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The sociology of race and of ethnic relations is the area of the discipline that studies the social, political, and economic relations between races and ethnicities at all levels of society. This area encompasses the study of racism, residential segregation, and other complex social processes between different racial and ethnic groups. The sociological analysis of race and ethnicity frequently interacts with other areas of sociology such as stratification and social psychology, as well as with postcolonial theory.

At the level of political policy, ethnic relations is discussed in terms of either assimilationism or multiculturalism. Anti-racism forms another style of policy, particularly popular in the 1960s and 70s. At the level of academic inquiry, ethnic relations is discussed either by the experiences of individual racial-ethnic groups or else by overarching theoretical issues.

Classical Theorists[link]

Marx[link]

Marx views society as two separate classes, the capitalist class and the working class. He hoped for the working class to rise up against the capitalist class in an attempt to stop the exploitation of the working class. He blamed part of their failure to organize on the capitalist class, as they separated black and white laborers. This separation, specifically between Blacks and Whites in America, contributed to racism. Marx attributes capitalism's contribution to racism through segmented labor markets and a racial inequality of earnings. ^[1]

Weber[link]

Weber laid the foundations for a micro-sociology of ethnic relations beginning in 1906. Weber argued that biological traits could not be the basis for group foundation unless they were conceived as shared characteristics. It was this shared perception and common customs that create and distinguish one ethnicity from another. This differs from the views of many of his contemporaries who believed that an ethnic group was formed from biological similarities alone apart from social perception of membership in a group.^[2]

W.E.B. DuBois[link]

W.E.B. DuBois is well known as one of the most influential black scholars and activists of the 19th century. DuBois educated himself on his people, and sought academia as a way to enlighten others on the social injustices against his people. DuBois research "revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence." ^[3] Dubois believed that Black Americans should embrace higher education and use their new access to schooling to achieve a higher position within society. He referred to this idea as the Talented Tenth. With gaining popularity, he also preached the belief that for blacks to be free in some places, they must be free everywhere. After traveling to Africa and Russia, he recanted his original philosophy of integration and acknowledged it as a long term vision.^[4]

Booker T. Washington[link]

Booker T. Washington was considered one of the most influential black educators of the 19th and 20th centuries. Washington offered an industrial education for Blacks through the Tuskegee Institute. He hoped to provide them with an education to escape sharecropping and debt, instead engaging in self employment, land ownership, and small business. His theory regarding race in America advocated to continue black disfranchisement and segregation, in return for the whites support in economic and educational attainment. This theory highlighted the accommodationist philosophy he became well known for. ^[5]

Social psychology[link]

A racist political campaign poster from the 1866 Pennsylvania gubernatorial election

One of the most important social psychological findings concerning race relations is that members of stereotyped groups internalize those stereotypes and thus suffer a wide range of harmful consequences. For example, in a phenomenon called stereotype threat, members of racial and ethnic groups that are stereotyped as scoring poorly on tests will perform poorer on those tests if they are reminded of this stereotype. The effect is so strong that even simply asking the test-taker to state her or his race before taking the test (such is by bubbling in "African American" on a multiple choice question) will significantly alter test performance. A specifically sociological contribution to this line of research has found that such negative stereotypes can be created on the spot: an experiment by Michael Lovaglia et al.(1998) demonstrated that left-handed people can be made to suffer stereotype threat if they are led to believe that they are a disadvantaged group for a particular kind of test.^[6]

Audit studies[link]

Another important line of research on race takes the form of audit studies. The audit study approach creates an artificial pool of people among whom there are no average differences by race. For instance, groups of white and black auditors are matched on every category other than their race, and thoroughly trained to act in identical ways. Given nearly identical resumes, they are sent to interview for the same jobs. Simple comparisons of means can yield strong evidence regarding discrimination. The best known audit study in sociology is The Mark of a Criminal Record by Devah Pager. This study compares job prospects of black and white men who were recently released from jail. Its key finding is that blacks are significantly discriminated against when applying for service jobs. Moreover, whites with a criminal record have about the same prospect of getting an interview as blacks without one.^[7]

