Talk with Wendy Roth of the University of Pennsylvania

Abstract 

Sociology has long been concerned with how societies construct and respond to differences among people, from race and gender to sexuality and legal status. These questions have become especially urgent as political struggles increasingly center on who has the authority to define such differences and what consequences those definitions carry. We see this in efforts to promote racial essentialism, impose binary definitions of gender, challenge birthright citizenship, and, simultaneously, undermine diversity and inclusion initiatives. This talk examines one consequential case: how Americans understand racial difference, and how we as sociologists teach students to understand it. I argue that there is no widely shared conception of what race is in the United States—not simply because Americans disagree about whether race is biological or socially constructed, but because they differ over whether racial differences reflect ancestry, culture, appearance, lived experience, or some combination of these, and whether race is imposed or chosen. New demographic patterns and technologies may further destabilize these understandings by creating new possibilities for treating race as elective. Such uncertainty is not merely academic; competing definitions of race can be mobilized politically to restrict the collection of information needed to monitor discrimination and to weaken civil rights protections. Sociologists therefore need to confront these ambiguities more explicitly, particularly in the classroom, by distinguishing social construction from self-construction and explaining how racial categories can relate to biological differences without being determined by them. We need to move beyond assuming that students understand these distinctions and empirically evaluate how effectively our teaching conveys them.