On the Experiences and Institutions Unit, Spring 2005

As you know, INDS/HIST 220 Introduction to Ethnicity/Race comprises an interdisciplinary approach to race and ethnicity in the United States and other contemporary multiethnic/multiracial societies. This semester, the course is divided into three units--theories and histories, experiences and institutions, and fictions and futures--so that we may consider the stakes of conceiving of critical race/ethnicity studies as a comparative, transnational, and postcolonial field of inquiry. This page focuses on the second unit, in which we consider both the processes and the experiences of racialization in order to flesh out the duality of race and ethnicity as social constructions and social facts. In a mere four weeks, we're going to immerse ourselves in a set of issues that we could easily devote an entire course to examining:

• How can we use attention to experiences--and hence assumptions, attitudes, feelings, desires, perceptions, memories, identities, identifications, interactions, and so on--to flesh out and complicate the theories and histories of race and ethnicity we've been examining in the first unit of the course? What kinds of authority should personal experience have? When? Why? How should we compare and interpret experiences of/with race and ethnicity?
• How can we use attention to institutions to flesh out and complicate the notion of social construction and to contextualize individual experiences? Which institutions play the greatest part in constructing race and ethnicity? How are we to conceptualize the relations between and effects of multiple and cross-cutting institutional constructions?
• If race and ethnicity are a mix of political, cultural, and economic identities, what does that mean for individuals who are either identified with or choose to identify with particular identities, and for those who aren't or don't? How do individuals negotiate ascribed and chosen identities? What roles do Lopez's categories of chance, context, and choice play in individual experiences of/with race and ethnicity? How are 'racialized' or 'ethnicized' experiences similar to and different from 'gendered,' 'sexualized,' 'classed,' and other kinds of experiences? How should we conceive of the relationship between structure and culture, between structure and experience? If race and ethnicity are simultaneously concepts, categories, identities, and social constructions, what are we to make of the associated communities and cultures?
• What is the relationship between the kinds of biographical and autobiographical writings we'll be analyzing in this unit alongside the theoretical, historical, anthropological, sociological, and political writings we were focusing on in the last unit, and that we'll continue to deal with in this unit?
• How can we use the experiences and institutions considered in this unit to help us to recognize and reexamine our own assumptions and habits of thinking with respect to race and ethnicity? To our own identities and self-identifications? To our own families and communities? To our views of ourselves and others?

So the purpose of the second unit is to help us to delve deeper into what it means to conceive of races and ethnicities both as social constructions and as social facts. The previous and following units should 'read' differently as a result of the work we do in this second unit--and your Identification Project should, as well, by the time you turn in the revision.

Due to the limitations of our anthology, we'll be focusing only on three institutions in particular this semester--the census, the legal system, and the sciences--out of a range that includes at the very least educational systems, various media and new media outlets, religious organizations, the criminal justice system, museums, activist organizations and movements of all kinds, literature, visual arts, and many, many more. You'll note that our anthology focuses our attention largely on the state's role in constructing race and ethnicity (through instruments like census forms, legislative action, judicial decisions, and executive actions), which is useful in underscoring the notion that race and ethnicity are as much political as cultural categories. Yet I wonder if the roles of what's variously known as the private sector, the public sphere, civil society--basically, institutions whose ties to state systems are more attenuated or mediated--get downplayed so much that they become distorted. Note that the final project gives you an opportunity to focus your research on a particular institution not covered in our anthology, should you so desire.

Having acknowledged the limitations of our anthology, I do want to emphasize that the institutions the editors chose to focus on are very important and worth pursuing further. Many of the links listed under "Race/Ethnicity Studies" on the links page deal with race, ethnicity, and the law. However, if you're interested in pursuing some of the census issues further, check out the following sites:

• Questionnaires, US Census Bureau (on the main page, try using their search function and type in 'race,' 'ethnicity,' or other terms you're interested in)
• The 2000 Census: Counting Under Adversity, The National Academies Press
• " The Census and American Identity," Evelynn Hammonds, Annenberg/CFB: Teacher Professional Development
• "'Race' and 'Ethnicity': History and the 2000 Census," Theodore Allen Cultural Logic 3.1 (Fall 1999)
• Miriam L. King, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota

And if you're interested in pursuing some of the science issues further, check out the following sites:

• "Is Race Real?," Race and Genomics, SSRC
• "Why Do We Still Believe in Race?," Kenan Malik
• RaceSci: History of Race in Science, Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto
• Human Genome Project, Bioethics Web
• Use and Measurement of Race in Health and Social Sciences Research, Rhea Farberman, American Psychological Association
• Race, Ethnicity, Biotechnology and Science Panel, Peter Wade, Association of Social Anthropologists
• Historians Participate in Conference on Race and Human Variations, Noralee Frankel, American Historical Association
• Teaching the Ethical , Legal, and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project , Dartmouth College ELSI Institute
• How Far Will the DNA Revolution Go?, The Case for Innocence, PBS

Going beyond the web, the following reserve readings may be the best starting place to really begin researching any of the above issues.

Institutions

• Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race
• Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954
• Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars
• Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement
• F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition
• Richard Dyer, White
• Charles Gallagher, ed., Rethinking the Color Line: Readings in Race and Ethnicity (2nd ed.)
• Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe
• Paul Gilroy, Against Race
• Guillermo Gomez-Pena, The New World Border
• Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism
• Sandra Harding, ed., The "Racial" Economy of Science
• Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert Rodman, eds., Race in Cyberspace
• Rachel Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, eds., Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace
• George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
• Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law
• Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain
• Martin Marger, ed., Race and Ethnic Relations: American and Global Perspectives (6th ed.)
• Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed.)
• Audrey Smedley, Race in North America
• Werner Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity
• Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America
• Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science
• Sasha Torres, ed., Living Color: Race and Television in the United States

Experiences

• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks
• Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White
• Kenneth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America
• Paula Rothenberg, ed., Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (4th ed.)
• Joseph Skerrett, Jr., ed., Literature, Race and Ethnicity: Contesting American Identities
• Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi, eds., Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity

Of course, even these works should be considered as different holes through a fence that provide access to a broad field, or as a variety of ports that provide entry to a vast ocean. Should you wish to dig or dive deeper into these subjects, see me in my office and I can recommend other works to explore. I encourage you to use your reflective essays to prepare yourself for both the Identification Project revision and the Final Project proposal, both of which will allow you to examine the institutions and experiences that make and remake race and ethnicity.

INDS/HIST 220: Introduction to Ethnicity/Race, Spring 2005
Created: 2/22/05 2:52 pm
Last modified: 5/9/05 1:02 pm