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I am a former president of the relevant specialist section of the International Sociological Association and will be circulating among out members the attached draft for their comments with a view to submitting it to you.It raises issues about amendment of your current entry that I should discuss with you beforehand.

Sociology of race and ethnic relations

The sociology of race and ethnic relations is a field within the study of sociology as one of the social or behavioural sciences. The field’s origins lie in 19th century ideas of racial differences that were undermined in the 20th century by the development of population genetics.

University teaching and research in the sociology of race and ethnic relations as a distinctive field commenced in the United States after World War I, and in the United Kingdom after World War II. It has since been taken up in other countries, though not necessarily under that name. The demarcation of this field of teaching and research, its name, and its most fundamental concepts, all remain matters of dispute.

Much teaching and research has been in response to the public perception of a social or political problem and, to this extent, has been nationally oriented. Nevertheless, many sociologists have attempted to develop a comparative or global perspective and have conducted research in countries other than those of their birth. In 1971 the International Sociological Association established its research committee 05 with the title `Ethnic, Race and Minority Relations’; in 2006 it changed this to `Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic Relations’. In 1976 the International Political Science Association established its research committee 14 with the title `Politics and Ethnicity’.

Beginnings

One precursor of twentieth-century sociology in this field was the Polish-born sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz. In 1875 he argued that the organism of the state grew out of the contact between two different races, one having better blood and ruling the other, though for the state to be properly established a middle estate of traders and manufacturers had to be inserted between the two others. In Der Rassenkampf (1885: 342) he contended that the means `by which tribes became peoples, peoples nations, nations grew into races and developed themselves, is something we know already; it is the perpetual struggle of races for dominance, the soul and spirit of all history’.

This was written at a time when Gumplowicz sympathised with the `Social Darwinist’ theories that exerted a powerful influence on early sociology. He also coined the concept of ethnocentrism. In 1911 one of the founders of classical sociology, Max Weber, reacted against then prevailing conceptualisations of race. He attempted to identify the ways in which perceptions of racial, national and ethnic difference influenced social behaviour, though his notes attracted attention only half a century later, following their translation into English (Banton 2014).

United States of America

The study of race and ethnic relations in the universities of the USA can be dated from the publication, in 1921, of the Introduction to the Science of Sociology by Robert E. Park and E. W. Burgess; it contained passages outlining an approach to the study of racial relations. From the beginning this study has been coupled with the perception of race relations as constituting a political problem. The early Chicago work started against the background of the city’s race riot of 1919; this had led to the appointment of the Commission on Race Relations, and to a report on the riot prepared by the sociologist Charles S. Johnson. Many US sociologists in the ensuing years lent their support to proposals for social reform and saw their subject as a means to the promotion of democracy.

As emphasised by his pupil, Everett C. Hughes, Park took his chief concepts by analogy from the study of ecology (Banton 1998: 102). Park has also been seen as a pioneer of the symbolic interactionist approach (Ballis Lal 1986: 280). Park developed his ideas in a series of essays over the next thirty years. While he wrote (1950: 81) of `Race Relations, as that term is defined in use and wont in the United States…’, he also encouraged the study of black-white relations in Brazil and elsewhere in order to place observations about the USA within a more general understanding of the phenomena in question.

In the field surveyed by Park, apart from the political issues, there were many theoretical questions for sociologists to address. Why were they brought together as exemplifying `race relations’ rather than as the relations between people of different skin colour or, in the US case, as Black-White relations? Why race? The answer to that question lies in the political circumstances of the time.

Though the word race had been used from the early nineteenth century in the designation of social categories, White and Negro had been the common designations in the USA. The idiom of race came into greater use after the civil war and the passing of the fifteenth amendment to the US constitution. Though race was used in the designation of Native Americans and other social categories, its most common reference was to the Black-White distinction. In the post-Darwinian era, this distinction was rationalised by theories of inherited differences associated with phenotype. The study of Black-White relations was presented as a major subdivision of `race relations’ because many members of the public had come to believe that knowledge about racial identities could explain the social structure.

Another feature of the Chicago school was its promotion of the study, by W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. At that time, research into the settlement of immigrants from Europe was seen as separate from the study of race relations. In the early 1940s the expression ethnic group came into popular use to identify categories like `Irish-Americans’ and `Italian-Americans’. In this way, `ethnic group’ became a subdivision of the category `race’. Sociologists followed suit (e.g., Warner and Srole 1945).

