Discussions of race and intelligence – specifically regarding claims of differences in intelligence along racial lines – have appeared in both popular science and academic research since the modern concept of race was first introduced. With the inception of IQ testing in the early 20th century, differences in average test performance between racial groups were observed, though these differences have fluctuated and in many cases steadily decreased over time. Complicating the issue, modern science has concluded that race is a socially constructed phenomenon rather than a biological reality, and there exist various conflicting definitions of intelligence. In particular, the validity of IQ testing as a metric for human intelligence is disputed. Today, the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between groups, and that observed differences are environmental in origin.
Racial discrimination is any discrimination against any individual on the basis of their race, ancestry, ethnicity, and/or skin color and hair texture. Individuals can discriminate by refusing to do business with, socialize with, or share resources with people of a certain group. Governments can discriminate explicitly in law, for example through policies of racial segregation, disparate enforcement of laws, or disproportionate allocation of resources. Some jurisdictions have anti-discrimination laws which prohibit the government or individuals from being discriminated based on race in various circumstances. Some institutions and laws use affirmative action to attempt to overcome or compensate for the effects of racial discrimination. In some cases, this is simply enhanced recruitment of members of underrepresented groups; in other cases, there are firm racial quotas. Opponents of strong remedies like quotas characterize them as reverse discrimination, where members of a dominant or majority group are discriminated against.
Discrimination based on skin tone, also known as colorism or shadeism, is a form of prejudice and discrimination in which people of certain ethnic groups, or people who are perceived as belonging to a darker-skinned race, are treated differently based on their darker skin tone.
The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. It was substantially caused by poor economic and social conditions due to prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld. In particular, continued lynchings motivated a portion of the migrants, as African Americans searched for social reprieve. The historic change brought by the migration was amplified because the migrants, for the most part, moved to the then-largest cities in the United States at a time when those cities had a central cultural, social, political, and economic influence over the United States; there, African-Americans established culturally influential communities of their own. According to Isabel Wilkerson, despite the loss of leaving their homes in the South, and the barriers faced by the migrants in their new homes, the migration was an act of individual and collective agency, which changed the course of American history, a "declaration of independence" written by their actions.
White guilt is a belief that white people bear a collective responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other racial groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples.
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species can be subdivided into biologically distinct taxa called "races", and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Before the mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding explanatory models, is referred to as racialism, race realism, or race science by those who support these ideas. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.
Feminist geography is a sub-discipline of human geography that applies the theories, methods, and critiques of feminism to the study of the human environment, society, and geographical space. Feminist geography emerged in the 1970s, when members of the women's movement called on academia to include women as both producers and subjects of academic work. Feminist geographers aim to incorporate positions of race, class, ability, and sexuality into the study of geography. The discipline was a target for the hoaxes of the grievance studies affair.
White privilege, or white skin privilege, is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people in some societies, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. With roots in European colonialism and imperialism, and the Atlantic slave trade, white privilege has developed in circumstances that have broadly sought to protect white racial privileges, various national citizenships, and other rights or special benefits.
Racism has been reflected in discriminatory laws, practices, and actions against "racial" or ethnic groups throughout the history of the United States. Since the early colonial era,White Americans have generally enjoyed legally or socially sanctioned privileges and rights which have been denied to members of various ethnic or minority groups at various times. European Americans have enjoyed advantages in matters of education, immigration, voting rights, citizenship, land acquisition, and criminal procedure.
Stereotypes of African Americans are misleading beliefs about the culture of people with partial or total ancestry from any black racial groups of Africa whose ancestors resided in the United States since before 1865, largely connected to the racism and the discrimination to which African Americans are subjected. These beliefs date back to the slavery of black people during the colonial era and they have evolved within American society.
Joe Richard Feagin is an American sociologist and social theorist who has conducted extensive research on racial and gender issues in the United States. He is currently the Ella C. McFadden Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. Feagin has previously taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, University of California, Riverside, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Florida.
In the United States, economic competition and racial prejudice have both contributed to long-lasting racial tensions between African Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans. There have also been inter-racial tensions between African Americans and Asian Americans.
African Americans, and African American males in particular, have an ethnic stereotype in which they are portrayed as dangerous criminals. This stereotype is associated with the fact that African Americans are proportionally over-represented in the numbers of those that are arrested and convicted for committing crimes. It has appeared frequently in American popular culture, reinforcing the negative consequences of systemic racism.
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.
Dorceta E. Taylor is an American environmental sociologist known for her work on both environmental justice and racism in the environmental movement. She is the senior associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Yale School of the Environment, as well as a professor of environmental justice. Prior to this, she was the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Michigan's School of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), where she also served as the James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor of Environmental Justice. Taylor's research has ranged over environmental history, environmental justice, environmental policy, leisure and recreation, gender and development, urban affairs, race relations, collective action and social movements, green jobs, diversity in the environmental field, food insecurity, and urban agriculture.
Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly focusing on the intersection of race, justice and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including the books People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022).
Dudley Edmondson is an American writer and photographer specializing primarily in outdoors and nature writing and photography. He currently lives in Duluth, Minnesota. His books include What's That Flower?, and The Black & Brown Faces in America's Wild Places, the latter focusing on African Americans in the outdoors, a subject on which he has spoken widely across the United States and for which a fellowship administered by the Greater Seattle YMCA was named for him.
Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt is an American social psychologist who is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. Eberhardt has been responsible for major contributions on investigating the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime through methods such as field studies and laboratory studies. She has also contributed to research on unconscious bias, including demonstrating how racial imagery and judgment affect culture and society within the domain of social justice. The results from her work have contributed to training law enforcement officers and state agencies to better their judgments through implicit bias training. She has also provided directions for future research in this domain and brought attention to mistreatment in communities due to biases.
Racial capitalism is a concept reframing the history of capitalism as grounded in the extraction of social and economic value from people of marginalized racial identities, typically from Black people. It was described by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983, which, in contrast to both his predecessors and successors, theorized that all capitalism is inherently racial capitalism, and racialism is present in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification. Jodi Melamed has summarized the concept, explaining that capitalism "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups", and therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value."
Carolyn Finney, is a storyteller, author, artist, educator, and currently a scholar-in-residence in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College. Finney's work reveals how nature and the environment are racialized in America. She began her professional journey as an actor; for eleven years she worked in television while honing her craft. After leaving acting, Finney spent five years backpacking through Africa, Asia and Europe, and living in Nepal. Inspired by this experience, Finney furthered her education and completed her Bachelors of Arts at Fairhaven College at Western Washington University in gender and international development. She completed her Masters of Social Science at Utah State University focusing on international rural community development. She went on to fulfill her Ph.D. in Geography at Clark University. Finney's full-time work is engaging with a wide variety of organizations, institutions and community groups in her capacity as a public speaker, consultant, advisor and writer.
