TY - JOUR AU - Niemonen, Jack PY - 2010/04/26 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Race and Ethnic Minorities JF - TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology JA - TRAILS VL - IS - SE - DO - UR - https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/race-and-ethnic-minorities SP - AB - In the broadest sense, this course will be taught as a history of paradigmatic shifts in howwe think about racial and ethnic relations. Paradigms are sets of assumptions that are taken for granted. They influence how we see and interpret the social world. They are more basic than the choice of a particular problem to be investigated or the particular rules for selecting data and interpreting them. Rarely are these assumptions made explicit. By comparing and contrasting how paradigms frame the study of racial and ethnic relations, we can investigate the level beyond which a theory does not progress, and note themes and issues that are emphasized or ignored. This approach is premised on James B. McKee’s observation that racial situations assume different configurations depending on the framework adopted for studying them. In any study of paradigmatic shifts, those shifts must be rooted in specific sociohistorical conditions, and a detailed examination of the underlying assumptions of the paradigms themselves must be conducted. As a sociology of the sociology of racial and ethnic relations, this approach forces a confrontation with questions about the value-free nature of sociological inquiry, about the adequacy of analyses subsumed under other sub-discipline rubrics and built on traditional concepts such as "majority" and "minority," and about the modes of political action that paradigmatic frameworks legitimize. In this approach, then, theory is not an after-the-fact enterprise; it is the foundation for understanding the race relations problematic. Because theories are rooted in paradigms, the problem is to explain how paradigms inform theories that influence how we interpret racial and ethnic relations at the everyday level. In the next section of this overview, I provide an outline of how this may be done. ER -