ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the study of racial and ethnic minorities are be reframed, not simply as a struggle for civil rights and social recognition but fundamentally as a struggle for human rights. A rights-based paradigm requires sociologists of racial and ethnic minorities to fundamentally take a moral position through their research agenda. Stratification studies of racial and ethnic minorities stem in large part from the empirically oriented works of the Chicago School, as well as some of the classic sociological theorists. The tradition of movement studies, in general, draws its strength from the early works of Karl Marx, in particular his argument that social movements are, for the most part, the end result of historically determined conditions. Later developments in Marxism reconfigured social-movement theories around the conceptual framework of "resource mobilization" spurred by those in positions of power and later as centered on the need to build consensus through the development of a collective identity.