During World War II a collaborative study led by Gunnar Myrdal resulted in the publication of An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and American Democracy. The title represented the perception of those who those who had funded the research, but its conclusion implied that the USA had to confront a `white problem’. The main academic challenge to the Myrdal thesis, and to Park’s doctrine was the approach of Marxist inspiration to be found in Oliver C. Cox’s book Caste, Class and Race (1948). After 1950, and in response to German anti-Semitism, a major academic stimulus came from a study of the authoritarian personality (Adorno et al. 1950). An important conference in Hawaii (Lind 1955) surveyed Race Relations in World Perspective and attempted to correct what was described as the `parochialism’ of work in this field.

Sociological studies of race and ethnic relations in the 1950s centred round the `prejudice-discrimination axis’. Representative textbooks of this period were those by Milton Gordon (1964) and by Simpson and Yinger (1965). `Race relations’ was seen as combining an approach from the study of ideology using racism as its basic concept, with an approach from attitude that used prejudice as its basic concept, and with an approach from social relationships based upon the concept of discrimination.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s challenged prevailing conceptions of `race relations’ as an academic field. Two proponents of `Black Power’, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton (1967: 3), re-defined racism as `the predication of decisions and policies on consideration of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group and maintaining control over that group’. For them, racism incorporated ideology, attitude and social relationships. The Black Power movement inspired a series of campaigns for the recognition of ethnic studies within the university curriculum (e.g. Barrera 1979). Another Wikipedia article has stated that `ethnic studies was created to teach the stories, histories, struggles and triumphs of people of color on their own terms’. Textbooks reflecting the new perspective include Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States and William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race.

A different stimulus during this period was an improved utilization of economic reasoning, particularly that associated with the Chicago school of economic theory as applied by Becker (1957) and Sowell (1975). From this perspective, ethnic group was no longer a subdivision of the category race. Presumed ethnic origin and racial origin were both grounds of unequal treatment, even if racial distinctions led to stronger discrimination. Concern with the processes of assimilation stimulated increased interest in the nature of ethnic groups and in the maintenance of ethnic boundaries (Barth 1969).

Other research has continued on black-white differentials in various areas of institutional life, such as employment, residential segregation and education.

The 2010 US Census reported a total population of 308,745,538 persons, 72.4 per cent of whom were White or European American, 16.4 per cent Hispanic or Latino, 12.6 Black or African American, 4.8 per cent Asian. 5.8 per cent reported more than one racial origin, a higher figure than ten years earlier. The election of Barrack Obama to the presidency in 2008 may explain some of the increase. `Mixed race’ and `Multiracial’ sociological studies may be attracting more interest.

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

The study of racial and ethnic relations in British Universities began in 1947 with the appointment, in the London School of Economics, of Dr Kenneth L. Little as Assistant Lecturer in Anthropology with special reference to Race Relations (Banton 2013). Having studied briefly with the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, president of Fisk University, Tennessee, Little promoted the study of `race relations’, first in the London School of Economics and then, after 1950, in the University of Edinburgh. His conception of the field of study, extended to cover other world regions, underlay the presentation in Michael Banton’s book Race Relations of 1967.

In 1952 the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London established a programme of studies in race relations with the intention that it should concentrate upon relations in the British Commonwealth and particularly upon the developing situation in what became briefly the Federation of Central Africa. The programme became independent as the Institute of Race Relations in 1958, with Philip Mason as director. [In a parallel development, 1953 saw the establishment of the Rhodes professorship in Race Relations in Oxford University; it was oriented towards the history of Southern Africa.] Following a contested election to its Council in 1972, the Institute changed into an `anti-racist think-tank’.

Mason had campaigned for a comprehensive examination of the developing scene in Britain comparable with Gunnar Myrdal’s study, An American Dilemma. This new research project led to the publication in 1969 of Colour and Citizenship by E. J. B. Rose and others. In British universities there was little interest in the study of race relations (Rose 1987:84), notwithstanding the government’s decision to call its first legislation against racial discrimination the Race Relations Act 1965, a title that was repeated in further legislation of 1968, 1976 and 2000. Outside Edinburgh, the one sociologist with an interest in the field was John Rex, of South African birth, who, writing with Robert Moore, drew inspiration from Park and Burgess to employ the Chicago urban model in order to explain features of the housing of New Commonwealth immigrants in Birmingham.

To stimulate academic interest, the Social Sciences Research Council established a Research Unit in Ethnic Relations located within the University of Bristol from 1970 to 1978. The Unit was then transferred to the University of Aston before, in 1984, being re-established as the Economic and Social Research Council’s Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations at the University of Warwick, where it continued until 1994.

