Based on Chapter One in Vincent N. Parillo's Strangers to the Shores:  Race and Ethnic Relations in the U.S.  Seventh Edition.  Boston and New York:  Allyn and Bacon.

*Sixth Edition is on reserve at Polk Library.
.  
Categoric knowing – the classification of others on the basis of limited information (visual, verbal)
e.g. all Swedes dislike coffee

Similarly, we have abstract typifications about strangers that become concrete through our experiences, i.e., our stereo-types become confirmed through our experiences, we notice things that confirm our stereo-types – Examples????

What is a Minority Group?
first used to describe 22 mln people (of East Central Europe’s 110 mln people) living in “the wrong countries” after WWI (Parillo, 12)

Speaks not just to numerical representation but to its
RELATIVE POWER AND STATUS IN SOCIETY (12)

(13) LIST OF MINORITY GROUP CHARACTERISTICS
 unequal treatment
easily identifiable (??) because of physical or cultural characteristics held in low esteem
 sense of peoplehood
 ascribed status (born into it)
endogamy (tend to marry each other, by choice and because of social isolation)

How do we feel about this list?  Is a good one?  Does it seem to apply well to groups we consider minorities in the US?  What’s wrong with it?

Race
“Racial classification is a sociopolitical construct, not a biological absolute” (13)

racial classifications range from 1 (the human race) to more than a hundred

Many classifications dressed up in scientific language, e.g., phenotype, to make differences seem scientifically justified

In reality, human history = migration, conquest, intermarriage, and physical adaptation

Making it impossible to clearly delineate people into discrete categories “races” based on physical traits (skin color, body type, facial features)
 

What to do with “mixed-race” people?
Historically, in US and Caribbean, one-drop of African blood=Negro, quadroon, etc.

Mixed Race Movement growing in US today

The census problem - 2000 solution - allow people to check more than one box

Should we stop asking “the race question” on the census, surveys?

How could we re-write the question to make it more applicable to the varieties of people living in the US today?

Ethnicity
14 – Parillo says “ethnic group” will be used to refer to social groupings that the dominant groups considers unique because of religious, linguistic or cultural characteristics

in P.S. literature, these are some of the variables that tend to distinguish one ethnic group
1) mythology of group origin
2) shared history
3) culture/custom
4) language
5) religion
6) shared claim to specific place/land
7) group consciousness, political identity

Different characteristics are delineate different groups from one another – Groups that are physically and linguistically similar may consider themselves different from one another because they practice different religions (e.g. Serbs and Croats).  Other examples?
 

Ethnocentrism
“a view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.”

Amer-centrism?
e.g. World Series?

Is Amer-centrism really just Euro-centrism?

Is Afro-centrism just a reaction to Euro-centrism?
 

What is Dillingham’s Flaw (22)?
Making inaccurate comparisons based on simplistic categorizations,  anachronistic judgments, limited personal experience

Judgments about immigrants that do not take into account
1)the technological evolution of immigrants home countries
2) the more rapid rate we expect immigrants to acculturate because of
3) the more rapid pace of life and more frequent inter-group contact in the US wrought by industrialization, post-industrialization, urbanization, etc.

e.g. saying that immigrants today are slower to Americanize, learn English