“The myth of race”
Provide commentary on the assigned videos/films this week. Do not summarize the film. its your reaction to the film. For example, did you learn anything?; was anything surprising?; can you relate to anything described in the film?; do you have any questions after watching the film?; is there something that needs clarification?; etc. Be as specific as you can.
For part B, look for recent (within the last 2 years) ads in your own environment (in magazines, on tv, websites, etc.) that you believe use sex, race, gender, family roles, nationality, or class (alone or in combination). Comment on how those characteristics are used in the ad. These can be ads for anything or any product. Hint:
(1) look for ads that use the same characteristics the same way (e.g. if you find a toy ad – are boys playing with dolls in the ads? what race are the dolls?)
(2) ads that use the same characteristics different ways (e.g. when are women presented as sex objects and when are they not?)
(3) ads for the exact same product targeted to a different audience. What kinds of messages about social groups are being sold to us alongside products? Include a picture and/or provide a link to the ad (or ads) you are discussing so we can view them.
There are countless examples of problems and conflicts involving various ethnic groups from around the world. Select a country and investigate ethnic conflicts (additional 150 word minimum). Present a summary that touches on several concepts of your choosing that were introduced in the Ethnicity reading. Be sure to cite any outside resources (including your textbook) using MLA citation format.
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9. ETHNICITY
Personal identity can be very complex. Ethnic identity alone is determined by crosscutting factors, including language, racial characteristics, national heritage and
religion. Ethnic identities factor into a wide variety of cultural practices – including
politics, religion, marriage and economics. Geography plays a significant role in the
creation, maintenance and erosion of ethnic identity.
Website dedicated to
exposing the manner
in which the US
Census Bureau has
fashioned notions of
race and ethnicity
since 1790
Racebox.org
“What are you?” You need some sort of an answer to this question because you will be asked
it frequently. Employers, schools, banks, the US Census are among the institutions
interested placing you into a category. You may be asked the same question by new
acquaintances or old friends. In the United States, no matter how complex the answer to
that question may be, it can difficult to respond in any way other than the most simplistic
terms. Check this box. Some people find it easy to check a single box, or provide a one-word
answer to the question. Others may find checking a single box, or providing a one-word
answer makes no sense at all. Moving from one cultural region of the world to another can
make answering such questions even more confusing because “what you are” is likely to
change when you move, even though you are still the same person. This is because the
categories that governments and culture groups use are socially constructed ideas. They’re
made up. And because categories are constructed in our collective imaginations, they’re also
subject to change through time and across space. Geography is an especially powerful tool
when it comes to understanding questions of race, ethnicity and identity.
Figure 9-1 Many government documents ask people to report their identity, but provide the categories thereby actively helping
create or maintain identity categories into which people generally place themselves, even if they don’t fit well.
Slavery, though once nearly a universal human practice, and as old perhaps as agriculture
itself, is perhaps the primary motivation behind the creation of ethnic categories. In the
Americas, many of the “rules” we use to determine ethnic identity today were introduced
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hundreds of years ago in order to grease the wheels of the slave economy. Nearly 100 years
before the English established the Jamestown colony in Virginia, the Spanish brought
African slaves to North America. The indigenous people of the Americas, were also
captured and sold into slavery. In both instances, race was the predominant characteristic
qualifying someone to be a slave in the European system. Almost any one whose ancestry
could be traced to Africa or the New World was at risk of being enslaved.
Most of the ethnic identity categories we use were created for legal purposes by the
government. In the United States, that begins with the US Census Bureau, but a number of
other government agencies have been interested in establishing categories into which people
could be placed since the earliest days of the colonial period. These categories have changed
through time frequently, and as a result everyday terminology regarding ethnic identity has
changed as well. Terms such as octoroon, mulatto, and high yellow, once common in the 19th
century to describe American of mixed ethnic or racial backgrounds, are nearly extinct now.
Today, because the composition of our country is far different than it was in the 1800s, we
use different categories to characterize our population. The three main areas are race,
language and national ancestry.
Race
Race is a visual category that changes based on geography. Americans use three primary
visual determinants to classify someone by race. The first element is skin pigmentation.
People with darker skin are distinguished from those with lighter skin, but skin color alone
is not sufficient in the US to classify anyone into a category. Second, people with darker skin
are further categorized by the texture of their hair. People with naturally straight hair, but
dark skin are generally not considered “black” or “African-American”, but instead assigned
to another category. Finally, people are categorized by the shape and color of their eyes.
People with brown “almond shaped “eyes, and straight hair, are placed in the “Asian”
category. This “three-factor test” generates three
groups: White, Black and Asian. Americans use this
test, very clumsily, all the time, and a lot of people are
left out, poorly categorized or not categorized, so
additional measures have been created by society.
There is substantial reason to doubt whether race even
exists. Clearly, the three-factor test used widely in the
United States is a social construction, meaning people
created this test and each category. On a deeper level,
anthropologists, biologists and geneticists argue quite
a bit about whether the concept of race is scientifically
valid. Clearly, there are genetic markers for physical
characteristics, like skin color or hair texture,
identifiable via DNA testing, but only a few of these
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Figure 9-2: Fingerprint patterns vary across the
globe much like skin color, but because they
are difficult to see, they were not chosen as
markers of race.
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DNA markers match up well with our very convenient social constructions. If we wanted,
we could choose from thousands of alternative genetic characteristics to classify people. If
our social constructions were to change, and we suddenly decided to group people by
height, fingerprint patterns and blood type (rather than skin color, hair texture and eye
shape), we would have an entirely different set of races lumped together quite differently
across the globe.
Because the overall amount of genetic variation among people of the same race is less than
the amount of genetic variation between people of different races, statisticians argue that
race fails the simplest definition of what constitutes a “group”. Despite the fact that the
concept of race, is essentially dead among scientists, it remains a vital reality in the lives of
many people and in most societies. Clearly race exhibits spatial characteristics on the
landscape that are of interest to geographers.
Language and Ethnicity
Often Americans confuse race and ethnicity. Race is commonly used as an ethnic marker,
but ethnicity extends well beyond race. Take for example people who speak Spanish. Known
collectively as Hispanics, this group constitutes about 17% of the US population. Hispanics
are not a race in the classic sense, despite the occasional attempt by groups to use the
Spanish expression La Raza to define a racial category (see below). Because people from any
race may speak Spanish, there are Asian Hispanics (Filipinos, e.g.), White Hispanics (Spain)
and Black Hispanics (Cuba, e.g.) among others who are not thought of as “Hispanic”.
Spanish speakers constitute an ethnic group in the United States because of a shared
linguistic heritage. It’s another overstuffed marker of identity that reflects perhaps a poor
understanding of the spectrum of peoples who speak a common language (sort of), but who
may otherwise have little in common.
A sizeable percentage of Hispanics in the United States have ancestors from both Europe the
Americas, and therefore have a mixed racial background. Traditionally, this racial mixture
was known as mestizo. Today, the term Latino is a common, but it is an inexact analog for
mestizo. Latinos however identify so strongly by language that they are often reluctant to
identify by race on government forms. Oftentimes, mestizos living in the US select “other”
when prompted to identify a racial category. Therefore, maps of race in cities like Los
Angeles feature large swaths of the race “other” in Latino-Hispanic neighborhoods.
Complicating the issue of race among Latinos is the varied way Spanish speakers use the
term “La Raza” (translated “the race”). Fascists in Spain used the term to celebrate the
uniqueness and racial purity of Spaniards for decades, but it has since been adopted /
adapted (appropriated) by various Latino groups to refer to a host of sometimes competing
claims to ethnic identities not actually based on race, as race is defined in this text.
No other minority group in the United States is defined as much by language as Hispanics.
Clearly, many dozens of languages other than English and Spanish are spoken at home by
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millions of Americans, and those who speak those languages generally identity themselves by
language before they would use a racial category. Americans of Chinese, Korean or Japanese
descent often think of themselves as quite different from each other, but the government
(and indeed many non-Asian Americans), frequently collapse these three linguistic/national
identities into the monolithic, but over-expansive Asian American category.
Switzerland
Switzerland is a country that is overwhelmingly “white”, with less than 10% of the
population non-European. Still, in many ways, Switzerland is exceptionally multi-ethnic
because of its great linguistic diversity. The majority of Swiss speak German, but there are
sizeable numbers of persons that speak French and Italian. Even Romansh is recognized as
an official language in Switzerland, though only about 1% of the population speaks it.
The jigsaw-puzzle linguistic map of
Switzerland is similar to those found
in other rugged, mountainous or
inaccessible regions where the
friction of distance is significant (see
chapter 5). What makes Switzerland
somewhat unusual though is the
manner in which the Swiss have
embraced their linguistic diversity,
even requiring school-aged children Figure 9-3: Map of Switzerland – Mountainous regions often feature
linguistic diversity. The Swiss present a model of ethnic harmony in the
to become bilingual. Despite the
face of diversity. Source: Wikimedia.
linguistic diversity, various groups
came together in the year 1291, and since then Swiss have focused their attention on
national commonalities such as their neutrality, love of democracy and Alpine sports to
build a special sense of national identity that overwhelms the various linguistic subnationalities. The strong tendency to self-identify with a common national identity by Swiss
people is probably helped by the fact they have one of the highest standards of living in the
world (health, wealth, happiness), but by the same token, their health, happiness and
prosperity is in no small part due to their ability to get along well with countrymen who
speak other languages. The Swiss demonstrate to the world that people of diverse
backgrounds can live together quite happily if they chose to do so.
Religion
In some parts of the world, religion is the primary marker of ethnic identity. In the United
States, religion is not widely used as a marker of identity. The US government collects
almost no data on religious affiliation because to do so would infringe upon the separation
of church and state. Jews and Muslims are the only two groups in the US that have a
tendency to self-identify by religion rather than some other marker of identity, but even that
is not very common.
