The Sociological Imagination - Race and Ethnicity - Lecture Slides, Slides of Sociology

Download The Sociological Imagination - Race and Ethnicity - Lecture Slides and more Slides Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Sociology 646 The Sociological Imagination and Race and Ethnicity docsity.com C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination • Understanding our own lives involves understanding the history and current status of the society in which we live. • Perspectives (Conflict/Consensus) • Tools (ethnography, statistics) • Challenge conventional wisdom: the common understanding of a situation. docsity.com Racial Profiling of Muslims and Arabs • Targeting 5,000 young men from Muslim countries for questioning after 9/11, 2001. • FBI: talk to everyone who might have information • Muslim leaders: racial profiling • What do you think: was this good or bad? docsity.com What sociological questions can we pose? • How are racial and ethnic relations structured? • How do racial and ethnic relations compare to the past and other countries? • What does the past and current state of racial and ethnic relations suggest about our “human nature”? docsity.com Applied to racial profiling • What is the structure, extent, nature, and form of racial profiling? • How does racial and ethnic profiling here compare to other countries and the past? • What does racial profiling reveal about our human nature? – Racial divide – We have not resolved all of our issues docsity.com Some classic examples 1. An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal (1944) 2. The Declining Significance of Race by William Julius Wilson (1978) 3. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation by Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut (2001) docsity.com Mitchell Duneier: Sidewalk • Slim’s Table • Ethnography: Participant Observation • Class, race, and gender issues docsity.com Mary Waters: Ethnic Options • Motivated by own ethnicity (really Irish) • Qualitative interviews • Significance of European ethnic identities and difference from racial identities docsity.com