ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the racialization of identities and the racism therein has played a significant and inextricable role in shaping ethnic identities and perceptions in the United States. It provides an understanding of the inextricable relationship between the two categories entails dissecting how racialization/racism affects the patterns of everyday living: language, traditions and customs, values and normative orientations, worldviews, and so forth. The chapter argues that whiteness has played a significant role in shaping ethnic patterns, social identities, and institutions in the United States. Although the discussion of the chapter focuses on the effects of the ideological construction of race, the analytic distinction of racenicity should not be abstracted from other important factors. Conservatives have historically equated race and ethnicity within unsubstantiated claims that biological characteristics result in predisposed psychological, intellectual, and social behavior. Racenicity is thus the result of the antagonistic social relations caused by the unequal distribution of power throughout society along racial lines.