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In areas where racial or linguistic markers are not readily
available, religion often becomes the primary marker of
ethnicity. The ongoing conflict in Iraq between Sunni
and Shia Muslims is a good example of how religion can
be made a primary marker of identity. Perhaps the most
tragic example in recent memory was the violent
dissolution of the country of Yugoslavia, in many ways
the “anti-Switzerland” of Europe.
From 1918 to around 2003, Yugoslavia was a multiFigure 9-4: Once Brothers is a documentary
ethnic country held together by a common language, a
film by ESPN detailing the emotional toll on
strong leader and numerous common cultural practices. former Yugoslav teammates who saw their
former country and friendships torn apart by
Translated literally, “Yugoslavia” means literally “Land
ethnic strife. http://vimeo.com/36827025
of the South Slavs”, indicating that there was a linguistic
bond forming the basis of a common national identity. There was some measure of ethnic
difference and a variety of religious identities within Yugoslavia, but for several generations
in the 20th century, the differences yielded to a more dominant national identity.
Animated Map
Watch the breakup of
Yugoslavia
(.gif format)
YouTube Version
However, after the death of their leader, Marshall Tito in 1980, the religious differences
among the groups proved unmanageable. The country broke up quite violently, largely
along lines established by religious identification. The Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) follow
Islam, and they now inhabit a part of the former Yugoslavia called Bosnia-Herzegovina. The
Slovenes and Croats (Croatians) are largely Roman Catholic, and they now occupy the
countries of Slovenia and Croatia. The Montenegrins, Macedonians and Serbs (Serbians)
are Eastern Orthodox Christians, and they now live in Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia
respectively. Many observers felt that the differences between the groups were not
significant, and certainly not worth the civil war that broke up the country. Critics of
Yugoslavia’s dissolution have argued that the actions of a few power-hungry politicians were
responsible for whipping up nearly forgotten hatred among neighbors that had lived
together for generations by creating or exaggerating claims about historical wrongs done by
one group against another. Today, after generations of living together, each of the breakaway countries has taken steps to create official languages based on the various regional
dialects of the common Serbo-Croation language they all speak in an attempt to create
several unique identities from a former common one.
National Heritage
Where your ancestors are from may be how you identify yourself as well. People sometimes
use nationality as a marker of ethnic identity. Some people in the US do this regularly.
Others couldn’t even tell you what their national ancestry was. Most of the time in the US,
national ethnicities comes in the form of hyphenated identities, such as Chinese-American,
Mexican-American, etc. Most Americans of European descent rarely self-identify as
“English-American” or “Canadian-American”, even though the England and Canada have
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each been a significant source of migrants.
Part of that stems from the fact that English
migration largely took place many generations
ago, and that English (and Canadian) culture
is so similar to American culture, that in some
ways, differentiating one’s self in this fashion
makes little sense. Another reason surely stems
from the “melting pot” trajectory of many of
European immigrants to the United States.
Figure 9-5: Huntington Park, CA – Fans of Mexico’s men’s
European immigrants to the US over a
national soccer team celebrate in a Los Angeles
number of generations have so frequently
neighborhood in a display of pride for a nationality-based
ethnicity. Source: Daily Mail, UK
married people from other European
countries that the countries of national origin were forgotten or were subjugated to the
national identity. Intermarriage, is the most effective means by which groups assimilate
into the host culture, and the barriers to intermarriage were lower for most Americans of
European descent, especially for those from northern Europe.
Time and distance also seem to factor into
how completely migrant families assimilate.
After a few generations, most families are fully
integrated, especially if the distance between
the ancestral country of origin is great,
making it difficult for migrant families to
remain connected to ancestral ways. Cheap
Figure 9-6: Location unknown – This soccer jersey features
international travel and even cheaper digital
the colors and symbols of both the US and Mexico, in
connections (TV, internet) have made it
recognition of the transnational identities held closely by
many Mexican-Americans living in both the US and Mexico.
possible for people to retain connections in
Source: MLS.
distance places, creating what is sometimes
known as transnational identities. Transnationalism may arise when an immigrant either
chooses not to assimilate; and/or is discouraged from assimilating by the host group. It is
interesting to observe the rooting interests of recent immigrant groups during the Olympics
and/or the World Cup soccer tournament. These events provide a window into the
processes affecting identity construction and maintenance. Though not always a reliable
measure of national identity, most Americans who identify simply as “American” would
have trouble cheering for any country other than the United States.
Region
The US Government also uses much broader stokes to classify ethnic groups as well. “Asian”
is the most common such category, and it is probably the most absurdly broad as well,
because it lumps several hundred ethnic groups from a vast continent together as one.
People whose ancestry is traceable to China, Japan, Korea, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey and
parts of Russia are all technically “Asian”, though they may think of themselves as different.
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White people are also overly broadly categorized. Clearly, this category is used to classify
people who are European, or whose ancestry is mostly European; but “white” also
sometimes includes people from Saharan Africa and the Southwest Asia (Moroccans,
Egyptians, Iraqis, Saudis, Turks, etc.). Depending on context, the term Caucasian may
reference either only Europeans or people from a vast swath of Europe, Asia and Africa.
African-American is another similarly confusing category, because Africa is made up of
about 50 countries and probably 500 ethnicities, but generally, only people whose ancestry is
from Sub-Saharan Africa seem to count as African-American. Secondly, some immigrants
from Africa are white, especially South Africans. Some African-Americans reject the label,
preferring “black”, partly because “African-American” has no equivalent, such as,
“European-American”, but also because of the manner in which the term “black” was
appropriated as source of cultural pride and ethnic power during the Civil Rights era. The
terms “colored” and “Negro” fell from common usage during the Civil Rights era as the
term “Black” gained currency.
American-American?
There are some that reject the numerous hyphenated American identities. What do people
call themselves who would rather not be classified, or those who think they’re being left out?
What about the millions who aren’t really sure what to check off on the “ethnicity” or
“national origin” question? The simple identity American is an option that a lot of white
people now chose on the US Census form, especially in the Appalachian South. This could
be interpreted as act of xenophobia, but for families from that region (the author included),
many of whom trace their American roots back to the 1600’s, the number of ethnicities
represented in the family tree is so numerous, so varied, and generally lost to time, to call
oneself anything other than simply “American”. Anyone living in the United States with a
complex family tree is perhaps by default “American”.
YouTube
The Great American
Melting Pot, a
children’s video
extolling the virtues
of cultural
assimilation. Watch
the video and
consider how
accurate this
portrayal is.
During the last two census periods (2000, 2010), there has been an effort by small politicallymotivated groups in some southern states to make Confederate-American, or Southern
White as an official ethnic designation. This seems clearly an outgrowth of the racially
charged, anti-Federal politics still quite common in the South, but there may be some less
nefarious logic to doing so as well. Ethnic groups should perhaps be allowed to self-identify.
Certainly many of the official and unofficial strategies we use to place people in a box are
illogical and nearly worthless. One could make an argument that because many people in
the American South have a unique dialect, religious beliefs, politics and social customs that
they may indeed be entitled to call themselves whatever they want.
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MEXICO-CANADA-UNITED STATES – FOOD AND ETHNICITY
There’s a well-circulated speech by Mexican-American essayist Richard Rodriguez who
compares the assimilation strategies pursued by the United States and its neighbors to the
north and south. Rodriguez offers a compelling look into three competing strategies for
understanding and managing ethnic difference in North America.
Rodriguez points out that Mexico has largely realized the American dream of becoming a
true melting pot. Racial minorities in Mexico are not very visible. There are several million
indigenous people living in Mexico for sure; the Nahua, Mayans and Zapotecas come to
mind, and there is a small population of Afro-Mexicans as well, but their experience has
been different from equivalent groups in the US. The main difference between the US and
Mexico was that in Mexico there were far higher rates of intermarriage between Europeans
(Spaniards), the native population and Africans. The host culture of Mexico is itself mixed.
Rodriguez likened this mixing to the process of making a good burrito: a lot of ingredients
rolled up into a single creation. In Mexico, the host culture has little reason to aggressively
discriminate against any of its constituent elements. As a result, Mexican identity and
culture is more cohesive, happier and perhaps more monolithic than that in the US.
Rodriguez points out that Canada, a
country known for its typically genial
multi-national culture has become a
welcoming place for immigrants by
celebrating diversity and respecting the
rights of all who come to maintain their
identity. As a result, Canada has had little
of the racialized strife that has marked US
history. Of course, some French-speaking
9-7: Poutine is one of the few identifiable dishes to
Canadians have argued for secession, but it Figure
emerge from Canada, a sign that cultural hybridization is under
was handled in an orderly, democratic
developed in this multi-ethnic society. Source: Wikimedia.
fashion (and rejected twice). The
Canadians have pursued a national assimilation strategy just the opposite of the one used in
Mexico. As a result, the Canadian strategy has perhaps undermined the growth of a solid,
singular national identity in Canada. Short of perhaps a common love of hockey and beer,
it’s hard to think of what makes Canadians “Canadian”. Rodriguez notes that you will never
be asked to go out to a Canadian restaurant. The lack of a widely embraced Canadian
cuisine , Rodriguez argues is because Canada never experienced the robust cultural
hybridization of the type one finds in the US and Mexico. Without cultural hybridization,
novel, creative cultural practices are starved of one important evolutionary pathway.
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The United States has pursued, to some
degree, both the Mexican and the Canadian
models. Many of the nationalities that
migrated to the US have assimilated in true
melting pot fashion, but others have not for a
variety of reasons. There is some pressure for
immigrant groups to do so, to act “like
Americans” or to adopt “American” ways,
cultures and traditions. On the other hand,
Americans are regularly encouraged to respect Figure 9-8: Los Angeles, CA – The Kogi Burrito mixes Korean
and Mexican culinary practices. It is an outstanding
the diversity of the many dozens of ethnicities example of the complexities associated with ethnic identity,
cultural hybridization and how foodways mark ethnicity.
who constitute the American “salad bowl”.
