DOCSLIB.ORG

Life, Chance & Life Chances

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Life, Chance & Life Chances Life, Chance & Life Chances Author(s): Lorraine Daston Source: Daedalus, Vol. 137, No. 1, On Life (Winter, 2008), pp. 5-14 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20028160 Accessed: 15-04-2019 09:14 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20028160?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Academy of Arts & Sciences, The MIT Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Daedalus This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Lorraine Daston Life, chance & life chances Like all men in Babylon, I have been pro ly situated and no one is able to design consul ; like all, I have been a slave. I have principles to favor his particular condi known omnipotence, ignominy, impris tion, the principles of justice are the re onment .... I owe that almost monstrous sult of a fair agreement or bargain. variety to an institution - the Lottery - which is unknown in other nations, or at - John Rawls, A Theory of Justice work in them imperfectly or secretly. JLhese two social fantasies, the Borgesi -Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Baby lon" an lottery and the Rawlsian veil of igno rance, seem to be poles apart: the one seeks to maximize the role of chance in The principles of justice are chosen be hind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that social arrangements, the other to mini no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in mize it. The people of Babylon are sub the choice of principles by the outcome ject to the most dizzying reversals of of natural chance or the contingency of fortune ; the only regularity in their lives social circumstances. Since all are similar is the ordained drawing of lots that will once again reshuffle their fates, for bet ter or worse. "If the Lottery is an inten Lorraine Daston, a Fellow of the American sification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, then is it not Academy since 1993, is director at the Max appropriate that chance intervene in ev Planck Institute for the History of Science in ery aspect of the drawing, not just one ? "x Berlin. Her many publications include uClassi cal Probability and the Enlightenment" (1988), No society could contrast more starkly "Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150 - 1750 " with Borgest Babylon than Rawls's poli ty of fairness, in which differences in cit (with Katharine Park, 1998), "Things that Talk: izens' "initial chances in life" are brand Object Lessons from Art and Science" (2004), ed as "especially deep inequalities," and "Objectivity" (with Peter Galison, 2007). which justice must alleviate.2 She has also coedited "Biographies of Scientific Objects" (2000), "The Moral Authority of Na i Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Babylon," ture" (2003), and "Thinking with Animals : New Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism" (2005). York : Penguin, 1998), 104. ? 2008 by the American Academy of Arts 2 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, & Sciences Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1971), 7. D dalus Winter 2008 5 This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Yet like all polar opposites, Borges's reincarnation, or divine providence. The lottery and Rawls's veil of ignorance are life of Oedipus was foretold, as was that plotted along the same conceptual axis. of Jesus. Lesser lives, though not digni Both envision life in terms of chances - fied by oracles or prophecies, were also and moreover, chances that are symmet thought to unfurl according to some rically distributed. The Borgesian Baby global plan. These lives are hardly fair - lon may be nightmarishly chaotic, but why should Oedipus, much less all of the lottery that rules it is fair. Everyone Thebes, be punished for crimes he com has been proconsul; everyone has been mitted unwittingly? - but they are just, a slave. Fairness - not prosperity, not according to an ideal of justice that is happiness, not achievement - is also the cosmic rather than individual. No doubt fundamental intuition that undergirds fairness is as ancient and universal a hu Rawls's imagined social contract. Our man value as justice, but the notion that society may be poor or rich, barbaric or they coincide is historically and cultural highly cultivated, light-hearted or mel ly rare, and perhaps distinctively mod ancholy, but whatever its resources and ern. aspirations, we are all in it together. Ide This is not to say that the role of ally, you and I should have the same chance in human affairs has not been prospects, the same number of tickets in recognized and thematized in many cul the lottery, the same life chances. If not tures besides our own. The wheel of for everyone becomes proconsul, not every tune is a very old motif, carved into the one a slave, it is only because Rawls has stonework of medieval cathedrals and qualified his distribution of life chances flamboyantly rendered in Renaissance as "initial" rather than lifelong. At least paintings. With each spin of the wheel, at the beginning of life, every infant in kings and beggars trade places. In some a Rawlsian society should have an equal traditions, including ancient Judaism chance of becoming (to update the pos and early medieval Christianity, chance sibilities) president or street person. It mechanisms like the cast of dice or the is, of course, Rawls's hope