Introduction: Race and Ethnicity

Year 2008, Issue: 28, 1 - 4, 01.10.2008

Timothy M. Roberts

Abstract

This issue of the Journal of American Studies of Turkey explores several scenarios in which people in America as well as outside American national borders struggle against the influence and institutions of what might be called American racialized ethnicity. The concepts of race and ethnicity are not themselves politically charged, in that they, technically, do not connote, as Shelby Steele has written, “a pursuit of power in relation to the other” Steele 5 . Through the early twentieth century, around the world, race was a concept for the division of humans into a few distinct groups. Insidiously, however, in America as well as elsewhere in the world, race became the basis for categorization of some races as innately superior, and some innately inferior. In the United States, basically two groups—as opposed to, say, in the Caribbean region and Brazil, where several racial categories emerged—became socially constructed: the racially superior group “white,” and the racially inferior group, “black.” Americans’ growing ancestral diversity by the late nineteenth century obviously complicated the plausibility of these terms, although, until the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, their cultural power largely was a basis for the organization of American society and government.

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