Post your responses to the appropriate threads in Blackboard's Db.

1) What is the section, "From Religion to Science" about? In other words, what do you see as the main claim Omi and Winant make here? Point to two passages that lead you to summarize O/W's point in the section.

2) What is the main point in "From Science to Politics?" Again, find a quote or two to support your assessment.

3) Omi and Winant write of Bob Blauner's idea that there are "two 'languages' of race" (p. 70). What are these two languages? Explain this in your own words.

4) Omi and Winant write, "A racial project can be defined as racist if and only if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race" (p. 71). What do you think this means? Look carefully at what they say after this definition to help you. What in those paragraph(s) helps you figure out what they mean?

5) Nagel (1998) writes that “ethnic identity is most closely associated with the issue of boundaries” (p. 239). Just what does this mean? Can you find any of these boundaries in either Omi and Winant’s (1994) essay or Gladwell’s (1996)?

6) “Ethnic identity, then, is the result of a dialectical process involving internal and external opinions and processes, as well as the individual’s self-identification and outsiders’ ethnic designations” (Nagel, 1998, p. 240). What does Nagel mean here? What is the internal? The external?

7) Can you locate any of Nagel's “dialectical process” in Omi and Winant’s (1994) essay? How about in Gladwell (1996)? Try to find at least one place in each of those readings where you can see it.