and claim drawing of lots were used for divination ; that precisely this symmetry of possibili in others, such as Hinduism, the gods ties - not benevolence or charity - will themselves gamble. motivate all members of society to ame But chance per se is never normative liorate the condition of the worst off: in these examples. Fortuna is a power this could happen to you, or to your chil ful goddess, but it is Justitia who com dren. mands the moral high ground. Philoso There is nothing self-evident about phy consoled the much-tried Roman conceiving of life as a kind of many scholar and statesman Boethius by re sided fair die, rolled at every birth or at vealing that true wisdom lay in spiritual intervals almost as regular as the draw indifference to the caprices of fortune ings of the Babylonian lottery (e.g., the (in his case, imprisonment and impend neighborhood one happens to grow up ing execution on a trumped-up charge in, the schools one attends, the well- or of treason) : in Boethius's allegory, Dame ill-starred marriage, the healthy or ail Philosophy bests Fortuna, wheel and all. ing children). On the contrary, most so The use of dice, lots, and other aleatory cieties have imagined lives as ordered devices to plumb God's will when a con from birth (or perhaps even before), sequential decision loomed (see, for ex whether by inexorable fate, the cycle of ample, Numbers 33:54 or Proverbs 16133) D dalus Winter 2008 This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms was frowned upon by theologians at Like all statistical regularities, life least since Augustine, precisely because chances apply in the first instance to such expedients forced God to rush in in populations, not individuals. The para order to contravene chance : a "tempta digmatic way of assessing life chances is tion of God." And the gambling Hindu the table of mortality, which plots many gods routinely cheated, the stakes being deaths as a function of some other vari too high to leave the game's outcome to able : age, sex, profession, lifestyle, or chance. In all cases, chance is invoked any number of other factors thought to only to be overcome - by philosophical influence longevity. The table of mortal transcendence, divine intervention, or ity serves as the basis for estimating the plain old stacking the deck. Life is full of most fundamental of all life chances - contingencies, fortune and misfortune. life expectancy. Thanks to the World But life itself is not, should not be, con Health Organization, we are accustomed ceived as a chance, a life chance in a co to reading about life expectancy as a lossal lottery. As the narrator of Borges's function of nationality - for example, short story about the Babylonian lottery 73.0 years for a newborn in Sweden ver observes : "I have known that thing the sus 25.9 years for one in Sierra Leone. Greeks knew not - uncertainty."3 But nationality is only one of many pos How did the metaphor of life chances sible groupings into which life chances come to be so irresistible, at least for may be parsed. Epidemiologists may modern societies like our own? And prefer grids that divide the world up in what does the symmetric distribution to city and country dwellers or the thin of such chances have to do with justice ? and the fat; sociologists draw the lines The first question is historical, the sec according to income level, sex, race, or ond philosophical.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Indigenous Capitalist Class, Social Stratification and Life Chances in the Contemporary Nigeria Society
    Public Policy and Administration Research www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-5731(Paper) ISSN 2225-0972(Online) Vol.4, No.7, 2014 Indigenous Capitalist Class, Social Stratification and Life Chances in the Contemporary Nigeria Society Oladele A. Adeleke 1* , Rasak Bamidele 2, Rasaq Omokeji, Ganiyu 3 1.Department of Sociology, Olabisi OnabanjoUniversity, Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State E-mail: [email protected] 2.Department of Sociology and Psychology,Fountain University Osogbo, Osun State E-mail:[email protected] 3.Department of Sociology, Fountain University, Osogbo, Osun State E-mail: [email protected] Abstract The life styles associated with people in the same class categories include, among other things, particularly orientations to manners, speech, clothing styles, education and especially, ‘Success’. There is a tendency for people with similar styles to participate together in both formal and informal groups, to marry one another, and to choose activities that reflect their similar value orientations. Social stratification draws attention to the unequal positions occupied by individuals in society. Social inequality is found in all societies. Therefore, this paper is to examine social stratification, life chances in relation to indigenous capitalist class in Nigeria. This study will be guided by the Weberian perspective of social stratification. Keywords: Social Stratification, Indigenous Capitalist Class, Life Chances, Social Inequality and Social Mobility Introduction In every human society, there are inequalities even in the smallest culture, where variations in wealth or property virtually none existent, there are inequalities between individuals, men and women, the young and the old. A person may have a higher status than others because of particular prowess at hunting for instance or because he/she is believed to have special access to ancestral spirits.
