Constructing Race

What do we mean in the U.S. today when we use the terms "race" and "ethnicity"? What do we mean, and what do we understand, when we use the five standard race-ethnic categories: White, Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic? Most federal and state data collection agencies use these terms without explicit attention, and thereby create categories of American ethnicity for political purposes. Davora Yanow argues that "race" and "ethnicity" are socially constructed concepts, not objective, scientifically-grounded variables, and do not accurately represent the real world. She joins the growing critique of the unreflective use of "race" and "ethnicity" in American policymaking through an exploration of how these terms are used in everyday practices. Her book is filled with current examples and analyses from a wealth of social institutions: health care, education, criminal justice, and government at all levels. The questions she raises for society and public policy are endless. Yanow maintains that these issues must be addressed explicitly, publicly, and nationally if we are to make our policy and administrative institutions operate more effectively.

As apartheid crumbled in South Africa, racial identity was thrown into question. Based on a year-long ethnographic study of a multiracial high school in Durban, this book explores how youth make meaning of the still powerful, yet changing, idea of race. In a world saturated with media images and global commodities, fashion and music become charged, polarized racial identifiers. As youth engage with this world, race simultaneously persists and falters, providing us with a glimpse into the future of race both within South Africa and throughout urban youth cultures worldwide.

This book explores how physical anthropologists struggled to understand variation in bodies and cultures in the twentieth century, how they represented race to professional and lay publics, and how their efforts contributed to an American formulation of race that has remained rooted in both bodies and cultures, as well as heredity and society.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

"In this book it is my intent to write about the Mexican American people's Indian, White, and Black racial history. In doing so, I offer an interpretive historical analysis of the experiences of the Mexican Americans' ancestors in Mexico and the United States. This analysis begins with the Mexican Americans' prehistoric foundations and continues into the late twentieth century. My focus, however, is on exploring the legacy of racial discrimination that was established in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest and was later intensified by the United States government when in 1848, it conquered northern Mexico (presently the U.S. Southwest) and annexed it to the United States (Menchaca 1999:3). The central period of study ranges from 1570 to 1898"--Page 1.

The current political standoffs of the 'War on Terror' illustrate that the interaction within and between the so-called Western and Middle Eastern civilizations is constantly in flux. A recurring theme however is how Islam and Muslims signify the 'Enemy' in the Western socio-cultural imagination and have become the 'Other' against which the West identifies itself. In a unique and insightful blend of critical race, feminist and post-colonial theory, Sunera Thobani examines how Islam is foundational to the formation of Western identity at critical points in its history, including the Crusades, the Reconquista and the colonial period. More specifically, she explores how masculinity and femininity are formed at such pivotal junctures and what role feminism has played in the wars against 'radical' Islam. Exposing these symbiotic relationships, Thobani explores how the return of 'religion' is reworking the racial, gender and sexual politics by which Western society defines itself, and more specifically, defines itself against Islam. Contesting Islam, Constructing Race and Sexuality unpacks conventional as well as unconventional orthodoxies to open up new spaces in how we think about sexual and racial identity in the West and the crucial role that Islam has had and continues to have in its development.

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery of race construction in Scandinavia, Austro Hungary, Germany, and Russia. It covers a period when historic disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and theorists of race were debating competing conceptions of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. Beginning in 1850 and extending into the early 21st century, this book explores how paintings, photographs, prints, and other artistic media engaged with these discourses and shaped visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures in countries associated with theorizations of white identity. The chapters contribute to postcolonial research by documenting the colonial-style treatment of minority groups, by exploring the anomalies and complexities that emerge when binary systems are seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts, and by representing the voices of those who produced images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued ethnographic and anthropological information. In doing so, Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe uncovers instances of unexpected connections, establishes the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and challenges the certainties of racial categorization.

For modern urban South African youth, the concept of "race" persists and falters.