The definition of race.
I mean, there's a conventional wisdom on the meaning of race.
A scientific explanation of race.
And the video documentary,
Race the Power of an Illusion is something I want you to watch.
Because it does a very outstanding job of dealing with these questions.
We also will look at videos that demonstrate how racial identity is
socially constructed.
How is the concept of race socially constructed over time and space?
How the individuals and groups define their racial identity, and
on what basis do they make claims to racial identity?
How are young children socialized into identities based on skin color and
how does this impact their attitudes toward skin color differences?
We have a couple of videos called the doll experiments and
that are very interesting and very revealing, very instructive to watch.
One actually is a replay of the video that was done in the famous Brown
v Board of Education case where the social scientist Kenneth Clark was
able to demonstrate to the court that segregation of children based
solely on the color of their skin had harmful psychological effects and
he demonstrated that with an identical doll test.
One white and the other one the color was black.
And he asked kids, how did they identify with them?
Which one was beautiful?
Which one was intelligent?
Which one was the bad problem doll?
And in 1954, it was quite revealing that African American
kids had a very difficult time with the test.
They did not like the doll that was the same color as they were.
They thought that the white doll was more beautiful, more intelligent and so forth.
Well, the video that we're watching now is a replay of that in
contemporary American society and it's very revealing.
Because it shows the intergenerational effects of socialization.
The African American kids who are in the contemporary video think very differently
about race, very differently about skin color.
They have a much more positive conception of their own skin color,
as well as their own phenotypic traits and
it's demonstrate how much has changed since 1954.
The second one is really about perceptions of skin color in Mexico and
the ways in which very young children define color, the meaning it has for
them, and the attributions that they make regarding doll of different color.
Their perception and their responses are much more keen to what happened in
the 1954 with African American kids.
They clearly attribute negative traits to the doll that is a little bit dark skin,
even when they think that the doll looks like them.
They have a very difficult time attributing positive traits
to the dark skin at all.
That is an interesting video when you compare the two.
One showing intergenerational change over time with African American kids.
The other showing that in some places, perceptions of skin color and
race are still much like they were in 1954.
What is a role of a racial ideology in individual and
collective definitions of national identity?
There's a good story and we will make sure you have access, and
a link to that called the Next America By the Pew Research Center.
Now what the Pew Research Center did was to really look at the demographic changes
that our nation is undergoing and we are in the midst of the most adverse ethnic,
and economic diversity in terms of immigration in the nation's history.