Sociology 134

The Sociological Imagination and Race and Ethnicity

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.

Example: Racial Profiling

• Blacks, Hispanics– Orlando, 1992: Road with 5% black drivers

and 70% of stopped drivers black

-- Maryland, 1998: Road with 20% black drivers and 70% of stopped drivers black

-- Illinois, 1999: 8% of state’s residents were Hispanic, while 25% of individuals stopped by drug interdiction units were Hispanic

What are some possible explanations of these

statistics?• Negative

– Prejudice and discrimination– Poor training– Bad policing

• Positive– Higher rates of illegal activities

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?

What sociological questions can we pose?(C. Wright Mills)• 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”?

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

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)

Code of the Street

• Ethnographic

• Explores the structure and culture of life in the inner city

The Ecological Indian

• Were Indians the original environmentalists?

Latinos: A Biography of the People

• Allowing people to tell their own histories and stories

• Looking at different Latino groups separately