People’s Attitudes About Race

Reference/ sources Chapter: 9 (Race and Ethnicity) in Brown,Tubelle de Gonzalez, and McIlwraith (2017)
Requarth, T. (2019, May 30). Why do so many researchers still treat race as a scientific concept? Slate.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/05/race-science-angela-saini-new-book-superior-deconstructed.html (Links
to an external site.)
For this research assignment and paper, you will first survey 20 adult people of your choosing to ask them
about their attitudes about race.
Please tell your adult respondents that you are completing a research project and paper for your online Cultural
Anthropology course on people’s understandings of, and attitudes about, race.
Important: Your respondents must remain anonymous. To maintain their confidentiality, in your field notes, you
must codify them and not list their names. You may number each subject or use initials instead, but no first or
last names should be included.
Explain no more. If respondents do not understand any of the five questions, please ask them to simply answer
to the best of their ability and understanding, and explain that you are unable to discuss the question any
further, according to assignment requirements.
Ask each of the 20 people the following 5 questions, and no more, and record their responses in your field
notes, which you will submit with your paper:
1) How many races are there?
2) What are those races? (Please list them.)
3) What is your race?
4) What is your gender?
5) What is your age?
Then, in a 3-to-4 page double-spaced paper, in Times New Roman 12 point font, no longer and no shorter,
explain your results.
Do you observe any patterns of responses based on respondents’ cultures, sub-cultures, or any particular
socioeconomic background?
What about gender?
What about age?
Do people of particular age groups respond in a similar way?
Why do you think you observed the responses that you did?
How do the responses compare to the anthropological understanding of race, or to what you have learned in
this course in the weekly lessons or in the textbook?