About This Unit

This unit is the starting point for the project — an introduction to how sociology approaches the study of race, ethnicity, and racism in the United States. Rather than treating race as a natural fact or a fixed biological category, sociological inquiry treats racial and ethnic categories as historically constructed and institutionally maintained: produced through laws, censuses, schools, and everyday practice; transformed across generations; and contested by those they classify. The unit traces this constructionist stance through canonical and recent scholarship, paying particular attention to how categories such as Hispanic, White, and multiracial come into being and shift over time.

The unit also introduces the analytical vocabulary that recurs throughout the project. Concepts such as racial formation, racialization, racial classification, and panethnicity name the processes by which racial meanings and categories are produced and sustained, and they give learners the tools to read the rest of Module 1 — on origins, belonging, and the legal and institutional architectures of race — as well as later modules on intersectionality, systemic racism, and the politics of identity. The unit closes with case studies that ask learners to test these concepts against the U.S. Census and against the lived making of Hispanic as an ethnoracial category.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Distinguish between race as a biological category and race as a socially constructed, historically produced one.
• Identify the major analytical concepts of the sociology of race — including racial formation, racialization, racial classification, and panethnicity — and apply them to a specific case.
• Analyze the historical construction of racial and ethnic categories in the United States, using the case of Hispanic categorization as a worked example.
• Explain how the U.S. Census operates as an institutional site where racial categories are produced, contested, and revised.

Keywords

• Racial formation
• Socio-historical construction
• Racial categories
• Racial justice
• Multiracial identities

Open Educational Resources

• American Sociological Association. Race and Racism in the United States: A Sociological Guide. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association, 2023. Read the report.

Report (PDF) · Open access.

This report presents the American Sociological Association's current consensus on race and racism in the United States. Drawing on decades of empirical research, it summarizes how the discipline understands race as a socially rather than biologically constituted category, distinguishes individual from structural forms of racism, and outlines the persistence of racial inequality across major institutions including education, housing, employment, criminal justice, and health. The report is written for a broad audience that includes policymakers, journalists, educators, and students, and it serves as an entry point into the disciplinary framework that the rest of this unit develops. Readers will encounter the foundational distinctions — race as constructed yet consequential; racism as structural rather than merely interpersonal — that recur throughout the project. Where individual scholars in this unit advance specific arguments and frameworks, the ASA report represents shared ground across the discipline.

• NPR Code Switch. "Who You Calling 'Hispanic'?" Hosted by Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji. NPR, September 20, 2021. Listen to the episode.

Podcast episode · Open access.

This Code Switch episode traces how Hispanic became an official racial-ethnic category in the United States — examining the activists, federal officials, and media institutions whose decisions in the 1970s and 1980s produced a single panethnic label for people whose national origins, languages, racial identities, and political interests are deeply heterogeneous. Through conversations with G. Cristina Mora and others, the hosts ask what the category does, whom it serves, and what it obscures. The episode pairs directly with Mora's Making Hispanics in the Key Scholarship section and supplies an accessible auditory introduction to the constructionist argument the unit develops. Learners will encounter the central insight that ethnoracial categories are made through institutional processes — by people, in time, in response to particular political and economic pressures — and that the people sorted into those categories often experience and contest them in uneven and conflicting ways.

• Blake, Felice, and Paula Ioanide. "Introduction." In Antiracism Inc.: Why the Way We Talk about Racial Justice Matters, edited by Felice Blake, Paula Ioanide, and Alison Reed. Santa Barbara: Punctum Books, 2019. Read the introduction.

Book chapter · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Blake and Ioanide's introduction to Antiracism Inc. takes up a question that animates much of the project: how does the language of racial justice get taken up, repackaged, and put to work in ways that may leave underlying racial arrangements intact? The editors argue that antiracist vocabulary has been institutionalized across corporate, governmental, educational, and nonprofit settings, sometimes in ways that displace the political and material claims of the movements that produced it. The introduction situates the volume's essays within Black radical, Indigenous, women of color feminist, and queer of color traditions, and offers a framework for distinguishing between antiracist practices that redistribute power and resources and those that perform inclusion without doing so. Learners encountering this chapter will gain analytical traction on the gap between racial discourse and racial structure — a distinction the unit's later readings on racial formation and the racial order develop further.

• Burgett, Bruce, and Glenn Hendler, eds. Keywords for American Cultural Studies. 3rd ed. New York: NYU Press, 2020. Selected essays: "Race,""Identity," and "White." Full volume: Keywords for American Cultural Studies.

Online essays · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

This online edition of Keywords for American Cultural Studies follows the model of Raymond Williams's original Keywords: each entry traces the history, contested meanings, and current usage of a single term central to the study of American culture and society. The three essays selected here — "Race," "Identity," and "White" — examine the genealogies of these terms across legal, political, scientific, and cultural domains. Readers learn how each term has shifted in meaning across periods and contexts, how it has been mobilized politically by different actors, and how it operates today in scholarly and public discourse. The essays provide a vocabulary-level entry into the unit's broader argument that racial and identity categories are not stable referents but historical artifacts. Together they prepare learners to read Omi and Winant's Racial Formation and Mora's Making Hispanics with attention to how the words themselves do political work.

