 One of the most complex concepts of

sociology.

 ‘Scientific’ theories of race arose in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Justifying social orders of imperial powers.
 Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82) was a Frech
diplomat and man of letters.

 Distinction between three races: white, black,

yellow.

 Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races:

Aryan master race.
 Post Second World War, ‘race science’ has been
thoroughly discredited.

 ‘ideological construct’

 What is race, then, if it does not refer to biological

categories?
 There are physical differences between
human beings but the question is why some
differences become matters for social
discrimination.

 Racial differences should be understood as

physical variations singled out by the
members of the community/society as
socially significant.
 Varies from state to state in America.

 From one great-grandparent to any Black

ancestry.

 Brazil—upper class light-skinned person

would be considered as white.
 Ethnicity refers to an idea that is purely social
in meaning—shared linguistic, national,
religious identity.

 Ethnic group is a social category of people

who share a common culture and have a
consciousness of their common cultural
bond.

 Ascribed status.
 Ethnic groups emerge because of their
unique historical and social experiences.
 Jews—ethnic group or race?

 Official recognition by the government.

 Racial formation: law and schools.

 Out-group homogeneity effect.

 Stereo-types: oversimplified set of beliefs
about members of a social group.

 displacement: hostility directed against

objects that are not the real origin of those
feelings.

 Scapegoating: two deprived ethnic groups.

Directed against distinct and relatively
powerless groups.
 Ethnocentricism—is a belief that one’s own
group is superior to all other groupd. It refers
to a suspicion of outsiders combined with a
tendency to evaluate the culture of others in
terms of one’s own culture.
 Civil Rights Movements starting from mid
1950s.

 Political Mobilization
 Legal reform
 Social policy
 The civil rights movement eliminated the legal
basis of discrimination.
 Brown v. Board of Education: “separate but
equal” 1954.
 Emmett Till
 Rosa Parks—Montgomery bus boycott
 Martin Luther King Jr.
 Radical Movements: Malcom X and the Black
Power movement.
 Stratification was gender-blind.

 Property and women.

 Woman’s class position.

 Gender socialization—begins with parents.

 Margaret Mead’s work on the variable nature

of gender differentiation.

 Coming of Age in Samoa.

 Women in the lowest paying occupations.

 Paid less for the same amount of work.

 Individual model

 Social model—Paul Hunt: Stigma: the

Experience of Disability

 The problem of disability lies not only in the

impairment of function and its effects on us
individually, but also, more importantly, in
the area of our relationship with ‘normal’
people.
IMPAIRMENT
 Lacking part or all of a
limb, or having a defective
limb, organ or mechanism
of the body.
DISABILITY
 The disadvantage or
restriction of activity
caused by a contemporary
social organization which
takes no or little account of
people who have physical
impairments and thus
excludes them from
participation in the
mainstream of social
activities.
 Individual treatment v. social action.

 Personal Problem v. Social Problem.

 Care v. Rights

 Individual adjustment v. Social Change

 Acute chronic pain and intellectually impaired
people.

 The difficulties in counting the number of

people with disabilities.
 Discrimination against people on the basis of
their age.