Race and Classification

Race and Classification PDF Author: Ilona Katzew
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804772584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
This innovative and provocative volume focuses on the historical development of racial thinking and imagining in Mexico and the southwestern United States over a period of almost five centuries, from the earliest decades of Spanish colonial rule and the birth of a multiracial colonial population, to the present. The distinguished contributors to the volume bring into dialogue sophisticated new scholarship from an impressive range of disciplines, including social and cultural history, art history, legal studies, and performance art. The essays provide an engaging and original framework for understanding the development of racial thinking and classification in the region that was once New Spain and also shed new light on the history of the shifting ties between Mexico and the United States and the transnational condition of Latinos in the US today.

Measuring Racial Discrimination

Measuring Racial Discrimination PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309091268
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Many racial and ethnic groups in the United States, including blacks, Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, and others, have historically faced severe discriminationâ€"pervasive and open denial of civil, social, political, educational, and economic opportunities. Today, large differences among racial and ethnic groups continue to exist in employment, income and wealth, housing, education, criminal justice, health, and other areas. While many factors may contribute to such differences, their size and extent suggest that various forms of discriminatory treatment persist in U.S. society and serve to undercut the achievement of equal opportunity. Measuring Racial Discrimination considers the definition of race and racial discrimination, reviews the existing techniques used to measure racial discrimination, and identifies new tools and areas for future research. The book conducts a thorough evaluation of current methodologies for a wide range of circumstances in which racial discrimination may occur, and makes recommendations on how to better assess the presence and effects of discrimination.

Race, Ethnicity, and Language Data

Race, Ethnicity, and Language Data PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309140129
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The goal of eliminating disparities in health care in the United States remains elusive. Even as quality improves on specific measures, disparities often persist. Addressing these disparities must begin with the fundamental step of bringing the nature of the disparities and the groups at risk for those disparities to light by collecting health care quality information stratified by race, ethnicity and language data. Then attention can be focused on where interventions might be best applied, and on planning and evaluating those efforts to inform the development of policy and the application of resources. A lack of standardization of categories for race, ethnicity, and language data has been suggested as one obstacle to achieving more widespread collection and utilization of these data. Race, Ethnicity, and Language Data identifies current models for collecting and coding race, ethnicity, and language data; reviews challenges involved in obtaining these data, and makes recommendations for a nationally standardized approach for use in health care quality improvement.

The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification

The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification PDF Author: Zarine L. Rocha
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030228746
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 826

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Book Description
This handbook provides a global study of the classification of mixed race and ethnicity at the state level, bringing together a diverse range of country case studies from around the world. The classification of race and ethnicity by the state is a common way to organize and make sense of populations in many countries, from the national census and birth and death records, to identity cards and household surveys. As populations have grown, diversified, and become increasingly transnational and mobile, single and mutually exclusive categories struggle to adequately capture the complexity of identities and heritages in multicultural societies. State motivations for classification vary widely, and have shifted over time, ranging from subjugation and exclusion to remediation and addressing inequalities. The chapters in this handbook illustrate how differing histories and contemporary realities have led states to count and classify mixedness in different ways, for different reasons. This collection will serve as a key reference point on the international classification of mixed race and ethnicity for students and scholars across sociology, ethnic and racial studies, and public policy, as well as policy makers and practitioners.

Sorting Things Out

Sorting Things Out PDF Author: Geoffrey C. Bowker
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262522950
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions. What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification—the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

How Real Is Race?

How Real Is Race? PDF Author: Carol C. Mukhopadhyay
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0759122741
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
How real is race? What is biological fact, what is fiction, and where does culture enter? What do we mean by a “colorblind” or “postracial” society, or when we say that race is a “social construction”? If race is an invention, can we eliminate it? This book, now in its second edition, employs an activity-oriented approach to address these questions and engage readers in unraveling—and rethinking—the contradictory messages we so often hear about race. The authors systematically cover the myth of race as biology and the reality of race as a cultural invention, drawing on biocultural and cross-cultural perspectives. They then extend the discussion to hot-button issues that arise in tandem with the concept of race, such as educational inequalities; slurs and racialized labels; and interracial relationships. In so doing, they shed light on the intricate, dynamic interplay among race, culture, and biology. For an online supplement to How Real Is Race? Second Edition, click here.

What Is "Your" Race?

