Race and Ethnicity

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In 2006, Henry Louis Gates popularized the practice of DNA ancestry testing through his PBS series "African American Lives". In it, he uses DNA testing to uncover ancestral connections to ethnic groups in Africa, as well as Europe and elsewhere. And yet, scholarly consensus is that race and ethnicity are social constructed- fictional concepts that have real consequences, but are not biological in nature. What is it about race that makes us believe it is constitutive of some essential, biological self, and yet racial categories and meanings are constantly in flux? In this course, we will scrutinize the classification of groups and the naturalization of those categories. Focusing on the United States, throughout the course we will examine the invention, production and reproduction of race from a social constructionist perspective, concentrating on the ways in which the constitution of race is controversial and constantly being remade. We will also discuss how race structures inequality in everyday life. This course is organized so that it builds from racial classification theory, moves on to an examination of the construction of US racial categories and racial stratification, and closes with an applied focus on racial controversies that are directly tied to resource allocation and federal policy.