The result has been complicated. Neither Mexico, nor Canada has had the sort of ethnic
tensions, riots and violence that the US has seen, but neither of America’s neighbors have
spawned the sort of cultural innovations the US has become well known for: rock n’ roll, rap
and jazz; airplanes, light bulbs and movie theaters; football, basketball and skateboarding.
Space Makes Race
Geographers like to argue that “space makes race” because we believe that spatial processes
are ultimately responsible for the emergence of racial categories and ethnic difference. In the
early history of humankind, there were no ethnicities. Everyone belonged to a single, very
small group. As our species grew more numerous and the search for resources (or
adventure) led groups to venture out of Africa, languages evolved, multiple religions were
established and our bodies changed in response to the new local conditions in which people
found themselves. Our inability to move quickly across the globe, to meet and breed people
from other continents reinforced our regional differences.
Imagine what would happen if someone invented an app for cell phones that could instantly
transport you to any spot on the planet, thereby removing the friction of distance. Within a
dozen generations, humans around the globe would begin to look more alike (generally
speaking) as racial and ethnic intermarriage accelerated rapidly, a single world language
would begin to emerge, perhaps a single world religion would begin to emerge, and maybe
we would begin to think of ourselves as earthlings or Terrans, rather than “Americans”,
“Germans”, “Chinese”, etc. Or maybe not. Perhaps there is some psychological reason
compelling people to consider themselves part of some group, or at the very least identify
groups of which they are not a member. What is clear however, is that geography factors
heavily into the formation of identity groups.
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Physical Geography of Race
Human beings have a number of physiological adaptations to climate, but skin color is the
most noticeable one. Humans living in the tropical regions of the world are exposed to
much more sunlight during the course of a year than those living closer to the North or
South Poles. Researchers suggest that the variations in skin pigmentation may have taken as
little as 100 generations to appear across the globe and there is evidence that the process is
reversible.
YouTube
This video cartoon,
inspired by the Dr.
Suess story, “The
Sneetches” cleverly
captures the desire of
many groups to build
an exclusive identity,
largely by creating
“the other” through
reference to physical
appearance.
(8:45 minutes)
Theory holds that dark skin is an evolutionary adaptation that helps protect people from the
damaging effects of the sun’s ultra violet radiation. Darker skinned people had an
evolutionary advantage over lighter skinned people in very sunny locations. However,
sunlight also provides vitamin D, an essential dietary nutrient, especially for lactating
mothers. People living in sunlight-deprived areas, like northern Europe, get less vitamin D
from the sun than those in sunny regions of the world. Darker skin reduces the body’s
natural production of vitamin D. Therefore, persons with lighter skin absorb more vitamin
D and have a slight evolutionary advantage over those with darker skin in places where it is
perpetually cloudy or where sunlight is scarce during long winter months.
The inability to absorb vitamin D into the system may also have also factored into the
development of lactose tolerance, and the subsequent dairy culture in Europe. Most adult
mammals cannot drink milk because of an inability to produce lactase, an enzyme that
metabolizes lactose. Most Europeans though can drink milk. Was this because millennia
ago, they were, as a group, so deficient in vitamin D / calcium that the rare persons that was
lactose tolerant had a massive evolutionary advantage over the majority who were lactose
intolerant? In any case, where was and continues to be a foundational, causal variable in the
construction and maintenance of our ideas about who we are, what we do and why we do it.
Baby’s Got Back – Geography and Standards of Beauty
Cultural factors also play a role in shaping our biological characteristics as well. Some of
these characteristics, like skin tone, height, or body morphology are partly determined by
local or regional standards for physical attractiveness in a process known as sexual selection.
Over the course of thousands of years, these sorts of preferences, rooted in local conditions
(and perhaps random fascinations) have lent themselves to regional evolutionary changes in
body morphology that have contributed to racial or ethnic characteristics.
Across the globe differences emerged in what men and women consider attractive in the
opposite sex. Preferences regarding height, weight, eyes, hair, skin tone and body
morphology vary greatly in different parts of the world. For example, for many generations
Chinese men valued tiny feet and therefore the feet of girls and young women were bound.
Presumably, tall women with naturally big feet were considered less desirable than short
women with smallish feet. Did the presence of this sexual preference help make the Chinese
much shorter on average, than the Dutch?
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In West Africa, where maternal societies and a cult of fertility characterized many cultures
for many generations, a preference for large buttocks, especially on females emerged. Among
places where food insecurity threatened the lives of infants, a big round derriere may have
been a sign of good health and some insurance to men seeking mates that their children
would more likely survive. In Japan, a place with a vastly different agricultural and religious
history from West Africa, this taste preference is muted or even reversed.
In the United States, especially during the
1970s and 1980s, many people worked hard to
darken their skin to meet an evolving standard
of beauty. For light skinned women to seek a
dark tan would have made little sense to
earlier generations of Americans that sought
to shelter from the sun as much as possible to
prevent tanning. A standard explanation for
this shift in cultural practice is rooted in time
Figure 9-9: Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA: Chinese women,
and space. During the agricultural era, a tan
especially older ones are careful to avoid exposure to the
was a sign of poverty because agricultural field sun as they cling to standards of beauty more common in
agricultural China.
laborers worked long hours in the sun.
Following the industrial revolution, impoverished people increasingly worked in factories,
and as a result were kept pale by working long-hours indoors. The wealthier classes finding
themselves now indistinguishable from the impoverished classes, began to tan in order to
signify their status via their ability to engage in outdoor leisure activities, like going to the
beach. In recent years however, the threat of skin cancer and shifting demographics have
confounded this American beauty standard once again.
Identity Maintenance – Ghettos
Once identities are created, they are in
constant danger of alteration or elimination.
People can move away from a region,
draining a group of the critical mass needed
to sustain a group identity. This process is
known as the clearance model of ethnic
change. Alternatively, a new ethnicity can
move into a region, overwhelming the
established host group, eroding their identity
of the host group. This process is known as
the changeover model. There are other
processes that affect the maintenance of
ethnic identity as well.
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Figure 9-10: Reseda, CA: This sign advertises a variety of
ethnic-based businesses. Cultural hybridity and new ethnic
identities are possible in neighborhoods such as this one.
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Several of the key ways identities are preserved, maintained or enforced are spatial. The
simplest way to preserve or maintain an ethnicity is to live in an inaccessible location. In the
United States for example, Cajuns and Creoles (French speaking people of Louisiana) have
managed to maintain their identity for hundreds of years, partly because they lived in a
swampy part of Louisiana where railroad and highway infrastructure was late to arrive.
People on various islands, in mountainous regions and other hard-to-get to places find their
identity insulated from the degrading effects of immigration and emigration.
The less benign practice of ethnic ghettoization is an attempt to enforce the maintenance of
ethnic identities. The term ghetto has been historically used to identify areas of a city where
specific minority groups were forced to live. In recent years, the term has been largely used
by Americans in reference only to poor African-American neighborhoods. It is important to
recognize that ghettos have a very long history, can be found in most every county on earth,
and any ethnic group can be ghettoized. Certainly the Chinatown districts of many US cities
qualified as ghettos during much of the 19th and 20th centuries, before legal changes made
housing discrimination unlawful. The Nazis confined Jewish people to ghettos during their
reign of terror across Europe.
Today, the less value-laden term, ethnic
enclave might be a better term to describe
neighborhoods dominated by a single
ethnicity. Some more well-off ethnic enclaves
are called ethno-burbs. The large concentration
of Asians in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley is
a good example of an ethno-burb.
It is reasonably easy to understand why a
group of people invested in racist/bigoted
9-11: Altgeld Gardens: Chicago, IL. This public housing
built after World War II to house black veterans
ideologies and/or sheer ignorance would seek project
after the war was built on an abandonned landfill. It
remains a black neighborhood and numerous toxic hazards
to isolate people who are different from
themselves. Keeping groups separate makes it remain in the vicinity. Source: Wikimedia
easier for groups in power to maintain the status quo. Residential proximity invites the
children of from different groups to fall in love, make babies or just learn from one another.
Any of which is likely lead to the dilution of the “purity” of identity, whatever that identity is
based upon (race, religion, nationality, language, etc.). More importantly, allowing people
from different groups to live together makes it difficult for people from a dominant group to
exercise and maintain political and economic power over any subjugated group(s). Marxists
argue that racism and/or ethnic bias is one of the most important tools by which capitalists
maintain power. They argue that the construction of race and ethnicity allows people to
justify economic, political and military dominance over a group. Marxists often maintain
that race is the cultural clothing of capitalism. It may well be.
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Kay J. Anderson.
1987. Annals of the
Association of
American
Geographers. The
Idea of Chinatown:
The Power of Place
and Institutional
Practice in the
Making of a Racial
Category. Vol. 77, No.
4, pp. 580-598
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Environmental Racism
In addition to keeping specific groups of people residentially separated, ghettos seem to
serve a variety of other unpleasant functions as well. Ghettos have been treated for many
years as dumping grounds for a variety of social ills and civic disamenities. For example,
Chinatown regions across the West Coast were permitted by white public officials to
continue to host brothels, opium dens and gambling houses. Rather than engendering pity
for the Chinese that were left without protection from the law, the lack of police
enforcement in these regions of the city reinforced negative stereotypes about Chinese
people.
