Glossary
Acculturation: loss of a minority group’s cultural distinctiveness in relation to the dominant culture. Amalgamation: interactions between members of distinct ethnic and cultural groups that reduce barriers between the groups over time.
Assimilation: pressure placed on minority groups to adopt the customs and traditions of the dominant culture.
Cline: differences in the traits that occur in populations across a geographical area. In a cline, a trait may be more common in one geographical area than another, but the variation is gradual and continuous, with no sharp breaks.
Ethnic group: people in a society who claim a distinct identity for themselves based on shared cultural characteristics and ancestry.
Ethnicity: the degree to which a person identifies with and feels an attachment to a particular ethnic group.
Ethnogenesis: gradual emergence of new ethnicities in response to changing social circumstances. Hypodescent: a racial classification system that assigns a person with mixed racial heritage to the racial category that is considered least privileged.
Jim Crow: a term used to describe laws passed by state and local governments in the United States during the early twentieth century to enforce racial segregation of public and private places. Multiculturalism: maintenance of multiple cultural traditions in a single society.
Nonconcordant: genetic traits that are inherited independently rather than as a package.
One-drop rule: the practice of excluding a person with any non-white ancestry from the white racial category.
Pigmentocracy: a society characterized by strong correlation between a person’s skin color and his or her social class.
Race: an attempt to categorize humans based on observed physical differences.
Racial formation: the process of defining and redefining racial categories in a society.
Reified: the process by which an inaccurate concept or idea is accepted as “truth.”
Socially constructed: a concept developed by society that is maintained over time through social interactions that make the idea seem “real.”
Symbolic ethnicity: limited or occasional displays of ethnic pride and identity that are primarily for public display.
Taxonomy: a system of classification.
