Race in the United States

Adoption, Race, and the Constitution

United States Constitution

According to the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, about its article titled ADOPTION, RACE, AND THE CONSTITUTIONSince Massachusetts enacted the first “modern” state adoption statute in 1851, adoption in the United States has been both a state judicial process and a child welfare service to promote the “best interests” of children in need of permanent homes. State law and
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Capital Punishment and Race

United States Constitution

According to the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, about its article titled CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AND RACEIn mccleskey v. kemp (1987) , the Supreme Court grappled with the difficult issue of race and capital punishment. Confronted with statistical studies that indicated potential racial discrimination in the assignment of death sentences in the state of Georgia, the Court
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Race in State Statute Topics

Introduction to Race (State statute topic)

The purpose of Race is to provide a broad appreciation of the Race legal topic. Select from the list of U.S. legal topics for information (other than Race).

Resources

Further Reading

• Information about Race in the Gale Encyclopedia of American Law.

Race Relations in relation to Crime and Race

Race Relations is included in the Encyclopedia of Race and Crime (1), beginning with: To truly understand race relations, one must understand race. As currently defined, a racial group is different from an ethnic group in that an ethnic group shares a common culture, whereas a racial group shares common physical characteristics. In the latest U.S. Census (2000), Asian, Black, and White were the only races identified. The term race has been used in various ways throughout history. For example, in 16th-century Europe, the word race was used in terms of one’s ancestry— what we now call ethnicity. Although there is no scientific basis for determining racial categories, societies have learned to differentiate and classify race based on social beliefs and stereotypes associated with physical characteristics. Thus, racism (the belief that one race is superior to the other) becomes the ideological base in a society where physical traits are used to subjectively characterize a person or a group.

Resources

Notes and References

1. Entry about Race Relations in the Encyclopedia of Race and Crime

See Also

Social Construction of Reality in relation to Crime and Race

Social Construction of Reality is included in the Encyclopedia of Race and Crime (1), beginning with: The social construction of reality is a sociological premise that individuals’ reality is “invented” as a product of the objective “real” world they experience; the subjective meanings they bring to, and draw from, these experiences; and the inter subjective agreements produced in interactions with other individual actors in which they construct an agreed-upon perception of reality. This section outlines the intellectual foundations of social constructionism. It also provides an illustration of how the philosophy can be applied to race and crime. Ideas about a socially constructed reality were introduced by the early phenomenologist philosophers Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. In their efforts to understand the structures of consciousness, they observed that the mind can be directed at real things (e.g., the dog barking in your backyard), as well as nonexistent things (e.g., your anxieties related to dogs barking in your backyard).

Resources

Notes and References

1. Entry about Social Construction of Reality in the Encyclopedia of Race and Crime

See Also

Critical Race Theory in relation to Crime and Race

Critical Race Theory is included in the Encyclopedia of Race and Crime (1), beginning with: Despite the relatively recent appearance of critical race theory (CRT) in academia, it has become an indispensable perspective on race and racism in America. CRT launched what many race scholars now take as a commonsense view: the view that race, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is socially constructed. However, unlike some views that argue that aspects of race should be eliminated from everyday speech, thought, and scholarship, CRT maintains that race, as a socially constructed concept, functions as a means to maintain the interests of Whites who construct(ed) it and is an indispensable lens from which to view the problem of racism. According to CRT, racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences Whites create between “races” to maintain elite White interest in labor markets and politics, and as such create the circumstances that give rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities.

Resources

Notes and References

1. Entry about Critical Race Theory in the Encyclopedia of Race and Crime

See Also