Ghettos are also frequently subject to industrial disamenities; health hazards not found
elsewhere in the urban environment. Air, water and ground pollutants are frequently worst
in poor, minority neighborhoods leading to the evolution of what some call environmental
racism. Historically, laundry activities were considered a nuisance – soap making was hot,
dirty and often foul-smelling, so “washhouses” were often confined to Chinese ghettos –
giving rise to the institution of the Chinese Laundry. Many similar conditions exist today.
Clearly black and brown residents in many cities suffer from higher rates of environmental
health issues like asthma and obesity than non-Hispanic Whites. These statistics may be
caused partly by ethnic cultural practices and poverty, but it is also clear that poor minority
people are least able to move away from polluted neighborhoods, most of which were
established long before the Civil Rights era. Minority groups also have more trouble
defending their right to healthy neighborhood via the political process.
In addition to the obvious toxic pollutants,
environmental hazards in the form of things
like predatory lenders, fast food, noise and
even the lack of disaster planning may
undermine the ability of residents living in
minority neighborhoods to live as long and
well as fellow citizens across town. For
example, during Hurricane Katrina (2005),
black residents of New Orleans were neglected
by the city’s hurricane evacuation plan because Figure 9-12: Chicago, IL. Vast crowds dressed in green line
streets for the Saint Patrick’s Day parade, a jubilant
the plan was designed to cater to people who
celebration of an ethnic heritage (Irish) that was once
owned automobiles. A significant percentage
subdued in the United States.
(100,000 people) of the city’s black population
relied on public transport and were therefore unable to take advantage of the city’s
evacuation plan.
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Positives
While many of the effects of ghettoization undermine the quality of life of minority groups,
it must be noted that there are positive outcomes from ghettoization as well. This is not to
justify the official and unofficial discriminatory practices (see section below), but to argue
instead that the spatial concentration of minorities creates situations that affected groups
have leveraged to their advantage.
First, diversity is preserved via ghettoization,
just as those who engineered these elements of
cities hoped. By undermining the prospects of
intermarriage and assimilation, excluded
groups remain somewhat distinct from the
host culture. If every minority group melted
perfectly into the host culture, then everyone
would be robbed of many of the wonderful
cultural aspects of a diverse society. Large
Figure 9-13: Los Angeles, CA – Immigrant Thais have
cities are exciting and enriching precisely
creatively re-used this hot dog stand. The mish-mash of
because they have diversity. Certainly, lots of
American and Thai influences points to the competing
forces that challenge the immigrant assimilation process.
people enjoy the wide variety of ethnic foods
in cities where ethnic identities remain strong, but there’s far more at risk should the
distinctiveness of ethnic populations erode. Minority religious traditions, languages,
philosophies, arts and economic practices would all suffer if complete assimilation were to
occur.
Other benefits accrue to ethnic groups who remain living in close proximity to each other.
Mutual support, in a variety of forms (economic, political, recreational, etc.) is easier when
members of an ethnic group live close near one another. A reduction in some types of
conflict may occur if people of like values and traditions are neighbors. Opinions regarding
how late a party should go, or what a proper lawn should look like may vary less in
neighborhoods where residents come from a common background. Recent immigrants,
even those seeking to shed their ethnic heritage, no doubt would find an ethnic enclave an
easier place to begin the acculturation and assimilation process than a neighborhood
dominated by a host culture group.
Ethnic minorities seeking to preserve their traditions and identities also stand a greater
chance of exercising political power if they live together; concentrating voting power in
specific areas. A number of voting districts are gerrymandered in order to help promote (or
deny) the interests of specific ethnicities. Even simple pleasures, like finding someone who
also likes to play certain games, like dominoes or cricket; or finding a bakery that makes an
ethnic-specialty food (e.g., pan de muerto, king cakes, laffa bread or knishes) is easier when
people who share an ethnic identity cluster together.
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Space and Race
Geography plays a significant role in the construction and
maintenance of ethnic identities. During the early period of human
history, a strong sense of “us and them” probably did not exist,
because finding “them” was more difficult. Consider for example that
the character for “China” also means “middle” or “center”. This
symbol suggests that the Chinese, like many other ancient
civilizations, thought of themselves as the center of the world; they
were “the people”.
Figure 9-14: The Chinese
character for China is a
stylized globe – the world.
Geographic mobility creates contact with outside groups and thus invites the creation of a
sense of difference, thus creating the idea of ethnicity. Migration and invasion heightens the
importance of identity. A person living in a region where their identity is matched by all
others would find themselves, after migrating elsewhere, now strange or peculiar in the eyes
of the dominant group where they migrated, a source of fascination or ridicule and scorn.
People once part of the majority – and therefore not “ethnic” become “ethnic” by migrating
to a location where they are in the minority. Alternatively, one may move from a location
where they are considered an ethnic minority to another location where they are not
considered ethnic. This could happen if they migrated to a location where their ethnicity
was in the majority, or it could happen if they migrated to a location where the
characteristics that classified them as a minority ethnicity did not exist. The social
construction of ethnicity is fluid.
African-American and Blackness
In the US, the primary ethnic divide was built around an ever-changing definition of black
and white. Early on, and in some regions of the US, there were multiple ideas about what
made a person black or white. It was only during the late 19th and early 20th century, during
Figure 9-15: Cumberland Posey, a famous baseball and basketball player from Homestead, Pennsylvania was considered
“black” because local people knew of his family’s partial African ancestry. He played baseball in the “Negro Leagues” and
basketball in the Black Fives league. His first cousins, (right) moved to Ohio in the early 1900s, and passed for “white” in
another town where their family history was less well known. The younger men in the photo fought in World War II in allwhite units and attended white schools. Geography changed their race.
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the height of the Jim Crow era, that stricter “blood laws” were enacted. Some states declared
specific percentages (one-fourth, one-eighth) of ancestry as a legal limit to be considered
legally white or black. In some places, there was an official policy that ruled that any person
with any ancestry from Africa was considered African-American, regardless of their
physical appearance. These were known as “one drop” rules. It is interesting to note that
before the great period of European migration in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a large
percentage of Americans were of mixed African, European and Native ancestry. In 1930, the
US Census Bureau even stopped using the designation “mulatto” to indicate people of
mixed ancestry. Subsequent censuses (1940-1960), black (“negro”) and white were the only
options.
Some of these laws remained intact until the late 1960s, when the Supreme Court struck
them down. Such laws were made necessary in part because other laws and regulations
required people to be treated as either black or white. Most laws did not account for mixed
ancestry people, so they forced people to be classified as one or the other. The US military
was segregated by race until 1948. Blood rules forced the military to render a racial
judgment on each soldier or sailor so they could assign individuals into race-based units.
Similar laws, known as blood quantum rules may still be applied to determine membership
in various American Indian tribes. It wasn’t until the 2000 census that the government
allowed people of mixed heritage to once again identify by more than a single category.
The effect of these laws remains strong in the
United States. Persons of mixed ancestry
generally are pressured by society to identify
themselves with a single heritage, especially if
they have even an identifiable percentage of
African ancestry. This is probably because
black people were the group most often
targeted by the old blood laws. Those
definitions linger. According to DNA tests,
Figure 9-16: Born of a European mother and an African
African-Americans are on average about
father, Barack Obama is still considered only “black”. It
20% “white”. About 10 percent of Africanshows that even the “most powerful man on the planet” is
Americans are more than half white in terms unable to overcome the cultural notions of race in the US.
of ancestry, but still identify (or are identified) as “black”. Even very well-known people of
mixed ancestry, like President Barack Obama and golfer Tiger Woods are forced to identify
as a single ethnic category, sometimes over their very public objections. Woods is considered
black in America, but he calls himself Cablinasian, a word he made-up to reflects his
ancestry that includes Caucasians, Black, American Indian and Asian. In Thailand he is
embraced as “Thai”, the home country of his mother. The unfortunate lesson here is that it
frequently doesn’t matter what you think you are, if everyone else insists that you are
something different.
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In South Africa, where race-based apartheid government policies lasted until the mid-1990s,
officials devised a variety of tests to determine individual’s inclusion as a white, coloured or
black. Consider for example, the so-called pencil test in which a pencil was stuck in an
individual’s hair. If the pencil did not fall out easily, the individual might be classified as
black. In one famous case, a girl whose parents were both legally recognized as white, was
reclassified as coloured, and subsequently removed from her all-white school, though her
parents remained white.
Light skinned black people could move from the United States or South Africa and suddenly
find themselves white. For example, in many places in Latin America or the Caribbean light
skinned persons of mixed ancestry are generally considered white. Brazilians who were
considered white in their home country often find themselves black once they move to the
United States. Such migrants must navigate a potential minefield of bigotry and anger.
Americans may simply consider these immigrants “black” without reflecting much about
the way the person from Brazil might self-identify. Discrimination could ensue. If the
immigrants deny their African heritage by claiming that they are white, then American
blacks may be off-put or upset.
Ethnicity and the Economy
Your ethnicity may also guide
(not determine!) how you
navigate a number of life
obstacles. For example, students
on multi-ethnic campuses can see
this process unfolding across the
university campus. Certain
ethnicities are easier to find in
engineering and business
buildings. Some ethnicities are
particularly rare in majors like
Anthropology or Agriculture.
Gender biases compound these
9-17: A graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Note the significant
differences in occupation by gender and ethnicity.
tendencies further. Students
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110914.htm
chose majors in part because of
the values placed on certain career paths by their family and/or community. These biases
play out in a number of areas in the economy.
Some of these difference come from what varying ethnicities value. Some groups seem to
value most careers that are high-paying. Other groups seem to value prestigious
occupations. Still others value occupations that have intrinsic rewards or those with specific
fringe benefits, like ample vacation time, or good health care packages. Some folks just hate
to have a boss, and so chose to be self-employed. In the US, About 13% of white males are
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self-employed. Black males are about half as
likely to be self-employed. Men from Israel or
Korea are mostly like to be self-employed at
around 30%. Immigrants come to America
sometimes pre-equipped with specific skills –
especially if they are coming a great distance.