What Is Author: Kenneth Prewitt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140084679X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
A historical overview of the census race question—and a bold proposal for eliminating it America is preoccupied with race statistics—perhaps more than any other nation. Do these statistics illuminate social reality and produce coherent social policy, or cloud that reality and confuse social policy? Does America still have a color line? Who is on which side? Does it have a different "race" line—the nativity line—separating the native born from the foreign born? You might expect to answer these and similar questions with the government's "statistical races." Not likely, observes Kenneth Prewitt, who shows why the way we count by race is flawed. Prewitt calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical "Asian race." One that once tried to divide the "white race" into "good whites" and "bad whites," and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains four hundred years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated twenty years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America—Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better? What Is Your Race? clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It's not an overnight task—particularly the explosive step of dropping today's race question from the census—but Prewitt argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.

Memory Practices in the Sciences

Memory Practices in the Sciences PDF Author: Geoffrey C. Bowker
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262524899
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
How the way we hold knowledge about the past—in books, in file folders, in databases—affects the kind of stories we tell about the past. The way we record knowledge, and the web of technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it, inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. The ways we hold knowledge about the past—in handwritten manuscripts, in printed books, in file folders, in databases—shape the kind of stories we tell about that past. In this lively and erudite look at the relation of our information infrastructures to our information, Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the past two hundred years, information technology has converged with the nature and production of scientific knowledge. His story weaves a path between the social and political work of creating an explicit, indexical memory for science—the making of infrastructures—and the variety of ways we continually reconfigure, lose, and regain the past. At a time when memory is so cheap and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds us of the centrality of what and how we choose to forget. In Memory Practices in the Sciences he looks at three "memory epochs" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and their particular reconstructions and reconfigurations of scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century's central science, geology, mapped both the social and the natural world into a single time package (despite apparent discontinuities), as, in a different way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. Both, Bowker argues, packaged time in ways indexed by their information technologies to permit traffic between the social and natural worlds. Today's sciences of biodiversity, meanwhile, "database the world" in a way that excludes certain spaces, entities, and times. We use the tools of the present to look at the past, says Bowker; we project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs.

The Existence Or Non-existence of Race?

The Existence Or Non-existence of Race? PDF Author: Conrad B. Quintyn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781934844991
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
In this book, Conrad Quintyn details the two intransigent sides of the race issue in biological anthropology and human biology in order to propose a common-sense compromise. This compromise is interesting because it does not derive from academic armchair philosophy. It takes into account practical issues in the social environment. This book is significant to the field, at this time, because it addresses the following issues, which form the basis for discussing the future of racial classification in America: 1) There is a high frequency of admixture in U.S. population caused by the steady flow of immigrants over the years, resulting in multiracial populations. Hundreds of thousands of these multiracial Americans are demanding visibility, acceptanceand in many cases an identity that is separate from black or white; 2) Officials in federal and state agencies as well as black and Hispanic political activists worry that allowing people to choose more than one race, or eliminating race altogether, would impact civil rights compliance and educational accountability for students by race and ethnicity; distribution of federal aid to minorities; and minority districting in congressional elections. It might also erode black or Hispanic solidarity and confuse law enforcement, since the FBI, state, and local police depend on race for much of their day-to-day work; and 3) Population admixture has increased the difficulty in determining race using the skull, which has implications for human identification in forensic science. Quintyn analyzes several critical arguments posed by both sides and propose a practical compromise which is integral to the future of racial classification in America. First, from the racialists perspective, they ask if there is no such thing as race, what would it look like if it existed? Furthermore, if the premise is accepted that there are no biological races, and there is much compelling evidence presented in the literature, then how is it that a person of European ancestry is easily distinguished from a person of African or Asian ancestry? In this book which brings us closer to answering these questions, Quintyn begins with a history of the race argument, with an emphasis on biological anthropology, to give the reader some critical background information. He gives in chronological order several biological definitions of race before discussing its meaning in contemporary society, and touches on race and medicine. In concluding his study, unlike current books on race, he argues that the academic consensus that there is no such thing as race is ultimately pointless.

The Races of Europe

The Races of Europe PDF Author: Richard McMahon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137318465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
This book explores a vital but neglected chapter in the histories of nationalism, racism and science. It is the first comprehensive study of the transnational scientific community that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to classify Europe's biological races. Anthropological race classifiers produced parallel geographies, histories and hierarchies of European peoples that were crucial to the creation of national identities and to the overtly political race discourses of eugenics and popular racist ideologues. They lent nationalism the invaluable prestige of natural science, and traced the histories, conflicts and relationships of ‘national races’ back into prehistory. Racial national character stereotypes meanwhile supported competing political ideologies. The book examines the interplay between class, gender and national identity narratives and the tensions and interactions between the scientific and political agendas of classifiers. Within the elaborate transnational networks of scientific communities, for example, they had to reconcile competing national narratives.