Discipline Development By Country[link]

United States[link]

In the United States, the study of racial and ethnic relations has been widely influenced by the factors associated with each major wave of immigration as the incoming group struggles with keeping its own cultural and ethnic identity while also assimilating into the broader mainstream American culture and economy. One of the first and most prevalent topics within American study is that of the relations between white Americans and African Americans due to the heavy collective memory and culture borne out of and lingering from centuries of forced slavery in plantations. Throughout the rest of American history, each new wave of immigration to the United States has brought another set of issues as the tension between maintaining diversity and assimilating takes on new shapes. Racism and conflict often rears up during these times^[8]

United Kingdom[link]

In the United Kingdom, foreign nationals were actively encouraged and sponsored to migrate in the 1950s after the dissolution of the Empire and the social devastation of the Second World War. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act changed the law so that only certain British Commonwealth members were able to migrate. This law was tightened again with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 and Immigration Act 1971. The Race Relations Act 1968 extended certain policies with respect to employment, housing, commercial and other services. This was extended again with the Race Relations Act 1976.

As with the UK establishments of media and cultural studies, 'ethnic relations' is often taught as a loosely-distinct discipline either within sociology departments or other schools of humanities.

Major British theorists include Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Richard Jenkins, John Rex, Michael Banton and Tariq Modood.

See also[link]

• Racism
• Anti-racism
• Multiculturalism
• Assimilationism
• Social cohesion
• Sociology of immigration
• Conflict theory
• Black feminism
• The Race of the Future

References[link]

1. ^ Bohmer, Peter. 1998. | Marxist Theory of Racism and Racial Inequality. Readings in Black Political Economy
2. ^ Banton, Michael. 2008. The Sociology of Ethnic Relations. Ethnic and Racial Studies.
3. ^ Dubois, W.E.B. 1940. Dusk of dawn; an essay toward an autobiography of a race concept. Schocken Books.
4. ^ Hynes, Gerald. ????. | A Biographical Sketch of W.E.B. DuBois. W.E.B. Dubois Learning Center.
5. ^ Harlen, Louis. 1972. | Booker T. Washington. University of North Carolina Press.
6. ^ Lovaglia, Michael, JW Lucas, SR Thye. 1998. Status Processes and Mental Ability Test Scores. American Journal of Sociology.
7. ^ Pager, Devah. 2003. "The Mark of a Criminal Record." American Journal of Sociology
8. ^ Park, Robert Ezra. 1950. | The Early Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. The Free Press.

Further Reading:

• Banton, M. 1987. Racial Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ellis, J. 2011. Race Relations | Culture and Ethnicity. USARiseUp
• Feagin, J. 2003. | Racial and Ethnic Relations. Prentice Hall (8th edition)
• Gibson, Robert. 1978. | Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois: The Problem of Negro Leadership. Yale
• Jenkins, R. 2008. Rethinking Ethnicity. London: Sage (2nd edition).
• Malesevic, S. 2004. The Sociology of Ethnicity. London: Sage.
• Vera, H; Feagin, J. 2007. | Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations. Springer
• Wilson, H. 2006. | The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations. Bryant

Dalton Clark Conley (born 1969) is an American sociologist. He is University Professor (with appointments in Sociology, Medicine and Public Policy) and formerly served as the Dean for the Social Sciences and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University.^[1] He also holds appointments as an Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and as Dean of Arts and Sciences (pro bono) for the University of the People.^[2] In 2005, Conley became the first sociologist to win the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Humanities, and from Columbia University with and an M.P.A. in Public Policy, and a Ph.D. in Sociology. He also holds an M.S. and M.Phil. in Biology from NYU. ^[3]

Career[link]

Conley is best known for his contributions to understanding how socioeconomic status is transmitted across generations.

His first book, Being Black, Living in the Red (1999), showed the important role of family wealth in perpetuating class advantages and racial inequalities in the post-Civil Rights era.