    [Show full text]
  • Beyond an Underclass: an Essay on Up-Front Politics
    The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare Volume 20 Issue 1 March Article 3 March 1993 Beyond An Underclass: An Essay on Up-Front Politics Paula L. Dressel Georgia State University Jeff Porterfield Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw Part of the Politics and Social Change Commons, and the Social Work Commons Recommended Citation Dressel, Paula L. and Porterfield, Jeff (1993) "Beyond An Underclass: An Essay on Up-Front Politics," The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol. 20 : Iss. 1 , Article 3. Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol20/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you by the Western Michigan University School of Social Work. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Beyond An Underclass: An Essay on Up-Front Politics PAULA L. DRESSEL & JEFF PORTERFIELD Georgia State University Department of Sociology Debate about underclass conceptualization has once again forced sociol- ogists to acknowledge the political context and implications of our work. This article extends the criticalexamination of underclass conceptualiza- tion to relatively undeveloped but politically important areas of concern. Initially we discuss the political economic context of conceptual contro- versies surrounding poverty. With a preference for structural analysis, we call for the return of class to economically marginalized people and suggest how that goal might be enhanced by a focus on relations of distribution as well as production. Valuing subjects' vantage points, we recommend how sociologists' work can return agency and diversity to economically marginalized people. Finally, acknowledging the agency of sociologists, we call for greater attention to the implications of our class positions for how we, too, make history, either by intention or default.
    [Show full text]
  • The Inheritance of Race Revisited
    The Inheritance of Race Revisited: Childhood Wealth and Income and Black–White Disadvantages in Adult Life Chances David Brady,a Ryan Finnigan,b Ulrich Kohler,c Joscha Legewied a) University of California, Riverside; b) University of California, Davis; c) University of Potsdam; d) Harvard University Abstract: Vast racial inequalities continue to prevail across the United States and are closely linked to economic resources. One particularly prominent argument contends that childhood wealth accounts for black–white (BW) disadvantages in life chances. This article analyzes how much childhood wealth and childhood income mediate BW disadvantages in adult life chances with Panel Study of Income Dynamics and Cross-National Equivalent File data on children from the 1980s and 1990s who were 30+ years old in 2015. Compared with previous research, we exploit longer panel data, more comprehensively assess adult life chances with 18 outcomes, and measure income and wealth more rigorously. We find large BW disadvantages in most outcomes. Childhood wealth and income mediate a substantial share of most BW disadvantages, although there are several significant BW disadvantages even after adjusting for childhood wealth and income. The evidence mostly contradicts the prominent claim that childhood wealth is more important than childhood income. Indeed, the analyses mostly show that childhood income explains more of BW disadvantages and has larger standardized coefficients than childhood wealth. We also show how limitations in prior wealth research explain why our conclusions differ. Replication with the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and a variety of robustness checks support these conclusions. Keywords: racial inequality; wealth; income; intergenerational mobility; stratification; inequality Citation: Brady, David, Ryan AST racial inequalities continue to prevail across the United States.
    [Show full text]
  • X CONTRIBUTIONS to the THEORY of REFERENCE GROUP BEHAVIOR*
    x CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE THEORY OF REFERENCE GROUP BEHAVIOR* T IS CHAPTER PROCEEDS on the assumption that there;s two-way traffic between social theory and empirical research. Systematic em­ pirical materials help advance social theory by imposing the task and by affording the opportunity for interpretation along lines often unpre­ meditated, and social theory, in turn, defines the scope and enlarges the predictive value of empirical findings by indicating the conditions under which they hold. The systematic data of The American Soldier,! in all their numerous variety, provide a useful occasion for examining the interplay of social theory and applied social research. More particularly, we attempt to identify and to order the fairly numerous researches in The American Soldier which, by implication or by explicit statement, bear upon the theory of reference group behavior. (The empirical realities which this term denotes will presently be con­ sidered in some detail. It should be said here, however, that although the term "reference group" is not employed in these volumes, any more than it has yet found full acceptance 'in the vocabulary of sociology as distinct from social psychology, reference group concepts play an im­ portant part in the interpretative apparatus utilized by the Research Branch of the Information and Education Division of the War Depart­ ment.) At two points, we deal briefly with related subjects which are not, however, part and parcel of reference group theory. We review the statistical indices of group attributes and social structure as variously adopted in these researches, and attempt to indicate, though very briefly and programmatically, the specific value of systematically incorporating such indices in further research.