Because it can be expensive to get into the US,
groups including Koreans and Israelis often
have some business experience prior to
Figure 9-18: Prague, Czech Republic. In Europe, many Asian
arriving in the US. Other migrant groups,
immigrants are self-employed as they are in the US.
especially those from nearby countries like
Migrants from more distant regions tend to bring more
skills than migrants from neighboring countries.
Mexico or Honduras, generally have a
shorter, less costly journey to America, allowing them to arrive in the US with fewer skills.
Again, location factors into a robust understanding of why things are the way they are.
Other elements of occupational choice are a bit more mundane. You may get a job in a field
because some relative helped you get started. Particularly in big cities, where employment
niches get a chance to fully develop, you’ll find specific job categories or business dominated
by a single ethnicity. A great example is the motel or hospitality industry where South
Asian-Americans operate about half of all US motels. Interestingly, most of these South
Asians are Gujuratis, a linguistic ethnic group from India and Pakistan. So strong are family
connections in this process that a single name dominates this area of the hospitality
industry, lending itself to the catch phrase used to describe these establishments: the “Patel
Motel.” It appears that a single Gujurati man, who opened a sort of youth hostel in the US
during the 1940s, may have started a snowballing process. He was able to demonstrate that a
farmer from India could succeed in this particular industry, inspiring others from the same
region. Many of the others that tried, and succeeded in running a motel, invited friends and
relatives to work for them; and naturally after a few years those employees ventured out and
started running a motel for themselves. This particular industry has built in advantages for
impoverished immigrants seeking a better life for their family, including built-in and
housing and an opportunity for women to stay-at-home with children.
Other sectors of the economy may have a less random origin. For example, KoreanAmericans own almost all stores that sell hair-care products for African-Americans. It is
somewhat bizarre reality, but it can be traced largely to a few international trade policies
adopted by the US and South Korea decades ago that made Korean wig manufacturers and
distributors more competitive than those from other countries. Korean-Americans came to
dominate the industry, and the web of familial and linguistic ties (and barriers) has made it
difficult for non-Koreans (including African-Americans) to break into a business that
largely caters to African-Americans.
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Ethnic Regions
If you zoom out from the scale of the city, you will see ethnicity articulated on the landscape,
sometimes over vast distances. In the United States, there are a handful of regions that are
heavily influenced by a single ethnicity, even though barriers to entry to any of these places
is uncomplicated; and most Americans don’t really care too much about it. The US
constitution does a reasonably good job of protecting the rights of minorities of all stripes. In
other parts of the world, regional and ethnic differences can be explosively dangerous.
Historic patterns of migration have created three main ethnic regions in the United States.
Around a dozen smaller ethnic regions can be found as well. Known sometimes as ethnic
islands, they may occupy areas as small as a single county. The largest ethnic region in the
US is German-American. It’s hard to discern what would make such a vast region ethnically
German though because so much of American culture is derived from German-Americans.
Clearly some areas are more culturally Germanic than other regions within the vast swath of
counties that are predominantly German-American. For example, people in Wisconsin may
drink more beer, eat more knackwurst and sauerkraut, and celebrate Oktoberfest more
heartily than people in Tennessee. Still, to the outsider, German-America is difficult to
characterize as fundamentally distinct from the Mid-South which appears on the map below
as “American-American”.
Figure 9-19: Map of US Ethnicity by County – This maps shows the dominant “Ancestry” in each US county in 2000. Source: US
Census Bureau / Wikimedia.
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The other large ethnic regions in the US are the
Mexican Borderlands and the so-called Black Belt in
the Lowland South. These latter two regions are
distinguished by cultural traditions that are more
recognizably distinct from the mainstream. Foodways,
musical traditions, holiday celebrations and a host of
other cultural practices mark these two regions as
somewhat unique from the rest of the US. In the
Southern Black Belt, you might eat a soul food supper
with collard greens, black-eyed peas and chitterlings
(chitlins) with sweet potato pie at a Juneteenth
Figure 9-20: Infographic. Note the large percent
celebration. In the Mexican Borderlands, you might
of Americans that claim German and Irish
eat gorditas, pozole and tamales with churros for
heritage. There was a time in some parts of the
US when a much lower percent claimed their
dessert at a Día de Muertos party. You might not as
Irish heritage. Most American families, if they
well. Those characterizations of the Black Belt and the have been in the US long have mixed ancestry.
Mexican Borderlands are stereotypical, but either scenario would seem exotic in Iowa.
There are a number of much smaller ethnic islands as well. They are too numerous for an
introductory textbook, but so interesting that at least a few deserve some attention in hopes
that students will be interested in visiting or learning more. Italian-Americans are the
dominant group in many areas in the Northeast. Irish-Americans live in many of the same
locations as the Italian-Americans. Norwegian-Americans, as well as other descendants of
Scandinavian ancestors form a number of ethnic islands in Minnesota and the Dakotas.
Cajuns, descendants of French-Canadians migrants dominate regions of swampy southern
Louisiana. Spanish-Americans are numerous in much of northern New Mexico.
Process
The processes that create ghettos, ethnic
islands and ethnic regions are varied. Much
of it is mundane or ordinary. Some causal
factors are more interesting than others. The
factors be attributed to racism or ethnic
prejudice get most of our attention. There is
Figure 9-21: Glendale, CA . Armenians settled in specific
an element of accident to a number of
suburbs of Los Angeles in large numbers drawn by the
migration stories, so accidental or random
availability of schools, churches and other amenities, such as
this market. People feel at home in enclaves, but residence in
processes should not be discounted. It’s not
them may delay entry into the American mainstream.
unusual to hear a story about why some
great-great-grandfather moved to a certain city turn out to be as simple as “my car (wagon)
broke down here” or “I only had enough money to get this far”. Chaos theory and a variety
of stochastic processes help social scientists explain and/or predict a number of social and
cultural phenomena that happen randomly.
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Terry G. Jordan. 1989.
Preadaptation and
European Colonization
in Rural North
America. Annals of the
Association of
American Geographers,
79:4: 489-500
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Environment and Ethnicity
Many of the locations that are attractive to migrants are those that remind them of their
homelands. It makes some sense that Scandinavians found Minnesota to their liking. The
Spanish found a familiar Mediterranean climate in Southern California. Germans probably
found the Midwest similar to the North European plain. When cultures are well suited to
thrive in a new environment, they enjoy some measure of cultural preadaptation. For
example, Dutch people from Holland, having generations of experience with draining the
Zuiderzee using an elaborate system of drainage ditches, windmills and dikes found taming
the marshy, tall-grass prairies scattered across the Midwest little trouble. Other Europeans
settlers considered the soggy wetlands of the Midwest worthless wastelands. On the flip side,
the English were culturally maladapted to settlement in both the Massachusetts and
Virginia colonies. This maladaptation occasionally resulted in catastrophic failure. The
English who survived learned new strategies for agriculture and housing in the extreme
climates of the North America, where heavy forests and unfamiliar soils conditions posed
considerable challenges. Mormon migrants to the Great Basin in Utah likewise were forced
to quickly adapt to different climate conditions from those they were accustomed back East.
It’s really very surprising that the Cajuns managed to survive in the swamps of Louisiana at
all after moving south from Canada.
Enforced Ethnic Regions
Some ethnic regions, ghettos,
enclaves and islands, have been
engineered to purposefully isolate
specific groups. Most famously,
North American Indians were
forcibly removed from their
lands, eventually restricted to
small parcels called reservations,
often near ancestral lands of the
tribe. Occasionally, Indians were
relocated to reservations many
9-22: Trail of Tears Map. How different or similar are the topography,
hundreds of miles from their
climate, flora and fauna of Oklahoma to the homeland areas from which
Indians were removed? Source: Wikimedia
homelands. The famous trail of
tears was a product of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to the relocation of some
46,000 Native Americans to Oklahoma from various locations in the American Southeast.
Oklahoma’s grasslands climate and environment made survival difficult for Indians from
the forested regions of the upland South and Florida.
Following the Civil War, a wide variety of strategies, aimed at limiting the geographic
distribution of African Americans evolved in the United States. Early on, very simple legal
measures were enacted that restricted African Americans to certain locations, especially in
the Jim Crow South. Such laws were found unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in
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1917 (Buchanan v Warley). More sophisticated
segregation methods emerged quickly thereafter.
Restrictive or exclusionary covenants were written into
the deed of sale for many homes sold in the 20th
century. These legal documents mostly prohibited
owners from doing mundane things like building
garages, fences or porches, but they sometimes also
forbade the sale of the house to specific ethnicities.
Black folks were frequently the target of this brand of
discrimination, but Jews, Catholics, Chinese and other
ethnic groups also found themselves victims of
restrictive covenants. It was once illegal to even sell or
rent property to Jewish people in Beverly Hills.
9-23: A homeowner’s deed containing
restrictive and exclusionary covenants, sold in
Ohio for housing in Florida. Source: Wikimedia
After 1948, when the Supreme Court found these
restrictive covenants also unconstitutional, yet
additional means to maintain housing segregation
evolved. Realtors, fearing a loss of profits through
the degradation of home values, sometimes would
simply refuse to sell minorities houses in specific
neighborhoods. Other practices might involve
making it harder or more expensive for specific
ethnicities to buy or rent in certain
neighborhoods. Banks and other lenders also
9-24: This sign was erected in 1942 near a proposed
practiced mortgage discrimination, which
housing project in Detroit. Rioting followed. Note the
effectively kept ethnic homebuyers out of selected use of the American flag, during World War II.
Eventually the National Guard arrived to protect the
neighborhoods by denying loans, or making them black residents. Source: Wikimedia.
irrationally expensive. There is evidence that this last practice continues to some degree
today. Another related practice, redlining, is discussed in the urban geography chapter.
