6.3a Race and Racism

Race is a social or political category based on assumed physical, biological, and ancestral characteristics. In the United States, physical characteristics such as hair texture, eye shape, and skin color are used to decide a person’s racial category. Historically, the federal and state governments used the assigned racial category of the child’s parents (or other ancestors) to decide the child’s racial category. If the state considered one parent or grandparent as Black, so was the child, regardless of their physical characteristics or personal identity. This practice follows what was known as the one-drop rule. The government’s power to classify people by race using the one-drop rule enabled it to enforce laws about everything from enslavement to segregation.

Today, race is understood to be self-determined and more flexible. Sociologists and other social and biological scientists contend that race is socially constructed rather than biologically determined (Roth et al., 2023; Yudell et al., 2016). Further, understanding how groups socially construct race sheds light on how racial categories change.

How Racial Categories Have Changed

For instance, the U.S. Census has used a range of racial categories over the years (Figure 6.4). From 1790 to 1850, there were five categories based on skin color and enslavement: Free White males, Free White females, All other persons, Free colored males and females, and Slaves. Recall that the U.S. Constitution counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for government representation. Therefore, for White people to keep government power, the Census had to distinguish free from enslaved. In contrast, the 2020 U.S. Census included 20 racial categories, allowed people to select multiple categories, and asked them to write in their origins in addition to choosing a category.

Sociologists recognize that an individual’s racial category results from their self-identification and others’ perceptions. Filipino Americans have a unique racial experience in the United States due to the Philippines’ location in Asia and its experience with Spanish and U.S. colonization. During Spanish colonization, the Spanish gave Filipinos Spanish surnames, the Spanish language influenced the Tagalog language, and Catholicism dominated (Ocampo, 2014).

Ocampo (2014) interviewed 50 second-generation (or the children of immigrants) Filipino Americans in Los Angeles and found that they reported blurring the boundaries between Asian and Latino identities. For instance, in classrooms, teachers often perceived Filipino students as Latino because of their surnames, language, and religion, which they shared with their Latino classmates. As a result, teachers treated them more negatively than if they had perceived them as Asian Americans, who are more often treated positively by teachers (see Okura, 2022). Therefore, Filipino Americans experience racism differently than other Asian American and Latino groups.

Racism

Racism is the social practice of applying differential and usually substandard treatment to some groups in the belief that they are inferior due to their racial category (see Fields & Fields 2012/2014). Racism includes actions such as discrimination and attitudes such as prejudice. There are several types of racism. Racism ranges from overt acts like the use of racial slurs to less visible but still harmful wrongs such as racism by social institutions (or institutional racism), seen in racial profiling in policing, for example (see Chapter 9).