    [Show full text]
  • A Contextual Definition of the Underclass by Martha Van Haitsma
    A contextual definition of the underclass by Martha Van Haitsma Spatial concentration of poverty in and of itself need not constitute a problem distinct from general poverty. The neighborhoods in which people live do alter the mix of Martha Van Haitsma is a graduate student in the Department opportunities and difficulties they face, but not everyone in of Sociology at the University of Chicago. This article is the an area of concentrated poverty belongs to the same socio- revised and edited section of a paper presented at the 1989 economic class. Spatial concentration cannot be ignored, Midwest Sociological Association Meetings in St. Louis, however, as it constitutes part of the mechanism that links Missouri, April 5-10, 1989. nonnormative3 patterns of income generation and family formation to chronic poverty. When an area is largely popu- lated by chronically poor persons, the opportunities for climbing out of poverty are dimini~hed.~Residents of such Assessing whether or not an underclass exists, how it came areas have weak links to job networks, and therefore find to be, and what policies are likely to affect it all turn on how alternate means of generating income. Higher rates of infor- the term "underclass" is defined. The underclass has been mal and illegal means of accruing income, as well as welfare variously defined by any or all of four characteristics: use, strengthen networks of information tied to these ave- chronic poverty; nonnormative behavior with respect to nues rather than to formal work. With few visible career income generation and family formation; spatial concentra- prospects and few "marriageable" (i.e., stably empl~yed)~ tion of such poverty and/or behavior; and intergenerational men, young women are more likely to opt for single mother- transmission of such poverty and/or behavior.? The manner hood as a route to adulthood.
    [Show full text]
  • Racial Categorization in the 2010 Census
    U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS RACIAL CATEGORIZATION IN THE 2010 CENSUS BRIEFING REPORT U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS Washington, DC 20425 Official Business Penalty for Private Use $300 MARCH 2009 Visit us on the Web: www.usccr.gov U.S. Commission on Civil Rights The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an independent, bipartisan agency established by Congress in 1957. It is directed to: • Investigate complaints alleging that citizens are being deprived of their right to vote by reason of their race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin, or by reason of fraudulent practices. • Study and collect information relating to discrimination or a denial of equal protection of the laws under the Constitution because of race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin, or in the administration of justice. • Appraise federal laws and policies with respect to discrimination or denial of equal protection of the laws because of race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin, or in the administration of justice. • Serve as a national clearinghouse for information in respect to discrimination or denial of equal protection of the laws because of race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin. • Submit reports, findings, and recommendations to the President and Congress. • Issue public service announcements to discourage discrimination or denial of equal protection of the laws. Members of the Commission Gerald A. Reynolds, Chairman Abigail Thernstrom, Vice Chair Todd Gaziano Gail Heriot Peter N. Kirsanow Arlan D. Melendez Ashley L. Taylor, Jr. Michael Yaki Martin Dannenfelser, Staff Director U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 624 Ninth Street, NW Washington, DC 20425 (202) 376-8128 (202) 376-8116 TTY www.usccr.gov This report is available on disk in ASCII Text and Microsoft Word 2003 for persons with visual impairments.