One of the most controversial practices, known as blockbusting was used to some effect,
especially in cities in the Industrial Midwest. The practice worked like this: realtors would
convince white home owners that the presence of a black family living nearby had eroded
the value of all nearbyhousing. If the realtor could convince the white owners of this
argument, the realtor would buy the property at below actual market value from the white
home owner¸ and often seek to sell it to a prospective black homeowner at above market
value. Real estate speculators, land developers and lenders all made substantial profits from
the scam. White and black homeowners alike lost money. The Fair Housing act of 1968
outlawed blockbusting, well after most of the damage was done. Blockbusting no doubt
accelerated the most common, process of ethnic segregation, known as white flight, in
which white people moved from heterogeneous inner city locations, to homogenous, largely
white suburbs and exurbs.
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More benign, perhaps even subconscious, actions also create and maintain ethnic
neighborhoods. One realtor behavior called steering may be still widespread today. Steering
happens when a realtors, in an attempt to sell a prospective buyer a house, focuses the
buyer’s attention on houses in neighborhoods predominated by persons of the prospective
buyer’s ethnicity. Whether this is always a purposeful, discriminatory act, or simply a logic
geared to help find people homes in neighborhoods where they “feel at home” is less clear.
Even some of the actions taken by national and local governments seem to have contributed
to ghettoization of minority groups. There is some debate about the intentionality of the
government, and the overall-long term effect of American public housing efforts, but public
housing projects designed to offer affordable housing to inner city residents appear to have,
at the very least, contributed to the maintenance of ethnically segregated neighborhoods in
many cities where they were built. They certainly became for many years icons of black
ghettoization in the United States. The effect of other government policies, including the
Interstate Highway Act, redlining and Federal Housing Authority polices are discussed later.
Black Ghetto Typology
Because they develop in different places and
different times, ghettos do not all look alike.
Geographers Larry Ford and Ernst Griffin
developed a partial typology of black ghettos
in the United States based on their
morphological evolution. The various
patterns of black ghettos on a map offer
valuable insight into the differing methods of
discrimination in the United States, and the
peculiar differences in black-white
relationship across the US.
Early Southern
Before the Civil War, most African
Americans lived in the Deep South. Most
were enslaved. Most enslaved persons lived
on farms, but a substantial number lived in
Figure 9-25: Early Southern Ghetto. Black people lived on
the same property as whites, often in small houses along
cities, like Charleston, New Orleans, and
alleyways before the Civil War.
Atlanta. Urban Blacks folks, living in the
South during this period were largely domestic servants and because most were enslaved,
they were required to live essentially with the white slave holders. Both enslaved and Free
People of Color were typically quartered on the property of white employers/slavers,
generally in a small house, or stable facility at the rear of the main house, along the alley, or
as they say down South, “in the lanes.”
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The close physical proximity combined with the exceptional differences in economic and
social status produced a peculiar type of ghetto where Blacks and Whites lived together, but
very much apart at the same time. Intense day-to-day sharing of space inevitably leads to
cultural exchange and even fondness, but in a system that demanded at least the appearance
of separation, and maintained the potential for horrific consequences for the enslaved.
Larry Ford and Ernst
Griffin. “The
Ghettoization of
Paradise.”
Geographical Review,
Vol. 69, No. 2 (Apr.,
1979), pp. 140-158
Article DOI:
10.2307/214961
http://www.jstor.org
/stable/214961
Classic Southern
During the Civil War, Blacks were freed from
slavery, but most Blacks in the South
continued to live on farms for several
generations. As industrialization crept
forward, Blacks (and others) moved in greater
numbers to cities in both the North and the
South. In southern cities, where Blacks were
sometimes a majority of the population, Jim
Crow segregation laws kept Black people in
specific areas of town, thus creating type of
Black neighborhood known as the Classic
Southern ghetto. Often, about half a city or
town was set aside for African-Americans.
Often, the dividing line between Whites and
Blacks was a rail line (or some other transport
corridor), giving rise to the expression “other
side of the tracks”. Many cities around the
South fit this model still today.
Figure 9-26: Classic Southern Ghetto. Black folks following
the Civil War were required to live on “the other side of the
tracks”.
Early Northern, Classic Northern
Outside of the slave holding regions of the South, the pattern of black ghettoization evolved
quite differently. Blacks were originally a very small minority in northern cities. As such,
they competed for precious housing space near downtown with other minority populations,
most of whom were recent migrants to the city. In the figure below you can see Blacks, along
with Anglo Whites and two other minority groups represented by the blue and peach colors
(Irish and Italians?). This pattern represents the Early Northern ghetto. Over the years,
European immigrants, unbound by law from leaving, moved from inner city regions of
northern cities. Their neighborhood were often taken over by African Americans, many of
whom had moved north from the Deep South looking for industrial jobs. Blacks whose
families had been in the North, perhaps for generations, were unable to move from inner
city neighborhoods because of discriminatory housing practices and laws. By the 1980s,
African Americans were outsized majorities in the inner cities of many of the Industrial
Midwest and Northeast. The intensity of black ghettoization is extreme in cities with Classic
Northern style ghettos. Cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee have much
higher segregation index scores than counterparts in the west or southern United States.
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Figure 9-27: Early Northern (left) and Classic Northern (right ) Black Ghettos. Typical of the pattern of black ghettoization in
cities in the Industrial Midwest and Northeast, blacks occupy an ever-increasing portion of the inner city. Note that other
minority groups occupy parts of the inner city in the Early Northern model and far less in the Classic Northern model.
New City
In the western United States, and parts of the Sunbelt, black ghettos evolved largely during
the age of the automobile. As a result, the morphology of the black ghetto reflected the
importance of the highway and interstate system that co-evolved with the car and the city.
These new cities grew rapidly after 1900, but had intense growth during and immediately
following World War II. Los Angeles is a classic example, where good jobs in defense
industries attracted large numbers of African Americans from the South, Midwest and East.
9-28: Housing Projects in St. Louis (left) and Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes in the mid-1990s. These well-intentioned public
housing efforts concentrated poor minorities in small areas of the city. Crime and other social dysfunction were common. Later
programs replaced large-scale housing projects thereby relieving some of the racial segregation created by these projects.
In cities like Los Angeles, Dallas and Phoenix that were built without efficient public
transportation systems, dense inner city cores never developed. Therefore, most families
bought single family homes. Multi-family apartment complexes that attracted in-migrants
of all ethnicities were sited near highways, where accessibility was greatest. As a result,
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ghettos in automobile friendly locations are
known as New City Ghettos, they tend to be
linear, stretching along a highway outward
from the CBD. In some cities, several distinct
“black corridors” developed. In the Southwest,
Latin American and Asian immigration have
occasionally generated additional linear
ghettos, replicating the style of black ghettos
formed earlier.
Ethnic Landscapes
Ethnicity is heavily inscribed onto the
landscape. It appears in many forms and helps
us better understand each other. Some ethnic
landscapes are a product of segregation. Many
Figure 9-29: New City Black Ghetto: In this model ethnic
American ghettos are African-American, but
ghettos evolve along corridors established by major
streets or highways. The blue areas may represent a
others are Latino or Asian in some fashion.
Mexican-American neighborhood.
Irish, Greek and Polish ghettos were once
more common. Most ghetto landscapes however were not built by the minority inhabitants
themselves, so often architecture offers few clues to the local cultural values, beliefs or
histories. So, geographers turn their attention to other elements of the landscape, including
businesses, how public space is used, graffiti, public art, as well as landscaping to extract
insight from the built environment. Think to yourself what visual elements of a minority
neighborhood (besides people) stand out to you as characteristic of a specific ethnicity? Are
their differences in the landscape of middle class Whites, Blacks, Asians or Latinos?
Ethnicity Based Tourist Landscapes
Landscape also can be misleading as well,
helping undermine enlightened
understandings, while helping create or
maintain faulty stereotypes about ethnic
minorities in a process called othering. One
of the prime sources of simplified ideas about
ethnicities are found in touristic landscapes,
like ethnic-themed destinations
(Chinatown), “wild west” themed locations
and ordinary tourist traps.
Figure 9-30: Columbus, OH – Restaurants, pubs, churches
and other institutions sometime linger on long after the
initial immigrant group has moved away. This old German
restaurant indicates a legacy ethnic enclave.
Ethnic islands, or enclaves dominated by a
specific ethnicity often try to attract visitors
by theming their location as a tourist destination. Many cities’ Chinatowns have done so
successfully, turning run-down slum ghettos into fun and visually interesting tourist traps.
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One of the key strategies used by almost all
designers in Chinatowns is to create
landscapes full of exaggerated architectural
motifs that conform to touristic expectations
about what Chinatown should look like, even
if one would be challenged to find actual
examples of such architecture in China itself.
Local residents (Chinese-Americans) have
every right to cash in on the erroneous beliefs
held by tourists, but it can also be argued that
places like Chinatown reinforce negative
stereotypes. On the other hand, if such
destinations did not build upon the
Figure 9-31: Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA. Buildings with
stereotypes held in the imaginations of
Chinese architectural motifs mark this area as a tourist zone
tourists, then tourist might not visit at all,
because they evoke the exotic. Asian neighborhoods in the
suburbs do not use these designs.
perhaps foregoing any opportunity for
outsiders to learn any truths about Chinese Americans or Chinese culture.
Tourist attractions, playing upon the ethnic heritage of many dozens of locations, draw
millions of visitors. Some claims to authenticity are dubious at best. The towns of Kingsburg
(Swedish) and Solvang (Danish) in California both attempt to leverage muddled
Scandinavian imagery to attract visitors. For example, both make ample use of windmills on
the landscape, assured that few Americans are aware that the Dutch (Netherlands) are the
ones who are most famous for them. Still visitors crowd the streets, particularly of Solvang,
happy to be strolling along, buying sweets in a miniature fantasyland.
