geographies of identity: race, ethnicity, sexuality & gender chapter 6

Geographies of Identity:Race, Ethnicity, Sexuality & Gender

Chapter 6

• Defining Race

• Ideology of racism and its evolution

The great chain of being: naturalizing human differences, linking differenceto inferiority, the standard of whiteness.

Political smear from 1867, againstGeorge C. Gorham’s gubernatorialbid in California

Atlantic Ocean became a highway as a result of the slave trade, 16th-19th Centuries.Brazil & the Caribbean leading destinations for African slaves. Fueled by racist ideology (naturalness of otherness) and demand for labor.

• Geographies of Race and Racism– How does race “make place”?– Spatial expression of institutionalized racism• Chinatown: San Francisco & Vancouver, B.C.• South Africa

San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1890s, photograph by Arnold

Genthe

Race and Racism on thelandscape of South Africa

*Evolution of ApartheidDutch Boers, Afrikaners

Afrikaner Nationalist Party

Baaskap

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Apartheid’s goal: to produce a society segregated on a racial and territorial basis.

Segregation will protect the racial purity of the white South Africans.

Allow for separate cultural and economic development of each racial group.


Apartheid’s Scales: Grand (national), Petty (individual) and Township (neighborhood)

Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976

Soweto, former Black Township of Johannesburg, South Africa


First democratic elections in South Africa are held in 1994, three years after the repeal of Apartheid laws. Nelson Mandela was elected president.

• What is Ethnicity?


This map shows the ancestral “roots” of the U.S. population based on census data. Notehow widespread German ancestry is. Identification of an “American” ancestry may stemfrom the fact that a person’s forebears have been in the country for several generations,or that making a selection is impractical or not suitable.


U.S. census form questions on race.The U.S. Census form is sent to allhouseholds every 10 years. Note that Hispanic origin is represented as something other than race.


U.S. population composition from two perspectives. The pie chart on the left shows Hispanic and non-Hispanic origin for the population. The pie chart on the right shows the count and percentage of those who selected just one racial category.


Leading minority group, by county. White, non-Hispanic is the majority population group.Excluding that data enables us to map and see the distribution of minority groups. California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Texas, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico are majority-minority, meaning that more than half of the population is minority.

Ethnic Interaction:Assimilation

Pluralism

Heterolocalism

Some 40,000 Vietnamese live in and around Washington D.C., but at the level of the Census tract nowhere do they make up more than 18% of the population. By contrast, they accounted for less than 1% of the population in most census tracts.

Ethnic Settlements:

Ethnic Islands

Ethnic Neighborhoods

Ethnoburbs

Location quotients

The Hopi and Navajo Reservations (population approximately 7000 and 174,000 respectively) are ethnic islands and enclaves in the US. When mapped, we can see that they also form enclaves of each other.

Ethnic ConflictDarfur, Sudan

Ethnic Cleansing

Population by race/ethnicity and proximity to a toxic release facility. Notice how the composition of population groups changes with increasing distance from the toxic release facility.

Environmental Justice: San Francisco Bay Area

Households within one mile of a toxic release facility by income, race/ethnicity.

geographies of identity: race, ethnicity, sexuality & gender chapter 6

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