A race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. The term came into common usage during the 1500s, when it was used to refer to groups of various kinds, including those characterized by close kinship relations. By the 17th century, the term began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits, and then later to national affiliations. Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partly based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning. The concept of race is foundational to racism, the belief that humans can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another.
An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, society, culture, nation, religion, or social treatment within their residing area. The term ethnicity is often times used interchangeably with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism, and is separate from the related concept of races.
White is a racialized classification of people and a skin color specifier, generally used for people of European origin, although the definition can vary depending on context, nationality, and point of view.
Melungeons are an ethnicity from the Southeastern United States who descend from Europeans, Native American, and sub-Saharan Africans brought to America as indentured servants and later as slaves. Historically, the Melungeons were associated with settlements in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Tri-racial describes populations who claim to be of mixed European, African and Native American ancestry. Although there is no consensus on how many such groups exist, estimates range as high as 200,000.
The concept of race as a categorization of anatomically modern humans has an extensive history in Europe and the Americas. The contemporary word race itself is modern; historically it was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries. Race acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology through scientific racism starting in the 19th century. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."
Edward Franklin Frazier, was an American sociologist and author, publishing as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States (1939); it analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The book was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. It was among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black person.
Social interpretations of race regard the common categorizations of people into different races, often with biologist tagging of particular "racial" attributes beyond mere anatomy, as more socially and culturally determined than based upon biology. Some interpretations are often deconstructionist and poststructuralist in that they critically analyze the historical construction and development of racial categories.
Brown or brown people is a racial and ethnic term. Like black people and white people, it is a term for race based on human skin color.
The legal and social strictures that define white Americans, and distinguish them from persons who are not considered white by the government and society, have varied throughout the history of the United States.
Black Hispanic and Latino Americans, also called Afro-Hispanics, Afro-Latinos or Black Hispanics, or Black Latinos are classified by the United States Census Bureau, Office of Management and Budget, and other U.S. government agencies as Black people living in the United States with ancestry in Spain or Latin America and/or who speak Spanish, and/or Portuguese as their first language.
Race Life of the Aryan Peoples is a two-volume book written by Joseph Pomeroy Widney, at the time chancellor of the University of Southern California, published in New York by Funk & Wagnalls in 1907.
There is no single system of races or ethnicities that covers all modern Latin America, and usage of labels may vary substantially.
The sociology of race and ethnic relations is the study of social, political, and economic relations between races and ethnicities at all levels of society. This area encompasses the study of systemic racism, like residential segregation and other complex social processes between different racial and ethnic groups.
Racism has been present in Brazil since its colony times and is pointed as one of the major and most widespread types of discrimination, if not the most, in the country by several anthropologists, sociologists, jurists, historians and others. The myth of a Racial Democracy, a term originally coined by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in his 1933 work Casa-Grande & Senzala, is used by many people in the country to deny or downplay the existence and/or the broad extension of racism in Brazil.
The Japanese in Latin America is a 2004 book published by the University of Illinois Press about Japanese Latin Americans. The author is Daniel Masterson, while Sayaka Funada-Classen gave research assistance related to the Japanese language. The book discusses all of the major Japanese populations in Latin America and some other groups of Japanese diaspora who are not as well known. The Japanese populations of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay in South America, Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico are all discussed in this book.
New Worlds, New Lives: Globalization and People of Japanese Descent in the Americas and from Latin America in Japan (ISBN 978-0804744621) is a 2002 academic book edited by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, James A. Hirabayashi, and Akemi Kikumura-Yano and published by the Stanford University Press. The volume, edited by three Japanese American anthropologists, was produced by the Japanese American National Museum's International Nikkei Research Project. The same project produced the Encyclopedia of Japanese Descendants in the Americas: An Illustrated History of the Nikkei, and the two books are companion volumes.
Edward Telles is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine and Director of the Center for Research on International Migration. He has authored several books and many articles, winning numerous prizes including the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. He has been a leader in the study of race, color and ethnicity globally and throughout the Americas as well as on immigration and immigrant integration in the United States.
Racism in the Dominican Republic exists due to the after-effects of African slavery and the subjugation of black people throughout history. In the Dominican Republic, "blackness" is often associated with Haitian migrants and a lower class status. Those who possess more African-like phenotypic features are often victims of discrimination, and are seen as foreigners. An envoy of the UN in October 2007 found that there was racism against black people in general, and particularly against Haitians, which proliferate in every segment of Dominican society.
Dr. Faye Venetia Harrison is an American anthropologist. Her research interests include political economy, power, diaspora, human rights, and the intersections of race, gender, and class. She is currently Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She formerly served as Joint Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of Florida. Harrison received her BA in Anthropology in 1974 from Brown University, and her MA and PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1977 and 1982, respectively. She has conducted research in the US, UK, and Jamaica. Her scholarly interests have also taken her to Cuba, South Africa, and Japan.
Jorge Duany is a theorist on Caribbean transnational migration and nationalism. Since 2012, he has been director of the Cuban Research Institute and Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University, and has held various teaching positions across the United States and Puerto Rico. His research focuses on concepts of nationalism, ethnicity, race, transnationalism, and migration within the Spanish Caribbean and between the Spanish Caribbean and the United States, particularly regarding Cuba and Puerto Rico.
