Chapter 23: The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations

FRANK HAROLD WILSON

The sociology of racial and ethnic relations Racial and ethnic relations are salient dimensions of social distinction and diversity. Although institutional changes, the civil rights movement, and federal policies have diminished the traditional problems of discrimination and segregation across racial and ethnic groups, the “color line” remains as a complex system of cultural and institutional patterns, inequality markers, and social constructions of reality. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the traditional Black-White color line, which defined the most salient boundaries of social distance in American race relations, is complicated and augmented by the increasing growth of recent immigrants from Latin America and Asia and the emergence of a new color line that has additional layers of cultural and color stratification and distinction. Sociologists usually view racial and ethnic groups as deriving from social interactions and social definitions in which physical and cultural characteristics are distinguished and used as identifiers ...

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