Race in Contemporary Life

Abstract

As a social construction, race is part of family genealogy and it creates intergenerational groups and identities for individuals. Racial differences matter in concrete areas of life, such as marriage rates, social class, employment, wealth, and health. Marriage rates vary by race and ethnicity: African Americans marry less than whites, due to external economic constraint; Mexican immigrant women marry younger but for economic rather than cultural reasons. Social class now includes cultural capital in tastes and consumption, which may make it difficult for minorities to fully thrive within white-dominated institutions. Race affects health in environmental ways based on nonhereditary factors. Race-targeted medicine therefore needs to be distinguished from race-based medicine.

Discussion Questions

• 1. Do the low marriage rates for African American women indicate a “preference” for remaining unmarried? Explain the external factors.

• 2. If immigrant Mexican American women marry at younger ages, why is “ethnic culture” not a good explanation?

• 3. What does increasing interracial marriage indicate about white attitudes toward nonwhites, in your opinion? Explain how this is different from past ideas about miscegenation during segregation.

• 4. Why do older, Marxist notions of social class no longer apply?

• 5. If our ideas of social class are expanded to include cultural capital, how does that effect prospects for upward socioeconomic mobility among minorities?

• 6. Explain the difference between race-based and race-targeted medicine in reference to how BiDil was developed.

• 7. It what sense is sickle cell anemia related to racial identity and in what ways is it independent of even social ideas of race?

• 8. What does the difference in health among Pima Indians in Arizona and Mexico indicate about lifestyles and disease, more broadly?

• 9. How are education, wealth/income, and health related? Apart from the statistics can you imagine a concrete example, in narrative form?

• 10. If race in life plays out in comparatively disadvantaged ways for U.S. nonwhites, what can individuals do about this? Give specific examples.

Glossary

authority

—the recognition of power.

cultural capital

—class status of individuals based on their preferences and practices in consumer society.

health-wealth gradient

—gradual increase in health as wealth and income increase.

matriarchy

—family and social structure in which women have the most power and resources, as well as resources and wealth.

patriarchy

—family and social structure in which men have the most power and resources, as well as resources and wealth.

power

—the ability to do something, influence others, or make things happen.

social status

—a person’s position or rank in any given pecking order or hierarchy that has to do with how others view them.

race-based medicine

—medicine developed and applied because of hereditary or physiological differences among racial groups.

race-targeted medicine

—medicine developed for and applied to a specific racial group, based on disease rates within that group.

racial climate

—the degree and extent of hearts-and-minds racism on individual-to-individual levels, in specific contexts.

stratification

—sociological analysis of “how where we start in life affects where we end up.”