Key Scholarship

• Roth, Wendy D. "The Multiple Dimensions of Race." Ethnic and Racial Studies 39, no. 8 (2016): 1310–1338. Access the article.

Journal article.

Roth's synthetic article distinguishes six dimensions of race as it is experienced and measured: racial identity (how one understands oneself), self-classification (how one identifies on forms and surveys), observed race (how others see one), reflected race (how one believes others see one), phenotype (visible physical features), and racial ancestry (genealogical descent). Roth argues that these dimensions can diverge from one another in any given person's life — for example, a Puerto Rican man may identify as Puerto Rican, classify himself on the census as White, be observed by others as Black, and possess mixed ancestry — and that scholarship and public discourse often use the word race as if it referred to only one of these dimensions. The article supplies analytical vocabulary that learners will use to read other authors in this unit and to make sense of the gap between how individuals understand themselves and how they are sorted by institutions.

• Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2015. Publisher page.

Book.

Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States is the foundational statement of the racial formation perspective, which understands race as the product of ongoing sociohistorical processes through which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. The third edition revises and extends the framework first introduced in 1986, engaging with neoliberalism, colorblindness, and the racial politics of the early twenty-first century. Central to the book is the concept of the racial project — any effort to interpret, represent, or explain racial dynamics and to redistribute resources along racial lines — which the authors use to analyze a wide range of state, social-movement, and cultural activity. Learners encountering the book's central concepts here will recognize them throughout subsequent modules, particularly in the units on intersectionality and Du Boisian theory in Module 2 and the treatment of systemic racism in Module 3.

• Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Matthew Desmond. The Racial Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Publisher page.

Book.

Emirbayer and Desmond's The Racial Order develops a general sociological theory of race, drawing on the relational sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to argue that race is best understood not as a property of individuals or groups but as an order — a structured, durable, and contested system of positions, dispositions, and resources. The authors examine how the racial order is produced and reproduced across multiple domains, from the body and the family to the state and the economy, and they distinguish racial domination, racial classification, and racial habitus as analytically distinct mechanisms. The book also reflects critically on the discipline of sociology itself, asking how sociological accounts of race have at times reproduced the categories they aim to study. Learners will encounter a vocabulary for thinking about race relationally — as a system of relations rather than a list of groups — that complements the racial formation framework introduced by Omi and Winant.

• Mora, G. Cristina. Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Publisher page.

Book.

Mora's Making Hispanics reconstructs the political and institutional history through which Hispanic became a recognized panethnic category in the United States. Drawing on archival research at federal agencies, advocacy organizations such as the National Council of La Raza, and the Spanish-language television network Univision, Mora shows how a coalition of activists, bureaucrats, and media executives produced the category in the 1970s and 1980s, each for partly different reasons — activists to claim federal resources, the Census Bureau to manage classification, and broadcasters to assemble a national audience. The book argues that Hispanic did not simply describe an existing population; it was a category whose making had material consequences for the people now sorted under it. Learners will encounter a case study of panethnicity in action and a model for analyzing how state and market actors jointly produce ethnoracial categories.

• Prewitt, Kenneth. What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Publisher page.

Book.

Prewitt, a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, traces the history of racial classification in the decennial census from 1790 to the present and argues that the current system — built up incrementally across more than two centuries — is now incapable of capturing the population it purports to describe. The book examines how each generation of census categories reflected the racial politics of its moment, from the slavery-era distinction between free and enslaved through twentieth-century debates over the inclusion of Hispanic and multiracial categories. Prewitt proposes a phased reform of the federal statistical system and considers what is at stake politically, legally, and demographically in changing how the state counts race. Learners will encounter the census not as a neutral instrument of measurement but as an active site where racial categories are produced, contested, and revised.

Case Studies

• "What Census Calls Us": A Historical Timeline of Racial Categories

Pew Research Center, 2020 · Interactive timeline.

An interactive visualization tracing how the U.S. Census Bureau has categorized race and ethnicity from 1790 to the present, showing the addition, removal, and renaming of categories across more than two centuries. The case study uses the timeline to examine how census categories reflect and shape the racial order of their moment, and to test the arguments made by Prewitt and Mora against historical primary evidence.

• Lived Experience and the Making of Hispanic: An Exercise Drawn from NPR Code Switch

NPR Code Switch, 2021 · Reflective exercise.

