SOC 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Racialization, Ethnocentrism, Institutional Racism

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 1101
• Professor: Willow Scobie

Document Summary

Race a category of people who share certain common physical traits deemed to be socially significant. There are no clear-cut races , only a range of physical differences. Human populations are a continuum, and the genetic diversity within populations that share visible traits is as great as the diversity between them. In various points of history, for various imperialist reasons when people try to categorize and classify people, it is not in fact that easy to fit people into specific narrow categories. Process of racialization is the process by which people use their understandings of race to classify individuals or groups. Historically, certain groups were thought to be distinct biological groups. Scholars went to great lengths to come up with justifications for the process of racialization. Beginning in the 15th century, as europeans expanded their travel, their increased contact with different regions of the world lead to attempts to categorize and explain natural and social dynamics.