ideology of race

(noun)

The belief that races are primordial, natural, enduring, and distinct, derived from folk beliefs and scientific explanations generated during the 17th-19th centuries.

Related Terms

Examples of ideology of race in the following topics:

  • Race

    • Historically, the concept of race has changed across cultures and eras.
    • While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that this idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way.
    • From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the merging of folk beliefs about and scientific explanations of group differences produced what social anthropologist Audrey Smedley has called an "ideology of race. " According to this ideology, races are primordial, natural, enduring and distinct.
    • Racial discrimination often coincides with racist mindsets, whereby the individuals and ideologies of one group come to perceive the members of an outgroups as both racially defined and morally inferior.
    • Interpret ''the ideology of race'' based on examples from the text

  • Ethnic Groups

    • An ethnic group is a group of people who share a common heritage, culture, and/or language; in the U.S., ethnicity often refers to race.
    • The group's ethos or ideology may also stress common ancestry, religion, or race.
    • While a sense of ethnic identity may coexist with racial identity (Chinese Americans among Asian or Irish American among European or White, for example), the long history of the United States as a settler, conqueror, and slave society, and the formal and informal inscription of racialized groupings into law and social stratification schemes has bestowed upon race a fundamental social identification role in the United States.
    • In the late 1980s, the term "African American" came into prominence as the most appropriate and politically correct race designation.
    • While it was intended as a shift away from the racial injustices of America's past often associated with the historical views of the "Black" race, it largely became a simple replacement for the terms Black, Colored, Negro and similar terms, referring to any individual of dark skin color regardless of geographical descent.

  • The "Nadir of Race Relations" and the Great Migration

    • The early 1900s marked the low point in 20th-century race relations between white Americans and African Americans.
    • The nadir of race relations in the United States was an ideological era of nationwide hostility directed from white Americans against African Americans.
    • Despite being made up almost entirely of Northerners, in the 1896 case of Plessy v.
    • The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 erupted into mob violence that lasted several days, leaving 15 white people and 23 black people dead.
    • A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.

  • Reform Darwinism

    • During the age of New Imperialism, the concepts of evolution justified the exploitation of "lesser breeds without the law" by "superior races. " To elitists, strong nations were composed of white people who were successful at expanding their empires, and as such, these strong nations would survive in the struggle for dominance.
    • Darwinist Collectivism or Reform Darwinism, rather than the individualist form of Darwinism, are more accurate terms for these ideologies.
    • Some pre-twentieth-century doctrines subsequently described as social Darwinism appeared to anticipate state- imposed eugenics and the race doctrines of Nazism.
    • Critics have frequently linked evolution, Charles Darwin, and social Darwinism with racialism, nationalism, imperialism, and eugenics, contending that social Darwinism became one of the pillars of fascism and Nazi ideology, and that the consequences of the application of policies of "survival of the fittest" by Nazi Germany eventually created a very strong backlash against the theory.
    • Josiah Nott was a polygenist who believed that the "races" of man had always been separate.

  • Cooperation, Competition and Conscription

    • The race is a mixture of cooperation and competition.
    • The structure and character of these elements determines the nature of the race.
    • A road race is fundamentally different from a mountain bike race.
    • The winner of a mountain bike race may not be the winner in a road race.
    • Joan Robinson argues that an economic system " requires a set of rules, an ideology to justify them, and a conscience in the individual which makes him (sic) strive to carry them out. " (Robinson, p 13) Provisioning is the way in which society develops the rules, ideology and conscience.

  • Ideology

    • An ideology is a set of ideas that constitute one's goals, expectations, and actions.
    • An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things, as in several philosophical tendencies, or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society.
    • In the Marxist account of ideology, it serves as an instrument of social reproduction.
    • Similarly, Louis Althusser proposed a materialistic conception of ideology using the concept of the ideological state apparatus.
    • Some parties follow a certain ideology very closely, while others may take broad inspiration from a group of related ideologies without specifically embracing any one of them.

  • Social Definition of Race

    • In the face of the increasing rejection of race as a valid classification scheme, many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word "ethnicity" to refer to self-identifying groups based on shared religion, nationality, or culture.
    • The social construction of race has developed within various legal, economic, and sociopolitical contexts, and may be the effect, rather than the cause of major race-related issues.
    • Sociologists Omi and Winant's theories of racial formation describe how "race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies. " The meanings and implications of race are produced and invested in by social institutions, as well as through cultural representations.
    • This map depicts the three great races, according to Meyers Konversationslexikon, of 1885-90.
    • The subtypes of the Mongoloid race are shown in yellow and orange tones, those of the Europid race in light and medium grayish green-cyan tones, and those of the Negroid race in brown tones.

  • Ideological Interest Groups

    • There are a wide range of ideological interest groups that represent many different constituencies.
    • Ideological interest groups often work on a variety of specific issues, with their work driven by deeply held beliefs.
    • Some examples of ideological interest groups include the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Taxpayers Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Christian Coalition.
    • Each organization has an ideological point of view that determines which specific issues or campaigns they get involved in and which side of an issue they take.
    • NOW is an example of an ideological interest group.

  • Postcolonial Discourse

    • As critical theory, post-colonialism presents, explains, and illustrates the ideology of neo-colonialism, and draws examples from numerous other fields — for instance history, political science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, religion, linguistics, and feminism.
    • The idea of colonialism was founded upon the belief that the white European race was naturally superior to other races around the world.
    • It was believed among white colonists that imperial stewardship of "less civilized" areas of the world would help lead to intellectual and moral reform of the peoples within these areas (largely people of color), and contribute to natural harmony among the human races of the world.
    • Post-colonialism critically destabilizes the dominant ideologies of The West, by challenging the inherent assumptions and the cultural legacies of colonialism and working with tangible social factors such as:
    • Colonialist literature, wherein the writers ideologically justified imperialism and colonialism with cultural representations (literary and pictorial) of the colonized country and its people, as perpetually inferior, which the imperial steward must organise into a colonial society to be guided towards European modernity.

  • The Changing Definitions of Race

    • The division of humanity into distinct races can be traced as far back as the Ancient Egyptian sacred text the Book of Gates, which identified four races according to the Egyptians.
    • Medieval models of race mixed Classical ideas with the notion that humanity as a whole was descended from Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three sons of Noah, producing distinct Semitic, (Asian), Hamitic (African), and Japhetic (European) peoples.
    • Races were distinguished by skin color, facial type, cranial profile and size, and texture and color of hair.
    • The advent of Darwinian models of evolution and Mendelian genetics, however, called into question the scientific validity of both characteristics and required a radical reconsideration of race.
    • The United States government has attempted its own definitions of race and ethnicity (see for example U.S.