Understanding Race, Ethnicity, and Minority Groups

The Sociological Perspective on Race

Since ancient times, people have attempted to group human beings into racial categories based on physical characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and body structure. Historically, scholars have placed people into three racial groups:

• Caucasoid: Characterized by fair skin and straight or wavy hair.
• Mongoloid (Asian): Defined by yellowish or brownish skin and distinctive folds on the eyelids.
• Negroid (Black): Distinguished by dark skin and tightly curly hair.

However, in reality, people recognized as belonging to each of these racial categories exhibit a wide range of skin colors and hair textures. Almost every sociologist looks at race from a social perspective. In social terms, a race is a category of people who share inherited physical characteristics and whom others see as a distinct group. For sociologists, the important issue is not that a person has a specific color of skin or hair of a certain texture.

Defining Ethnicity

The set of cultural characteristics that distinguishes one group from another is called ethnicity. People who share a common cultural background and a common sense of identity are known as an ethnic group. Ethnicity is generally based on cultural characteristics such as national origin, religion, customs, and values.

Race and ethnicity refer to two separate sets of characteristics. While ethnicity is based on cultural considerations, some ethnic groups are also racially distinct. For example, African Americans are often viewed as a racial group.

Minority Groups and Social Power

Many sociologists recognize that those who hold power in a society may place an arbitrary value on specific characteristics. The privileged position of the dominant group is often gained at the expense of minority groups within the society.

Sociologist Louis Wirth identified a minority group as a group of people who, because of their physical characteristics or cultural practices, are singled out and treated unequally. As a result, group members view themselves as subjects of collective discrimination. For example, in South Africa, white people made up about 15% of the population during the second half of the 1900s.

Characteristics of Minority Status

Minority status is not related to group size, but to the group's unequal standing in society. To be considered a minority group, a group must exhibit all of the following characteristics:

• Group members are the victims of unequal treatment at the hands of the dominant group.
• Membership in the group is an ascribed status.
• Group members share a strong sense of group loyalty.
• Members tend to practice endogamy (marriage within the group).

Exhibiting only one or two of these characteristics is not enough. For example, having blue eyes is an identifiable physical characteristic and an ascribed status, but it does not constitute a minority group.