In the University of Birmingham, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies developed a distinctive line of research under the leadership of Stuart Hall from 1968 to 1979. He set out to revise Marxist theorising (Hall 1980) and to highlight the experience of black youth. Describing the 1970s, he declared `In that moment, the enemy was ethnicity. The enemy had to be what was called ‘multi-culturalism’ (Back & Solomos 2000: 151). As part of a general criticism of prevailing sociological research, Centre staff singled out the work of John Rex as providing information that `will be of use to a state apparatus preoccupied with the social control of an increasingly insurgent black population’ and for a `definition of the `race relations’ problem [that] intersects with his pessimistic assessment of the chances of solving it’ (Gilroy 1980: 58-59). The Birmingham Centre was closed in 2002 (Webster 2004).

The century ended in the UK with the publication of a particularly important report on the handling by the London police of the murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence (Macpherson 1999). This report gave new life to the concept of institutional racism introduced by Carmichael and Hamilton. The US Black Power movement had also sparked a `battle of the name’ in the 1970s and 1980s, about who in Britain was be identified as Black.

There has been a significant increase in the number of persons with multiple ethnic origins, many of whom wish to have more than one of their lines of ancestry recognised. The 2011 census of England and Wales recorded a total population of 54 million. Of these, 83.35 per cent were recorded as White, 1.80 per cent Mixed, 5.87 Asian or Asian British, 2.81 per cent Black or Black British and 0.82 per cent Chinese. In households of two or more persons, 12 per cent of adults had partners or fellow household members of a different ethnic group. The percentage of persons of mixed origin was highest among children up to the age of 15.

Transcultural concepts

The academic study of racial and ethnic relations, as it developed in the English-speaking world, was much concerned with the processes of immigration, settlement and the assimilation or integration of the resulting minorities. The English language concepts of race, ethnic group and nation were central to this research, and, if allowance was made for the special position of indigenous peoples, could be transferred to research in Europe. They do not always fit circumstances in parts of Africa and Asia.

The concept of a nation reflected historical experience in Europe and was closely associated with state formation. In parts of Africa there are very large ethnic groups that are internally divided, while state formation is sometimes insecure. In India the recognition of caste distinctions testifies to a completely different system of differentiation. The applicability of Western concepts of race, ethnic group and nation in some Asian countries is uncertain.

Other countries in Europe and North America

Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine

[In this and following sections I use the list of members of RC05 and the countries recorded there, though I do not expect all of our colleagues to write about teaching and research in their countries. There might be a single paragraph to cover Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, a single paragraph for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Paraguay, and single paragraphs for several other sets of countries.]

South Africa

In 1929 an Institute of Race Relations was founded in South Africa. Its Memorandum of Association declared its main objective to be the encouragement of `co-operation between the various sections and races of the population of South Africa’, as if blacks and whites constituted sections that were divided into races. This wording may have reflected the practice from the early part of the twentieth century by which any reference in English to `the races’ was likely to relate to the English-speaking and the Afrikaans-speaking sections of the white population. Equally, it was common to refer to the Zulu race, the Xhosa race, the Tswana race, etc., differentiating groups within the African section of the population.

Nomenclature changed after the National Party came to power in 1948. The expression `Bantu’ replaced `native’ in official documents. The laws for the enforcement of apartheid introduced after 1948 did not use a racial vocabulary and supporters of apartheid preferred to use the idiom of pluralism. Nomenclature changed further, but in an uncertain fashion, after the election in 1994 of a democratic government.

[more, please!]

Latin America

Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay

Australasia

Australia, New Zealand

Middle East

Lebanon, Israel, Turkey

Asia

Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan

What should count as racial or ethnic relations in India is problematic. The relations that prevail in India cannot be slotted into the categories used in Europe and North America. They may offer a basis for questioning some conventional sociological assumptions.

In Malaysian universities teaching and research in sociology has included reference to racial and ethnic relations. The national government has seen these relations as a matter of political concern. In 2007 it ordered its public-sector universities to introduce a compulsory course on `ethnic relations’. To guide the teaching of the 20,000 undergraduates each year, it approved an `Ethnic Relations Module’ as a course book. The text was reviewed in detail at three meetings of the Cabinet. It contained some passages that others regarded as contentious (Banton 2010).

International developments

The sociological study of racial and ethnic relations needs to take account of the legal definitions of words that also form part of the sociological vocabulary. The prime source for such definitions is the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination adopted by the United Nations in 1965. By 2012, 176 of the UN’s 193 member states had become parties to this treaty-based legal instrument.

The European, American and African regional groups have adopted their own human rights treaty measures providing for courts to rule on complaints of racial discrimination. In 2012 the organization of Asian and South-East Asian states adopted a draft human rights declaration which may lead in the future to the establishment of a similar court for that region.

