Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Supplements
The following students supplements are available with the textbook: The Kottak Anthropology Atlas, available shrink-wrapped with the text, offers 26 anthropology related reference maps. The Student's Online Learning Center features a large number of helpful study tools and self quizzes, interactive exercises and activities, links, readings and useful information at www.mhhe.com/kottak. PowerWeb, available via a link on the Student's Online Learning Center, offers help with online research by providing access to high quality academic sources."
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Overview
This chapter discusses the concept of race as it is applied to humans. It shows how the biological and social categories of race are largely unrelated, and demonstrates this by discussing the construction of race in Brazil, Japan, and the United States.
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Ethnicity and race are not synonymous, although American culture does not discriminate between the two terms.
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The so-called three great races (white, black, and yellow) are more a reflection of European colonialist politics than an accurate representation of human biological diversity. Even skin color-based race models that include more than three categories do not accurately represent the wide range of skin color diversity among human populations.
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Social Race
Race, as it is used in everyday discourse, refers to a social category, rather than a biological category. Hypodescent: Race in the United States
In the United States, race is most commonly ascribed to people without reference to genotype. In extreme cases, offspring of genetically mixed unions are ascribed entirely to the lower status race of one parent, an example of the process called hypodescent. The arbitrary lumping of bisexuals with homosexuals and the controversy surrounding the casting of Eurasian roles in the play Miss Saigon are suggested as examples of hypodescent. In the U.S., there are a growing number of interracial, biracial, or multiracial individuals who do not identify themselves with one racial identity.
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Comparing the U.S. with Canada, minorities represent a smaller percentage of the population, with a significantly smaller black population and a much larger percentage of people who identify themselves as Asian.
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The mixed Japanese-Koreans are treated as wholly foreign, despite otherwise complete cultural and linguistic assimilation.
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The complex flexibility of Brazilian race categories has made racial discrimination less likely to occur on the same scale as in the United States and Japan.
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Standardized testing
An environmental explanation acknowledges that for many reasons, both genetic and environmental, some people are smarter than others; however, these differences in intelligence cannot be generalized to characterize whole populations or social groups. Psychologists have come up with many ways to measure intelligence, but there are problems with all of them. Intelligence tests reflect the experiences of the people who write them.
Middle- and upper-class children do well because they share the test makers educational expectations and standards. The SATs claim to measure intellectual aptitude but they also measure the type and quality of high school education, linguistic and cultural background, and parental wealth. Studies have shown that performance on the SATs can be improved by coaching and preparation, placing those students who can pay for an SAT preparation course at an advantage.
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Standardized testing
Cultural biases in testing affect performance by people in other cultures as well as different groups in the same nation. Native Americans scored the lowest of any group in the U.S., but when the environment during growth and development for Native Americans is similar to that of middle-class whites, the test scores tend to equalize (e.g., the Osage Indians). At the start of World War I, African-Americans living in the north scored on average better than whites living in the south due to the better public school systems in the north.
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