    [Show full text]
  • Max Weber, "Class, Status, and Party" (Electronic Version [ Abridged by DJR)
    Max Weber, "Class, Status, and Party" (Electronic version [http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~jimi/363/webercsp.pdf] abridged by DJR) 1: ECONOMICALLY DETERMINED POWER AND THE SOCIAL ORDER Law exists when there is a probability that an order will be upheld by a specific staff of men who will use physical or psychical compulsion with the intention of obtaining conformity with the order, or of inflicting sanctions for infringement of it. The structure of every legal order directly influences the distribution of power, economic or otherwise…. This is true of all legal orders and not only that of the state. In general, we understand by, "power" the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action. "Economically conditioned" power is not, of course, identical with "power" as such. On the contrary, the emergence of economic power may be the consequence of power existing on other grounds. Man does not strive for power only in order to enrich himself economically. Power, including economic power, may be valued "for its own sake." Very frequently the striving for power is also conditioned by the social "honor" it entails. Not all power, however, entails social honor: The typical American Boss, as well as the typical big speculator, deliberately relinquishes social honor. Quite generally, "mere economic" power, and especially "naked" money power, is by no means a recognized basis of social honor. Nor is power the only basis of social honor. Indeed, social honor, or prestige, may even be the basis of political or economic power, and very frequently has been.
    [Show full text]
  • IQ and Poverty: Testing the Bell Curve on a Novel Data Set
    IQ and Poverty: Testing the Bell Curve on a Novel Data Set The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Eid, Daib Tony. 2018. IQ and Poverty: Testing the Bell Curve on a Novel Data Set. Student paper, EC970, Department of Economics, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:36853967 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA IQ and Poverty: Testing the Bell Curve on a Novel Data Set Dody Eid∗ April 30, 2018 Abstract In their controversial work The Bell Curve, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein hypoth- esize that intelligence plays a signicant role in determining later life outcomes. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Herrnstein and Murray specically claim that Youth IQ is more important than Parental Socioeconomic Status in aecting future odds of living in poverty. We explore their hypothesis using the same statistical deci- sions but on a new data set: the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Our ndings mirror those of Herrnstein and Murray; IQ has a larger eect than socioeconomic status on the likelihood of being in poverty, though the overall eect of both is diminished. We nd that increasing Youth IQ by one standard deviation is expected to decrease the odds of ending up in poverty by 35 percentage points, compared to the 13 percentage point decrease from similarly increasing Parental Socioeconomic Status.
    [Show full text]
  • Social Inequality
    SOCIAL INEQUALITY AQA GCSE SOCIOLOGY UNIT 2 MAY 2013 Created by Lydia Hiraide The BRIT School AQA GCSE 2013 DEFINING SOCIAL INEQUALITY AND STRATIFICATION DEFINING SOCIAL INEQUALITY Social inequality refers to the unequal distribution of: • Resources such as power, wealth and income • Opportunities (related, for example, to health, education and employment) Social class, gender, ethnicity and age are all sources of inequality in modern British society. DEFINING SOCIAL STRATIFICATION Social stratification refers to the way society is structured into a hierarchy of strata that are unequally ranked. A social hierarchy is shaped like a pyramid with each stratum more powerful than the one below it. The most privileged group forms the top layer and vice versa. Stratification involves inequalities between groups in the distribution of socioeconomic resources such as wealth, income, status and power. These inequalities persist or continue over time. In Britain, gender, class, ethnicity and age are the main criteria by which people tend to be stratified. Social Class Slavery What is stratification Economic factors Some individuals claim that they have the based on? such as occupation right to own and sell other people, to treat and income them as property and to deny their human rights Is status achieved or Achieved Status was ascribed in the southern states ascribed? of the US for the people who were born into slavery Is social mobility Yes For many slaves in the southern states of possible? the US, social mobility was unlikely unless, for example, they escaped to safety or until slavery was abolished (emancipation) which was unlikely even then DIFFERENT FORMS OF STRATIFICATION The cast system in traditional India, slavery in the southern states of the US in the 19 th century, Apartheid in South Africa and the social system in modern Britain are all types of stratification.