The UN General Assembly also launched three `decades for the elimination of racial discrimination and racism’. In each decade there was an international conference of UN member states. The third decade concluded with a conference in Durban, South Africa, in which political disputes, particularly the Israel-Palestine dispute, dominated discussion.

Ethnic relations

The expression ethnic group came into use as a replacement for the word race (Huxley & Haddon 1935: 91-92). In Nazi Germany a kind of racial theory with pre-Darwinian origins was used in a scientifically unjustifiable manner, so critics attacked its central assumptions. Fifteen years later an expert committee convened by UNESCO advised that `it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term `race’ altogether and speak of ethnic groups’. As earlier explained, that expression had come into popular use in the USA in a different sense.

Reference to `ethnic groups’ was soon generalised by observations about `ethnicity’. A volume edited by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Ethnicity. Theory and Experience, was influential. The editors suggested `a new word reflects a new reality and a new usage reflects a change in that reality. The new word is “ethnicity”’ (1975: 5). In retrospect it appears that the new word reflected no more than a tendency for members of the public, particularly in the USA, to display a heightened appreciation of their ethnic origins and to use them as a basis for mobilization. European immigrants to that country had initially associated with their co-nationals. Later, when they realized that they would not return to live in their countries of origin, their co-nationals became their co-ethnics. The nature of the bond between the settlers had changed. To write of `ethnicity’, was to represent it as a thing, to reify it.

In law, the expression `ethnic origin’ is not problematic. An individual is at liberty to nominate one or more of his or her ethnic origins. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has stated that, after having examined state reports submitted under the ICERD, it `is of the opinion that such identification shall, if no justification exists to the contrary, be based upon self-identification by the individual concerned’1. There is a semantic slippage when sociologists move from the self-identification of an individual to a presumption that a highly variable shared self-identification motivates collective action. The word ethnicity has no agreed meaning in sociology.

The perception of a common ethnic origin can be a ground of collective action at any social level. It can be the basis for the formation of an ethnic minority within a state, for a nationalist movement attempting to change a state boundary, or for the cultivation of a shared identity at the state level. There can therefore be no sharp distinction between the study of ethnic relations and the study of nationalism. This conclusion may have lain behind the decision of the editors of the Annual Review of Sociology for 2009 to combine the three when commissioning a review of recent writing about `ethnicity, race and nationalism’ (Brubaker 2009).

Cross-disciplinary connections

The sociological study of racial and ethnic relations has been enriched by contributions from neighbouring disciplines. This has been particularly striking in the USA, where historical research has been fundamental to any understanding of contemporary relations.

In the mid-twentieth century the studies of sociologists and social psychologists in the USA were more closely related than they were towards the end of the century. While research into the expression of racial attitudes remained important, research in experimental social psychology tended to be more separate.

With the growth of interest in racial and ethnic relations outside the USA, the research of political scientists (e.g., Donald Horowitz and David Laitin) has been of particular importance.

The connection between sociology and biological explanations of social relations has always been controversial. The project pioneered by Pierre L. van den Berghe (1981) associated with what is now called evolutionary psychology has attempted to put them on a more secure basis.

The twenty-first century

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the study of racial and ethnic relations features in the sociology curriculum in most countries; it receives particular attention in the English-speaking world. Much of the teaching and research concentrates on demographic changes, inequalities in employment, housing, education, social mobility, religion, and cultural activities, including sport. It may also include comparative and historical studies. A prime topic is how best to account for any distinctiveness of racial and ethnic relations, seen both as interpersonal relations, and, possibly in quantitative terms, as accounting for social stratification.

Research findings may be published in mainstream sociological journals or in more specialized journals such as Ethnic and racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

Conclusion

The task of finding a name for `racial and ethnic relations’ as a field of teaching and research that takes account of the changes in the last century – changes both in practice and in sociological knowledge - remains an intellectual challenge. Quite possibly, it is a challenge that may not best be met head-on. If sociologists can, by their research, produce better explanations of what characterizes these relations, and the peculiarities associated with them, the problem of a name may solve itself.

Note

1. See UN document A/45/18 or HRI/GEN/1/Rev.8

See also

Discrimination Ethnic studies Race Racialization Racism

References

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Banton, Michael 1998 Racial Theories, 2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Banton, Michael 2002 The International Politics of Race. Cambridge: Polity.

Banton, Michael 2010 Ethnic Relations: an International Perspective on the Malaysian Initiative of 2007. UKM Ethnic Studies Paper Series No. 9. Bangi. Banton, Michael. 2013 `Superseding Race in Sociology: the perspective of Critical Rationalism’, in Karim Murji and John Solomos, eds., Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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