three - Ethnicity and race: from essentialism to constructionism

Summary

As explained in the previous chapter, population ageing, the globalisation of international migration and transnationalism are all bringing about increased diversity among the older segments of our populations. The fact that more and more ethnicity scholars have discovered old age as a life-course stage worth focusing on and the fact that social gerontologists’ understandings of ethnicity seem to have stagnated (Torres, 2015b) have led me to believe that this is an appropriate time to take stock of what we know and need to find out about the intersection of ethnicity and old age. It is against this backdrop that this chapter engages with the constructs of ethnicity and race and presents the different theoretical strands that scholars specialising in this area rely on.

As we will see in the chapter that follows a considerable amount of the literature reviewed in Chapters Four to Six tends to mix up ethnicity with race. Hence, this chapter needs to clarify the difference between these two terms. This is why it begins with a section that addresses these differences. Once these terms have been defined, a presentation follows that gives us insight into the theoretical discussions that have led ethnicity scholarship to evolve its understandings of ethnicity and race. In relation to this evolution, it is important to point out that scholars working on the intersection of ethnicity and old age have different disciplinary backgrounds and have been engaged in research at this intersection for different amounts of time. Clearly, this has consequences for the topics that have received the most attention over the 20-year period (and which are the focus of Chapters Four to Six), and also for how useful the different chapters of this book will be for them. The fact that it is not uncommon for ethnicity scholars to state which disciplinary backgrounds have guided their reading of what are deemed to be some of the classics in scholarship of ethnicity and race is part of the reason why I have deemed it necessary to ‘position’ myself as I did in the Introduction and will do in more detail here (Jenkins, 1997; Cornell and Hartmann, 1998; Elias and Feagin, 2016).