A guided exercise that asks learners to listen to NPR's "Who You Calling 'Hispanic'?" alongside Mora's account in Making Hispanics and to examine how the panethnic category is experienced, refused, or claimed by the people sorted under it. The case study connects institutional history to lived classification, asking learners to apply Roth's six dimensions of race to a specific person or community's encounter with the category.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Mora and the NPR podcast: Mora argues in Making Hispanics that the category Hispanic was made — by activists, government officials, and media executives in the 1970s and 1980s — rather than naturally existing. After reading her account and listening to NPR's "Who You Calling 'Hispanic'?", identify one specific moment or decision in the construction of Hispanic as a category that you find significant. What does this construction reveal about how racial and ethnic categories are made and maintained more generally?
2. On Omi and Winant: Omi and Winant define a racial project as any effort to interpret, represent, or explain racial dynamics and to redistribute resources along racial lines. Identify one contemporary example — a law, policy, media campaign, social movement, or institutional practice — that you would describe as a racial project. What does the project interpret race to be, and what does it do (or seek to do) to the distribution of resources or recognition?
3. On Roth: Roth distinguishes six dimensions of race: racial identity, self-classification, observed race, reflected race, phenotype, and racial ancestry. Choose two of these dimensions and describe a situation — drawn from your own experience, someone you know, or a public figure — in which the two dimensions diverge. What is at stake in the divergence, and what does it suggest about the limits of treating race as a single thing?
4. On Prewitt and the Pew case study: Prewitt argues that the U.S. Census's racial categories are the product of two centuries of incremental, politically conditioned additions rather than a coherent measurement system. Using the Pew "What Census Calls Us" timeline as evidence, identify one transition in the history of census categories (an addition, a removal, a renaming, or a re-sorting) and analyze what it reveals about the racial politics of its moment.
5. On Blake and Ioanide: Blake and Ioanide argue that antiracist language has been institutionalized in ways that sometimes displace the political and material claims of the movements that produced it. Describe an example — from a workplace, school, government agency, or media institution you know — in which antiracist vocabulary is used. Drawing on Blake and Ioanide, evaluate whether the use of that vocabulary corresponds to a redistribution of power or resources, or whether it primarily performs inclusion without doing so.
6. Synthesis across the unit: Omi and Winant, Emirbayer and Desmond, and Roth all treat race as constructed but use different analytical tools and emphases — racial projects, the racial order, and the multiple dimensions of race, respectively. Drawing on two of these three works, articulate one key similarity and one key difference between their approaches. Which approach do you find most useful for thinking about a specific case you know — and why?

Further Readings and Resources

• Kim, Hye Jee, and Aliya Saperstein. "'You're Supposed to Say White': Epistemic Ambiguity and Ethnoracial Classification." Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (November 2025). Access the article.

Journal article.

Kim and Saperstein examine how respondents to surveys and forms navigate moments of uncertainty in racial self-classification — the times when the available categories do not obviously fit, or when respondents are unsure what is being asked. The article develops the concept of epistemic ambiguity to describe these moments and analyzes how respondents resolve them. Pairs well with Roth's typology of racial dimensions and extends the unit's argument that classification is an active, negotiated process.

• Clair, Matthew, and Jeffrey S. Denis. "Sociology of Racism." In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed. Elsevier, 2015. Access the entry.

Encyclopedia entry.

Clair and Denis provide a concise overview of the sociology of racism as a subfield: its central concepts, major traditions of inquiry, and current debates. The entry distinguishes individual, institutional, and structural forms of racism and surveys empirical research on racial inequality across major domains. Useful as a reference work for learners orienting themselves to the literature beyond this unit's selections.

• Sussman, Robert Wald. The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Publisher page.

Book.

Sussman traces the history of race as a biological concept from its emergence in early modern European thought through its uses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific racism and its repudiation by twentieth-century anthropology and genetics. The book documents how, despite scientific consensus that race is not a meaningful biological category, the idea has persisted in popular and political discourse. Supplements the unit's sociological readings with a history of the scientific concept they displace.

• California Newsreel. Race: The Power of an Illusion. Three-part documentary series. 2003. Series website.

Documentary series (three episodes).

A three-part documentary series examining race from biological, historical, and institutional perspectives. The episodes — "The Difference Between Us," "The Story We Tell," and "The House We Live In" — argue that race is not biological, that it has a specific history as an idea, and that it has been built into American institutions in ways that produce ongoing inequality. Widely used in introductory sociology and ethnic studies courses; provides an accessible audiovisual complement to the unit's written readings.

• U.S. Census Bureau. Explore Census Data. data.census.gov.

Data portal.

The U.S. Census Bureau's primary public-facing data portal, providing access to American Community Survey, decennial census, and other federal statistical products. Includes tables, maps, and downloadable datasets organized by geography, topic, and population. Learners can use the portal to examine how race and ethnicity are currently measured and to retrieve data for case studies in this unit and later modules.

• Library of Congress. U.S. Census Connections: A Resource Guide. guides.loc.gov/census-connections.

Research guide.

A Library of Congress research guide aggregating primary and secondary sources on the history of the U.S. Census, including historical census schedules, enabling legislation, instructions to enumerators, and scholarly commentary. Useful for learners pursuing the construction of racial categories on the census across specific decades.

• U.S. National Archives. Census Records. archives.gov/research/census.

Archival portal.

The National Archives' gateway to U.S. federal census records, including population schedules from 1790 forward (with the exception of the lost 1890 schedules), instructions, and finding aids. Learners can consult original schedules to see how racial classification was operationalized in specific years and how enumerators recorded particular households.