as “nonwhite” cannot be understood without reference to whiteness.

Throughout U.S. history, therefore, white masculinity has often been defined in opposition to characteristics identified with racial minorities, especially African Americans. Indeed, it has been argued that the black/white binary has been the crucial organizing structure for racialization in the United States, and that the racialization of Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, and masculinities of other racial groups, although exhibiting their own specificities, cannot be understood without reference to this binary.

Racialized male identities have also been intertwined with the formation of class identities. White middle-class men have often applied to working-class men the same negative descriptors that they applied to women and nonwhite men, and they have excluded nonwhite men from the economic mechanisms of achieving middle-class status. Furthermore, the early-twentieth-century African-American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (as well as some recent historians) has argued that white racial identity was a fundamental element of working-class manhood and provided an additional “wage” for male workers consisting of the benefits (e.g., services, rights, access to positions of authority, and general psychological well-being) accrued from simply being white. The resulting affirmation of racial difference often prevented the white working class from affiliating with the nonwhite working classes.

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