He has also studied the role of health in the status attainment process. A seminal article entitled, "Is Biology Destiny: Birth Weight and Life Chances" (with Neil G. Bennett, American Sociological Review 1999) and his second book, which emerged from this and related pieces, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (with Kate Strully and Neil G. Bennett, 2003) showed the importance of birth weight and prenatal health to later socioeconomic outcomes, reversing the typical way sociologists viewed the health-economics relationship and anticipated a robust research literature on early life health conditions as they affect later socioeconomic processes and outcomes.

The Pecking Order, which followed in 2004, showed the importance of within-family, ascriptive factors in determining sibling differences in socioeconomic success, thereby challenging the usual association of intra-household differences with the greater salience of achievement and/or meritocracy.

In addition to these works, Conley is the author of the acclaimed sociological memoir Honky (2001), which examines Conley's own childhood growing up white in the inner city projects of New York City. Honky explores the intersection of race and class in America, outlining the subtle but profoundly important privileges even an impoverished white boy enjoys over his darker-skinned peers.

Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms and Economic Anxiety (2009) is Conley's latest book, chronicling how American society has moved from embodying Max Weber's Protestant ethic in the 19th and early 20th Centuries to William H. Whyte's "social ethic" during the mid-20th Century to today's "elsewhere ethic."

He argues that thanks to the combination of technological changes, rising economic inequality, market logics and the wholesale entry of mothers into the labor force, we have transformed from a 9-to-5 culture that had clear delineations between work and leisure to the modern 24-hour workday culture that combines home and office as well as a number of other once-bounded and sacred spheres of social life. Conley coins the terms weisure to describe activities that combine work and leisure such as social networking with colleagues who are also friends or contributing to open source products or gambling or other activities that are both instrumental and pleasurable. Likewise, he suggests the portmanteau convestment to describe purchases, or consumption, often viewed and written off as investments or serve both purposes.

Finally, he argues that we have gone from a culture of American individualism—in which the imperative was to find our true, backstage self through disconnected time alone and then let that authentic self guide our life choices as a lodestar of sorts—to American "intravidualism", where the moral imperative is to manage multiple external and internal data streams (and selves) that compete for attention, with little concern for the notion of an authentic core or true, single self as our guide. In this vein, the frontstage / backstage dichotomy that formed the basis of intimacy in an earlier epoch has been erased by the delocalized social economy and network-society where a new form of "privacy" is obtained via a metaphorical "fun house of mirrors" where once-personal information is now part of a hyperlinked, recursive data overload—which may, in fact, offer its own form of protection.

Conley's work has also appeared in Salon.com, Feed Magazine. He has written several op-ed pieces for the New York Times and is frequently interviewed for articles on race, family, and socioeconomic status.

He was formerly married to the technoartist, Natalie Jeremijenko and together they have two children: E and Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley.

Works[link]

• Being Black, Living in the Red. University of California Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-520-21673-0. http://books.google.com/books?id=Ij1XXs8oK4IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Dalton+Conley&hl=en&ei=1mrNTbmGM4L50gGw1KGaDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
• Honky. University of California Press. 2000. ISBN 0-520-21586-9. http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520215863. 
• The Pecking Order. Random House. 2004. ISBN 978-0-375-71381-1. http://books.google.com/books?id=qJDu3qqadhEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Dalton+Conley&hl=en&ei=1mrNTbmGM4L50gGw1KGaDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
• Elsewhere, U.S.A.. Random House. 2009. ISBN 978-0-375-42290-4. http://books.google.com/books?id=0726UXcSEEsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Dalton+Conley&hl=en&ei=1mrNTbmGM4L50gGw1KGaDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
• You May Ask Yourself.. W. W. Norton & Company. 2011. ISBN 978-0-393-12020-2. http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=22262. 

Memoir[link]

• Honky. Random House. 2001. ISBN 978-0-375-72775-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=WhTH3r6FIDUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Dalton+Conley&hl=en&ei=1mrNTbmGM4L50gGw1KGaDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false. 

References[link]

External links[link]

• The Family Pecking Order
• Guardian profile of Honky
• Elsewhere, USA