    [Show full text]
  • Notes and References
    Notes and References Preface 1. First edition, 1949; second edition, 1957; revised and enlarged edition, 1968 (New York; The Free Press). Translated into: French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese, Polish, Hungarian, Serbo­ Croatian, Chinese and German (in part). 2. Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language (Cleveland, 1959: The World Publishing Company), p. 1678. 3. Dated 15 May 1970 (mimeographed). Chapter 1 1. Merton, STSS, p. 70. 2. Merton, 1975a, p. 335. 3. This strategy is 'unorthodox' only in the social sciences. After all, probably 95 per cent of all the scientific work in the world is published in the form of articles; much less so, of course, in the humanities and with the social sciences somewhere in between the natural sciences and the humanities. 4. Bell, 1980, p. 13. 5. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, a Vicennial Edition (New York, 1985: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). First published in 1965. 6. Merton, Sociology of Science; An Episodic Memoir (Carbondale, 1979: Southern Illinois University Press). 7. First edition: 1938. 8. Bierstedt, 1981, p. 486. 9. Ibid., pp. 495 and 487-8. 10. Loomis and Loomis, 1961, p. 246. 11. The term is introduced by C. W. Mills, 1959. 12. Stinchcombe, 1975, pp. 26-27. See also Boudon, 1977: 'there is more systematic and general theory in Merton's work than he himself has ever confessed' (p. 1356). 13. Bierstedt, 1981, p. 488. 14. Lazarsfeld, 1975, p. 61. 15. Stinchcombe, 1975, p. 30. 16. He certainly shares Toulmin's conviction that 'a scientist who fails to criticize and change his concepts, where the collective goals of his discipline require it, offends against the "duties" of his scientific "station", as much as a somnolent night-watchman or an insubordinate soldier' (as quoted in Merton, 1984b, p.
    [Show full text]
  • Racism, Sociology of Matthew Clair, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Jeffrey S Denis, Mcmaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
    Racism, Sociology of Matthew Clair, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Jeffrey S Denis, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is a revision of the previous edition article by P.L. Van Den Berghe, volume 19, pp. 12720–12723, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd. Abstract The sociology of racism is the study of the relationship between racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequality. While past scholarship emphasized overtly racist attitudes and policies, contemporary sociology considers racism as individual- and group-level processes and structures that are implicated in the reproduction of racial inequality in diffuse and often subtle ways. Although some social scientists decry this conceptual broadening, most agree that a multivalent approach to the study of racism is at once socially important and analytically useful for understanding the persistence of racial inequality in a purportedly ‘postracial’ society. At root, racism is “an ideology of racial domination” (Wilson, They applied the term to plants, animals, and humans as 1999: p. 14) in which the presumed biological or cultural a taxonomic subclassification within a species. As such, race superiority of one or more racial groups is used to justify or became understood as a biological, or natural, categorization prescribe the inferior treatment or social position(s) of other system of the human species. As Western colonialism and racial groups. Through the process of racialization (see Section slavery expanded, the concept was used to justify and prescribe Racism as a Social Process), perceived patterns of physical exploitation, domination, and violence against peoples racial- difference – such as skin color or eye shape – are used to ized as nonwhite.
    [Show full text]
  • Commission on Life Chances and Child Poverty
    The Fabian Society The Fabian Society is Britain’s leading left of centre think tank and political society, committed to creating the political ideas and policy debates which can shape the future of progressive politics. With over 300 Fabian MPs, MEPs, Peers, MSPs and AMs, the Society plays an unparalleled role in linking the ability to influence policy debates at the highest level with vigorous grassroots debate among our growing membership of over 7000 people, 70 local branches meeting regularly throughout Britain and a vibrant Young Fabian section organising its own activities. Fabian publications, events and ideas therefore reach and influence a wider audience than those of any comparable think tank. The Society is unique among think tanks in being a thriving, democratically-constituted membership organisation, affiliated to the Labour Party but organisationally and editorially independent. For over 120 years Fabians have been central to every important renewal and revision of left of centre thinking. The Fabian commitment to open and participatory debate is as important today as ever before as we explore the ideas, politics and policies which will define the next generation of progressive politics in Britain, Europe and around the world. Find out more at www.fabian-society.org.uk Fabian Society 11 Dartmouth Street London SW1H 9BN www.fabian-society.org.uk Fabian ideas Series editor: Jonathan Heawood First published June 2005 ISBN 0 7163 0616 6 ISSN 1746-1146 This pamphlet, like all publications of the Fabian Society, represents not the collective views of the Society but only the views of the author. The responsibility of the Society is limited to approving its publications as worthy of consideration within the Labour movement.
    [Show full text]