Chapter 1Thinking Sociologically
Race is not based on biology, but is this, created by society to categorize people into groups based on appearance, social factors, and cultural background.
What is a social construct?
When people unconsciously hold negative attitudes toward racial groups, it is called this.
What is implicit bias?
This lifelong process teaches individuals the norms, values, and behaviors of their society, shaping how they think and act within society.
What is socialization?
These explanations incorrectly attribute racial differences in crime to genetics or innate traits.
What are biological theories?
This institution shapes public understanding of race and crime by choosing which stories to highlight, which images to show, and how events are portrayed, often influencing stereotypes and public opinion.
What is the media?
This term describes the combination of cultural values and norms that shape how individuals interpret the world.
What is social location?
This term refers to a belief of a group formed without sufficient knowledge, often rooted in stereotypes and learned through family, peers, media, and institutions.
What is prejudice?
This organization, founded in 1966, created community programs like free breakfast, medical clinics, and legal aid, yet was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO despite engaging in legal open‑carry and peaceful protest.
What is the Black Panther Party?
This justice paradigm focuses on healing, accountability, and reintegration, arguing that victims, offenders, and communities should co‑create justice rather than rely solely on punishment.
What is restorative justice?
This policing tactic involves stopping, questioning, or searching individuals based on race, ethnicity, or perceived immigration status rather than behavior.
This concept refers to shared practices, values, and beliefs that shape daily life within a society.
What is culture?
This theory argues that people who experience frustration or hardship may blame their problems on people of color, turning them into targets for hostility.
What is frustration or scapegoat theory?
These state‑level policies targeted Latino communities by allowing officers to stop people they “suspected” were undocumented and detain them if they could not immediately prove their legal status.
What are Juan Crow laws?
This theory argues that contradictions between cultural goals and the socially accepted means of achieving them can create pressure that leads individuals—especially those facing racialized barriers—to pursue alternative, sometimes criminal, paths.
What is strain theory?
This discriminatory practice involved banks and federal agencies marking neighborhoods as “high‑risk” based on racial composition, denying loans to Black and minority communities for decades.
What is redlining?
Peggy McIntosh described this concept as an “invisible knapsack” of unearned advantages that shape access to education, jobs, and social treatment.
What is white privilege?
This term refers to everyday, subtle, intentional or unintentional behaviors or comments that communicate bias toward marginalized groups, often arising from stereotypes.
What are microaggressions?
This form of segregation occurs without explicit laws but emerges through social forces such as housing markets, school zoning, and economic inequality, producing racially separated communities.
What is de facto segregation?
This type of racism claimed that racial differences in intelligence—especially conceptual learning—explained crime rates, and was later used to justify segregation and white supremacist ideology.
What is academic racism?
This long-lasting belief system shapes who is advantaged and disadvantaged across institutions like housing, education, employment, and policing, producing unequal outcomes that persist even without explicit individual bias.
What is racism?
This concept refers to cultural identity—shaped by region, traditions, food, and shared heritage—while race refers to inherited physical traits such as skin color, facial features, and hair texture.
What is ethnicity?
This form of racism is embedded in the fabric of society, shaping institutional processes such as housing, education, banking, and the criminal justice system, resulting in unequal outcomes even without explicit individual bias.
What is systemic or institutional racism?
This term describes how modern criminal justice policies—such as racial profiling, harsher sentencing for people of color, and disproportionate arrests for low‑level offenses—function as a contemporary system of racialized control, following earlier forms of state‑sanctioned oppression.
What is the New Jim Crow?
This framework argues that racism is ordinary, legal gains for people of color often benefit whites, and that the lived experiences of people of color reveal how racism actually operates.
What is Critical Race Theory?
This institution produces unequal outcomes in policing, sentencing, and incarceration, with racial groups experiencing vastly different treatment even when charged with similar offenses.
What is the criminal justice system?