Figure 9-32: Santa Nella, CA – This restaurant uses a
Dutch-style windmill to attract tourists. The windmill
is an icon that evokes Europe, excitement and
expectations about the food and atmosphere inside.
Figure 9-33: Indio, CA. The Riverside, California fairgrounds,
like many other landscapes in this desert community adopted
an exotic Arabian motif to attract visitors in the post war era.
Since the 1970s, the imagery has lost some appeal, but
remains. Note the small irony of the sponsor.
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9-34: Touristy tipis. Clockwise from upper left – Upstate New York, San Bernardino, California; Moab, Utah and Holbrook, Arizona.
None of these locations were likely to have had Indians that used this sort of housing. Why are people drawn to this imagery?
How do they help maintain simplistic, erroneous, stereotypes about Native Americans?
Perhaps the most unfortunate representations of ethnicity in the US seem to involve Native
Americans. Business people use Native American imagery to sell everything from trinkets at
roadside stands to motel rooms to slot machines. Surely no other ethnic group is so
consistently utilized as a tool for touristic commerce. The commodification of “Indian”, in
the generic, may help explain why Indians remain the only ethnic group so consistently
misused as mascots for sporting teams (see below).
Part of the reason Indian imagery is so
compelling is that it is hopelessly tied to
Americans’ collective fantasies about the
frontier era in the American West. Most people
have little idea of the staggering diversity of
languages and cultural practices among the
hundreds of Indian nations, tribes and bands
9-35: Buffalo Bill was a late 18th century entertainer whose
that continue to exist in the United States.
popular “Wild West” show helped to greatly simplify
Instead, most Americans, at least casually, think American knowledge of Indian culture. Hollywood adopted
the imagery which is preserved to this day, despite its
of Indians as a monolithic ethnicity; noble
inaccuracies. Source: Wikimedia
warriors, silent, primitive and respectful of
nature. Americans have learned little of value about Native Americans because our heavy
reliance upon the stereotyped Indian created by the movie industry. Hollywood chose a few
tribal practices, common only among Plains Indian cultures, modified them, and muted any
other representations.
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For example, tipis (or tee-pees) a folk era tenthouse once favored by nomadic tribes on the
Great Plains, such as the Lakota, Sioux and
Blackfoot, are the only Indian housing form
regularly appearing in movies. As a result, tipis
dot the landscape at tourist destinations from
California to Maine to Florida, though there is 9-36: Three Rivers, CA. This sign welcomes visitors to a
ample evidence that tipis were little used
national park. Is this an appropriate representation of
Americans? Why would this imagery be linked to a
outside the Central Plains. Indian headdresses, Native
park known for large trees? Would the imagery of any
tomahawks, bows and arrows, horseback
other ethnic group be used in such a manner?
riding and other iconography of the
Hollywood stereotype of Indians dominate the American landscape in diverse, spatially
inappropriate locations.
Washington Redskins
One of the most controversial uses of Indian imagery is for sports mascots. Most teams
eliminated Indian mascots decades ago (Stanford, Syracuse, etc.) but a few teams (Florida
State, Cleveland Indians, Chicago Blackhawks, etc.) cling to controversial mascots. None are
more controversial than the NFL franchise in Washington D.C.
Geographers would point to the role of space and place in creating
and maintaining this unfortunate situation. First, spatial thinkers
would point out that Native Americans were ghettoized in mass
reservations which prohibited other Americans from coming to
know Indians and Indian culture in any meaningful manner. The
spatial isolation of Indians has not only helped impoverish Native
Americans, but prevented the rest of America from the kind of direct
interpersonal contact that would undo the lasting effects of
Figure 9-37: The federal
Hollywood stereotyping. No other ethnic group could be so
capitol building, source of
consistently stereotyped and used for commercial purposes without a many racist policies, serves
as a background for a racist
significant cultural backlash from within and beyond that ethnicity.
mascot.
Imagine if a mascot to honor Jews, Blacks, Latinos or Asian epithets
and iconography were displayed in a similar fashion. Geographers would also argue that
because the federal government in Washington D.C. has been the primary source of racist
policies (though it’s ultimately the American population at large), having an Indian mascot
for a team from Washington DC is especially irritating to Indians.
TERMINOLOGY
What to call Indians is another source of controversy that is instructive on a number of
levels. The ability to name or label anything is important indicator of the locus of power,
which is often a geographic concept. The most popular theory regarding the word Indian
stems from Christopher Columbus mistakenly believing he had landed in South Asia in
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1492. Columbus assumed, incorrectly, that the people of the Caribbean were therefore Asian
Indians. The exonym stuck even though the indigenous people of the Americas were clearly
not from India.
During the Civil Rights era in the 1960s, American Indians, like other minority groups did a
good deal of agitating in favor of policy changes. In response, the United States government
adopted the term “Native American”, because somebody considered it less offensive than
“Indian”. The problem was that, like the term “Indian”, “Native American” was once again
imposed upon them by an outside group. Therefore, many Indians rejected the term as just
another symbol of abusive government power, preferring instead the age old term “Indian”,
or “American Indian.” This text uses “Indian” in deference to what the author perceives to
be the preference of the people to whom it refers. Other terms are occasionally used as well.
“First Peoples”, “First Nations” and “First Americans” are a broader, including peoples from
Canada and Alaska as well. “Indigenous Americans”, “Amerind” and a handful of other
terms have been forwarded as well to include a greater geographic range of persons from
both continents and adjacent islands. Ideally, it would be best to use the endonym
referencing a specific national identity, like “Cherokee”, “Ute” or “Chumash” where
possible.
Help Keep this Text Free
Similar consideration should be used when referring to Asians. Most folks know that
“Oriental” refers to things like rugs and food, rather than a group of ethnicities. When
possible, each of us should try to identify specific ethnicities (Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
Bengali, Tajik) rather than lumping diverse groups into a single blanket term. To do so is
not simple political correctness, but rather an indication of your knowledge of, and
sympathy for the identity of others. That courtesy is extended to the people of the United
States. All people of the western hemisphere (Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, Cubans) are
not referred to with the overly broad term “Americans”
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10
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GENDER AND SEXUAL IDENTITY
Our gender is one of the most important components of our identity, yet most people
understand little of the mechanisms responsible for the creation and maintenance of
the categories we use to identify ourselves. Gender categories are heavily laden with
expectations and conditions that deeply effect the lives of us all. All of which is
conditioned by geography. Where you live affects how others see you, how they label
you and how you understand yourself. Where you can go and what you can do is also
product of a place-based gender roles.
Are you a boy or a girl? Seems a simple enough question, and lots of people it is. For many
others, this question is not simple at all. There are dozens of chromosomal combinations,
body types and psychological orientations that fall outside of the traditional male-female
binary widely recognized by government, many religions and the average American.
Hundreds of babies are born every day that do not fall easily into one of the two traditional
categories: male or female. In the United States, doctors and parents generally assign a
gender to such babies, often when the person is an infant. Traditionally, Americans have
insisted that each individual “must be either a boy or a girl”, because only two gender
categories were available in American culture. A person could not be both. “Neither” was
also an unacceptable gender identity. However, gender categories, like race and ethnicity are
social constructions, and like most social constructions, they vary across time and through
space. In other parts of the world, people who do not fit neatly into the American gender
binary may have several additional gender categories available for them to select. People in
these other categories are hard to describe using the English language, because English has
no terminology sufficient to the task. Kathoey (Thai), Travesti (Brazilian Portuguese),
Femminello (Italian) and Hijra (Hindi/Urdu/Bengali) are terms other languages use to
express a range of gender identities that fall either between, or outside, the man -woman
binary known to English speakers. Alternative genders may be celebrated, or may be
condemned in other cultures. In the US, those who do not fall into traditional categories are
generally condemned and commonly suffer from physical abuse.
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In recent years, there has been a growing recognition here in the United
States that there is a complex rainbow of gender identities, well beyond
our culture’s simple monochromatic categorization system. This has led
to the adoption of the word transgender to help us to begin to develop a
third gender category. Still, congress, courts and voters argue in heated
terms about the legitimacy or desirability of allowing marriages between
Figure 10-1: Symbol:
Transgender. Source:
only a man and woman, always without a pause to consider what the
Wikimedia.
categories “man” and “woman” really mean. The disconnect between the
lived reality of tens of thousands of transgendered people and our vocabulary points to the
profound influence our language has upon our ability to conceptualize and solve problems.
Sometimes, the questions prompted by our culture’s resistance to recognizing more than
two gender identities isn’t as profound. Often, these questions are as mundane as, “which
restroom should I use?”
Evolution of Gender and Identity in California
I In 2013, state legislators in California passed a law protecting the right of schoolchildren to
select lavatories and sport teams based on their self-proclaimed gender identity rather than
their anatomy or chromosomal identity. It appears to be the first statewide law of its sort in
the United States. California officially recognized that some people do not fit into the
traditional gender binary. It’s hardly surprising that California would be the state to blaze
this trail. The Golden State has long been home to large populations of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgendered, and other people (LGBT) who fall outside traditional gender roles and
classifications. Why has this state developed a culture of acceptance while others have not?
The relative ease with which LGBT Californians go about their lives may be rooted in the
cultural diversity that was born with the Gold Rush. The San Francisco Bay Area may have
been the first place in the world to be truly globally multicultural. Tolerance for diversity was
a necessary component of life in California from its early days. Of course, California has had
ugly moments of racism and bigotry, but in general, Californians have been more tolerant
than most other Americans have. Californian’s tolerance for difference probably attracted
thousands of persecuted people from elsewhere a century or more, before World War II.
