Race remains an often heard term in American society today. It is played both up and down depending on the convenience of circumstances, and yet, beyond rhetoric, very little open dialog addresses the meaning of the term itself or the adequacy and implications of its blanket and often blind application in a modern state society.

On the other hand, "class" remains a term that is rarely spoken in American society, though its implications are omnipresent and impact in almost every social interaction we can have in our daily lives.

Race and class are two defining aspects of American culture, but they are not the only two aspects of this culture, nor are they necessarily even the most or exclusively central aspects of this cultural patterning.

What has race and class have to do with each other, especially as these terms become articulated in both speech and action in both the United States and abroad? What to they mean to different people?

No one would argue that American society is and has been both a racially stratified society and a class stratified society, and thus these two sociological concepts seem to share in common at least the notion of "stratification."

Modern state societies are by definition "stratified" societies. This means that the structure of these societies embodies basic differences between certain categories of people based on socially defined criteria, and usually entail institutional mechanisms and cultural constraints that serve to reinforce these differences and to maintain the boundary of separation between differing groups of people.

Stratification also always has a more invidious meaning, and that the structure and nature of these relationships of difference between people are always unequal and assymetrical in terms especially of the articulation and distribution of power, resources, opportunities and also in the direction of positive and negative social valuation of both self and other in society.

These assymetries are even more invidious because usually they are embedded into the very basic pattern of our daily lives, such that most of the time we take them for granted as given and do not question them, much less seek to understand them in any more significant manner.

Assymetries in American society of both race and class are undeniable, and yet American society is at the same time astonishingly lacking in other forms of stratification. The constitutional freedom of religion has for the most part entailed that religion is usually not an issue or principal for stratification. America is also surprisingly lacking in structurally reinforced patterns of ethnocultural or ethnonational stratification, at least as long as these patterns are not conflated with and coincidental to other racially-defined criteria. Because we have been an open, immigrant society, we have had a history of relative tolerance and even integration of culturally-defined criteria of group identity and difference.

From a purely scientific standpoint, the concept of race is left lacking in basic definitional criteria. Anthropologists, looking for defining criteria of physical differences between people, long ago abandoned the categories of race as useful constructs. Skin color crosses too many geographical and social boundaries to be by itself a safe criteria for a sound science of human difference. Other racial affinities, like the epicanthic fold of the eye, body type, body hair, blood type, all give way at some point or another in our consideration of the geographical distribution of humanity in the world.

Lacking genuine scientific criteria for basing our definition of race, it is not uncommon for agencies in the business of racial selection to attach such definitions to other sorts of criteria, namely to criteria of ethno-national and ethno-cultural heritage and identity, even if in fact these criteria frequently cross and abuse the traditional racial boundaries. Thus, the use of race is most often conflated and confused as a notion with the promotion and demotion of the interests of ethnocultural groupings of humanity.

In education and government especially, issues of race are foregrounded as the operative principle in the articulation of resources, power and opportunity. The government has attempted to impose its own definitions of race upon other sectors of the society as well.

Anthropological/biological definitions of race

Sociological/psychological ascriptions of race. Stereotyping & symbolic ideology

conflation of race and ethnocultural differences. The use of race as a "playing card" in interethnic politics.

the concept of class

How Class and Race come together.