John Iceland > Quotes

“As Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres argue, one of the negative consequences of this colorblind ideology that it “inhibit[s] racialized minorities from struggling against their marginalized status. . . . It gives those who have enjoyed little power in our society no mechanisms for understanding and challenging the systemic nature of their oppression. . . . The way race has been used both to distribute resources and to camouflage the unfairness in that distribution remains invisible. . . . And the political space, where groups come together to give voice to their collective experience and mobilize to engage in fundamental social change, vanishes”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“The underlying reason why Woods might be identified as black in the first place, given his very mixed heritage, is the traditional “one-drop rule” in the United States. This rule refers to the legal (for a time) designation of people with any black ancestry—that is, a person with even a single drop of black blood—as black.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“Culture has sometimes been used to blame poor people and minorities for their own disadvantage. For example, some people believe that cultural values and lifestyles, such as a weak work ethic, childbearing outside of marriage, criminal behavior, and drug use inhibit upward mobility among some groups.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“Race has traditionally referred to groups that are biologically distinguishable by physical, mental, and genetic traits.9 Indeed, this notion remains widely held among the public.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“Assimilation refers to the reduction of differences between ethnic groups over time.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“Mexico itself gained its independence from Spain after a protracted war from 1810 to 1821, and its population generally consisted of a mix of three groups: a Spanish-origin elite population; mestizos (those of mixed European and Indian ancestry), who were mostly landless but who occupied many middle-tier positions in society (working, for example, as craftsmen, soldiers, laborers, and traders); and, finally, Indians, who remained outside of Spanish-speaking society and who farmed land in a traditional manner.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the crowning achievements of the civil rights movement, prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“affirmative action,”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“A significant majority of the Hispanic population is of Mexican origin (63.0 percent), with the next largest groups being Puerto Ricans (9.2 percent), Cubans (3.5), Salvadorans (3.3), and Dominicans (2.8).”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“In other words, they feel part of the mainstream, and they are less likely to perceive the importance of race in other people’s lives. This is what some commentators would refer to as “white privilege.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act went further, barring the immigration of all Chinese laborers.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“My conclusion is that there is considerable evidence that both Asians and Hispanics have experienced upward mobility across generations, indicative of some measure of incorporation in the United States. Asians have achieved parity, or even an advantage, when compared to whites in terms of education, income, and other outcomes.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“As to the distinction between race and ethnicity, ethnicity refers to a group of people who are differentiated by culture rather than by perceived physical or genetic differences central to notions of race. Nevertheless, the terms race and ethnicity are often used interchangeably in public conversations today, especially given the growing diversity of the U.S. population, increasing intermarriage, and the changing meaning and importance of group differences. There is also some ambiguity about whether some groups, such as Hispanics or Middle Easterners, are distinct races or ethnicities, and this debate is far from settled.20”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“The rule was historically used as a tool of subjugation. If a society was going to keep blacks and whites “separate but equal” as declared by the infamous Jim Crow laws in the segregated South and antimiscegenation laws (which barred interracial marriages) that at one point existed in thirty-eight states across the country, then rules were needed to determine who would fall on each side of the stark line dividing privilege from oppression.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“Naturalization Act of 1790,”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“The problem with color-blind ideology, according to this perspective, is that it masks deep-rooted racial inequalities.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“Sociologists typically define culture as the beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and other characteristics that are shared and accepted by a group of people. The connection”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“The most obvious explanation for explaining black-white inequality, especially historically, is racism and discrimination. African Americans first arrived in the United States in large numbers in colonial times via the slave trade and were heavily concentrated in southern states, such as South Carolina and Mississippi, where they often worked on plantations. They had few rights and could be bought and sold at will, meaning that families were frequently broken up at the discretion of their owners. Each state had its slave code that regulated the relationship between the slave and owner. The South Carolina slave code, for example, stated, among many provisions, that no slave should be taught to write and that slaves were forbidden to leave the owner’s property unless accompanied by a white person or by permission. Masters who killed their slaves without justification were subject to a fine, but all types of punishments (including those leading to the death of slaves) for infractions were allowed.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“The golfing champion went on to state that as a child he’d invented the term, “Cablinasian” to describe his parents multi-ethnicity and nationality—a mix of half Asian (Chinese and Thai), one-quarter African American, one-eighth Native American and one-eighth Dutch.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“Culture has also been invoked by some as a possible explanation for relatively high levels of educational attainment among Asian Americans. The thinking here is that Asian Americans highly value education and its potential to foster upward mobility and communicate this to their children, who put more effort into their schoolwork than their white and other non-Asian peers.47 These high levels of education translate into good jobs with high earnings. Asian American families likewise have particularly low levels of single parenthood and high levels of cohesiveness, and this also helps explain relatively low levels of Asian poverty.48”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“The Naturalization Act of 1870 expanded naturalization in the United States to “white persons and persons of African descent,” but other nonwhites remained excluded.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“For many Americans, race is an important part of their identity. It affects how they view themselves, their aspirations, and their communities.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“Descendants of European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have largely assimilated into U.S. society. Groups once viewed as outsiders now view themselves, and are viewed by others, as part of the American mainstream.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“In 1836 Texas proclaimed its independence from Mexico and beat back a Mexican effort to reclaim the land. Then, at the request of the Texans, the United States annexed this territory in 1845, precipitating the Mexican-American War. After the Mexican army was defeated in 1848, Mexico ceded territory to the United States in what is now California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This treaty also gave U.S. citizenship to the fifty thousand or so Mexicans who remained.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“This perspective further argues that whites often don’t recognize these systemic inequalities and thus don’t acknowledge the privileges they enjoy by the virtue of being white and blame the disadvantaged position of many minorities on their own poor choices and wayward values.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“In 1970 just 5 percent of the U.S. population was Hispanic. By 2013 this had risen to 17 percent, and population projections suggest that perhaps 28 percent of the population might be Hispanic in 2050, though, as discussed in chapter 2, the actual percentage will depend on how data are collected in the future and changing patterns of self-identification, especially among people of mixed-ethnic origins.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“African Americans are still more likely to be poor, unemployed, and incarcerated and suffer from worse health than whites. The”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“Research tends to indicate that American Indians on average fare relatively poorly across a number of outcomes, such as educational achievement and income. American Indians have been, and continue to be, marginalized in a number of ways, such as spatially and economically, that contribute to their disadvantaged position. A challenge when examining American Indian outcomes is that, because of the group’s relatively small population, less data are available about them in nationally representative surveys than for most other groups. Moreover, it is difficult to gauge the change in outcomes over time among American Indians because of changing patterns of self-identification among people with some American Indian ancestry.”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“Another wave of Cuban immigrants entered in 1980 as part of the Mariel Boatlift, and this group was both racially and socioeconomically very mixed. In that year 803,000 Cubans, or about 8 percent of Cuba’s population, lived in the United States. Cubans overwhelmingly settled in Miami, and many found success as entrepreneurs and small-business owners.9”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)

“As the Irish immigrant population swelled in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, for example, there was a strong, negative reaction among many nativists to the mostly low-skilled Catholic immigrants, and this was often cast in both religious and racial terms. Jacobson continues, “Negative assessments of Irishism or Celtism as a fixed set of inherited traits thus became linked at mid-century to a fixed set of observable physical characteristics, such as skin and hair color, facial type, and physique. The Irishman was ‘low-browed,’ ‘brutish,’ and even ‘simian’ in popular discourse.”13”
― John Iceland, Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2)