The bigotry of the US military during World War II, oddly enough, probably helped create
greater openness of toward gender identity tolerance in California. It appears that San
Francisco, which had a massive military role during World War II, became the primary
location where gay men were discharged from the military after they were discovered to be
gay. Often disgraced and vulnerable, gay former military men were often unable to return to
their hometowns. Many gay men appear to have opted to stay in California to build a life
after the war. They found that San Franciscans tolerated, perhaps even accepted, other
outcasts and misfits. Bohemians, radical poets and Beat Generation figures had already
established a significant presence in San Francisco during the post war era. These radicals
occupied night clubs, like the Black Cat and other social venues that openly accepted LGBT
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people. By the 1950s, several civil right groups focused on the rights of LGBT people
appeared in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Jose Sarria, an openly gay political activist and
regular at the Black Cat, even ran for office in 1961.
During the 1960s, San Francisco’s growing reputation
for gay tolerance attracted more gay men from around
the country. An entire neighborhood where gay men
could live in relative safety evolved in a region of the
city known as The Castro District. At the same time,
the nearby Haight-Asbury District evolved as the de
facto headquarters of the anti-establishment youth
culture. News spread through word of mouth and the
news media, that San Francisco was tolerant of
alternative lifestyles and alternative cultural politics.
People who felt uncomfortable, unwanted or unfit to
Figure 10-2: San Francisco, CA – A gay pride flag
live in other parts of the United States (and elsewhere) flies in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district
demonstrating this city’s exceptional
moved to San Francisco, providing additional
commitment to divesity and tolerance.
momentum to the tolerant cultural trajectory of Bay
Area and the rest of the state. In 1977, one of those migrants, Harvey Milk, became one of
the first openly LBGT persons elected to public office in the United States. He was
assassinated alongside the Mayor of San Francisco George Moscone in 1978
Same Sex Marriage
Perhaps the most visible arena of public
debate shedding light on our collective
understanding of gender is the fight over
same sex marriage. The topic is covered
briefly in the chapter on Political Geography,
but there the focus is on the question of
whether the government has a compelling
interest in directing who may marry who, and
the role of religious affiliation in shaping
Figure 10-3: Washington, DC – A sign at a rally for traditional
people’s willingness to seek governmental
marriage relies on traditional notions of gender. Source:
Wikimedia.
regulation over the legal union of any two
people. Another way to approach the question of same sex marriages is to call into question
the government’s ability to identify “sex” in a legally consistent pattern. If the law of a state
only recognizes “man” and “woman” as identities, what is to be done with people who have
indistinct gender identities (biological and/or psychological)? What criteria can feasibly
determine a person’s legal identity? Most often, a doctor in a delivery room makes this
determination moments after an infant is born, but sometimes it takes weeks to determine
the sex of an infant.
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Similar difficulties have arisen most notably in sports, especially Olympic sports, where
female athletes were for many years subject to gender verification to ensure they were
indeed women. The International Olympic Committee, FIFA and other sports governing
bodies have struggled to find a way to allow everyone to compete against people who share
similar hormonal and chromosomal profiles. During the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio,
800 meter gold medalist Caster Seymena was at the center of a controversy regarding her
inclusion in the women’s division of the sport because tests had reportedly shown her to
have exceptionally high levels of testosterone. Most laws fail to consider any of the
complexities of gender identification, and therefore identity questions are not a common
fixture of legal (or public) debates on marriage rights. Only, Connecticut and California
have managed to enact gender-neutral marriage rights, either through legislation or court
decisions.
Evolution of Gender Roles
The notions governing how men and women should behave, are called gender roles. These
largely unwritten rules are quite powerful, governing much of our behavior every day,
including how we dress, what courses college students enroll in, what kind of car we drive,
and even what we eat.
Gender roles are in a constant state of flux, and
they vary widely by geography, although many
people consider them immutable. Economic
systems have a great deal of influence upon
gender roles. For example, hunter-gatherer
societies and agriculturalists tend to have very
different gender roles. This fact is one of the
reasons why European efforts to enslave
Native Americans generally unsuccessful.
Enslaved Indians tended to be reluctant
Figure 10-4: San Miguel, CA – Missions in California failed for
a number of reasons, including disease and military
agriculturalists because farming / tending
shortcomings, but the sudden reassignment of gender roles
plants was considered women’s work among
to Indians undermined the economic viability and the
cultural health of missions across California.
many Indian males raised to be hunters and
warriors. Men from agricultural societies in West Africa often did not consider farming to
be women’s work, and were therefore not emasculated by farming. Spanish Missionaries in
California had similar difficulties convincing male Indian neophytes at the Missions to
abandon masculine hunting roles for more feminine agricultural roles.
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The Industrial Revolution brought additional
changes to gender roles. Women and men
had very similar economic roles in the
agricultural societies. Successful farming in
the pre-industrial age required all members of
the family work hard to plant, weed, harvest
and tend animals. Men and women and
children may have had different jobs back
then, but women were absolutely essential to
the survival of the family farm. Even in preFigure 10-5: Angelino Heights, CA – This grand Victorian
home evokes a period of history in which many of
industrial urban areas, women who were a
traditional gender role norms were idealized.
part of a family unit engaging in trades or
crafts required women played important economic functions in the production of goods
and the management of the family business. Geographers point out that the domestic spaces
(family houses) were simultaneously the family’s place of economic livelihood. Women and
men worked side by side in the “family factory” where they lived.
Gender roles changed dramatically during the industrial revolution of the 19th century,
when men, and sometimes women, started to work more frequently away from home. This
era, also known as the Victorian Era, has had an enduring impact on gender roles in the
United States and Europe. During this era, large numbers of middle class men began to
work away from the home, and middle class women, were left behind at home, tasked with
housekeeping and child-rearing. As the economic roles changed, so did other expectations
for women. Victorian values demanded women to be modest in dress, sober, private, and
impeccably moral, especially when it came to sexual mores and marriage.
Poor women, often worked as domestic workers, or occasionally in light industry factory
jobs where such employment was available; and though poor women may not have been
bound to their residences, such employment was considered improper by the upper classes,
who were influential in crafting public opinion on such matters. Women of all classes had
few rights to property, income, and political rights. They had little power over their own
bodies, especially if they were married. All this is especially ironic given that the most
powerful figure in the world at the time was Queen Victoria of England.
Victorian gender roles survived well into the mid-20th century. Additional changes in the
economy began to erode some of the rules governing the proper behavior for women. In the
United States and Europe, there grew a backlash against the repressiveness of Victorian
gender codes. In 1920, women won the right to vote in the US. During the subsequent
decade, many young women exercised their right to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, cut
their hair short, wear makeup and comfortable clothes, have sex and generally flaunt
authority. They called themselves flappers. Geographers would point out that flappers, also
had very different spatial behavior – they were not bound to the home like their Victorian
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counterparts. At the time, flappers elicited considerable controversy. Today, flappers are
widely considered important figures in the evolution of the women’s rights movement.
Flappers all but faded from the American
consciousness during the Great Depression,
but they were replaced admirably by the
iconic mythic figure Rosie the Riveter during
World War II. Women were needed to work
in factories because a significant percentage of
young male factory workers were called to
serve in the Armed Forces. Women stepped
out of the house and into the factories and
shipyards, places that had been largely
Figure 10-6: Nashville, TN – This “Rosie” operates a drill
reserved for men for the previous 100 years.
while working on a dive bomber in a factory during World
After the war, women who had experienced
War II. Source: Wikimedia.
the freedom of working outside the home in defense of their country demanded the right to
continue working outside the home, especially for good wages and benefits that came with
factory work. They had certainly earned it.
Women’s Reproductive Rights
Just as the economic system changed the role of women during the industrial revolution,
economic changes also bring changes to the degree to which women had control over their
bodies. In the pre-industrial era, women had little control over the number of children they
were expected to bear. There were several reasons for this. First, women had few rights in
many countries over their own bodies. In many societies, women were in varying degrees
considered the property of their fathers, brothers and/or husbands. Women often had little
say over who and when they had sex with, or even who they married. Refusing sex could be
very dangerous for in the context of marriage. Second, children are economic assets in preindustrial societies. In situations where children can contribute by working around the
house or farm, and where they represent important safeguards against starvation and
violence for elderly parents, families with numerous children are considered wealthy. In
places where a significant percentage of children die before they can become economically
useful, it was (is) wise to have as many children as possible – just in case disease or some
other misfortune takes some of them away.
Demographic Transition Model
The evolution of the world’s economic system had implications for women’s reproductive
rights, as well as population growth rates around the world. Geographers observed a regular
pattern of reduction in average family size during the industrial revolution. Their
observation were described in a theory known as the Demographic Transition Model.
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In stage one of the DTM, pre-industrial economics and gender roles required women bear
numerous children, often more than 10. This is because many will die before they reach
reproductive age themselves and because children are economically beneficial in the preindustrial, agricultural system. The overall population during stage one remains reasonably
stable, but may experience occasional rapid declines thanks to various plagues and famines.
During stage two, advances in nutrition, sanitation and medicine that accompany the
industrial revolution greatly reduces the death rate as countries industrialize. Not only do far
more children live to become adults, but women live far longer and therefore bear even
more children. During stage two, the growth rate of countries increases rapidly. In Europe
and the United States, stage two occurred roughly between 1800 and 1950.
Stage three occurs when people eventually realize that in an urban-industrial environment,
children are no longer economic assets, especially once children are forbidden to work in
factories and are forced to go to school. Children become very expensive to house and feed.
Once old-age insurance and other social security functions become available, children lose
Figure 10-7: Graphic representation of the Demographic Transition Model. The green line is the birth rate, the orange line
represents the death rate and the dotted blue line represents the rate of natural increase or population growth rate.
the last remaining economic value for familie…