The U. Asian population was predominately Japanese, Filipino, and Chinese just two decades ago. Minorities have also become more diverse socioeconomically. The number of minorities in the highest income brackets has more than doubled since , for example, yet minorities still account for a disproportionate share of the poor.
More minority politicians are being elected to public office, but minorities are more likely than non-Hispanic whites to serve time in prison. More minorities are earning graduate and professional degrees, yet a disproportionately large percentage never finish high school. Many businesses target their products to specific minorities because they recognize that minorities are an expanding market.
Aspects of black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian culture—including art, food, music, and styles of dress—are being adopted throughout American society. Americans are divided in their beliefs about the long-term effects of the growing diversity. Discussions on this topic sometimes become heated because the increase in the minority populations is closely linked to important policy issues relating to immigration, affirmative action, welfare, and education reform.
Few Americans have a good grasp of how large the different minority groups are. A survey by the Gallup organization found that just 8 percent of Americans knew that African Americans make up between 10 percent and 15 percent of the U.
In a Gallup poll, respondents estimated that Hispanics made up about 20 percent of the U. Minority group status is also categorical in nature: an individual who exhibits the physical or behavioral characteristics of a given minority group will be accorded the status of that group and be subject to the same treatment as other members of that minority group.
Every large society contains ethnic minorities: subgroups that share a common heritage, which often consists of a shared language , culture often including a religion , or ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy.
In this case, while minority status can be conditioned by a clear numerical difference, more significantly it refers to issues of political power. In some places, subordinate ethnic groups may constitute a numerical majority, such as blacks in South Africa under apartheid. In addition to long-established ethnic minority populations in various nation-states, ethnic minorities may consist of more recent migrant, indigenous , or landless nomadic communities residing within, or between, a particular national territory.
Recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as a minority group or groups has gained prominence in the Western world since the nineteenth century. The term queer is sometimes understood as an umbrella term for all non-normative sexualities and gender expressions but does not always signify a minority; rather, as with many gay rights activists of the s and s, it sometimes represents an attempt to highlight sexual diversity in everyone.
Even the aboriginal population is identified as "native American" to distinguish it from Anglo-American, African American, and so on. The United States, accordingly, is perceived throughout the world as a successful experiment in ethnic mixing, the preeminent melting pot to many.
Another, strikingly successful example of a multiethnic country is Switzerland, where French-, German-, and Italian-speakers divided between Roman Catholic and Protestant adherents live and work in exceptional harmony and prosperity. Ethnic diversity in the Swiss case appears to have had a stimulating effect rather than a divisive one. Studies of structural conditions in Switzerland suggest that harmony may coexist with diversity where important characteristics are shared.
There, at least, linguistic and sectarian differences have proved in recent centuries to be subordinate to the condition of being Swiss—and perhaps also European. Although not a melting pot, like the United States, Switzerland is a model of ethnic toleration. Shifting political and religious lines, altered economic conditions, and natural disasters have created more immigrants than have the sum total of human wanderlust and fortune hunting.
The first waves of settlement in colonial North America, for example, arose in many cases from religious persecutions in Great Britain and the continent of Europe. They were followed by Scots-Irish peasants impoverished by the enclosure of common lands at the turn of the next century. Roman Catholics suffering from a variety of legal disabilities in 18th-century England and Scotland settled parts of Maryland, while Scandinavian farmers in the earlyth century sought an adequate growing season in the northern Middle West.
A potato blight and consequent famine in the midth century forced millions of rural Irish into involuntary exile in the urban slums of an industrializing United States. At the same time that the Puritans were settling parts of New England the proprietors of royal land grants in the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies were underwriting the transportation of white European indentured servants to work their land.
When these eventually earned their freedom, the planter aristocracy found a cheaper and more permanent substitute kidnapped and enslaved Africans sold as chattel whose children and later progeny likewise became personal property.
The demands of industrialization and a corresponding need for a large pool of cheap labor acted as a magnet attracting a flood of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, to replace the upwardly mobile Irish-Americans, at the turn of the 20th century.
Railroad building in the American West pulled in a wave of Chinese coolie labor. Other groups arrived for a variety of reasons, but the main social characteristic of the American experiment, its multiethnic mix, never changed. As new ethnic groups arrived earlier ones were absorbed into the predominantly white population of mostly European extraction. Usually this took place in a generation or two, in some cases longer.
But multiethnicity was the rule and the melting pot — assimilation of ethnic minorities into the ever-changing majority — the ideal. An unfortunate secondary characteristic of ethnic minority status is that it is often accompanied by prejudice and discrimination. Ethnic minorities tend to be at a disadvantage in most situations, most often because they are stigmatized as different from the norm.
Religion and, most significantly, skin color are more apt than almost anything else to provoke prejudice, and the resistance to assimilation encountered by persons of different skin color is pronounced and long-lasting. In the United States the greatest hostility toward ethnic minorities repeatedly has come from those Americans most threatened by the newcomers.
At times those threatened have included a majority of working men and women, and the government has usually responded by enacting harsh and restrictive immigration laws or quotas.
In the past, theorists have posited categories of race based on various geographic regions, ethnicities, skin colours, and more. Their labels for racial groups have connoted regions Mongolia and the Caucus Mountains, for instance or denoted skin tones black, white, yellow, and red, for example. However, this typology of race developed during early racial science has fallen into disuse, and the social construction of race or racialization is a far more common way of understanding racial categories.
According to this school of thought, race is not biologically identifiable. Rather, certain groups become racialized through a social process that marks them for unequal treatment based on perceived physiological differences. When considering skin colour, for example, the social construction of race perspective recognizes that the relative darkness or fairness of skin is an evolutionary adaptation to the available sunlight in different regions of the world.
Contemporary conceptions of race, therefore, which tend to be based on socioeconomic assumptions, illuminate how far removed modern race understanding is from biological qualities. She is the daughter of a black man Quincy Jones but she does not play a black woman in her television or film roles.
In some countries, such as Brazil, class is more important than skin colour in determining racial categorization. The social construction of race is also reflected in the way that names for racial categories change with changing times. Culturally they remain distinct from immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa or the descendants of the slaves brought to mainland North America. Ethnicity is a term that describes shared culture—the practices, values, and beliefs of a group.
This might include shared language, religion, and traditions, among other commonalities. And like race, individuals may be identified or self-identify with ethnicities in complex, even contradictory, ways. These examples illustrate the complexity and overlap of these identifying terms. Ethnicity, like race, continues to be an identification method that individuals and institutions use today—whether through the census, affirmative action initiatives, non-discrimination laws, or simply in personal day-to-day relations.
These definitions correlate to the concept that the dominant group is that which holds the most power in a given society, while subordinate groups are those who lack power compared to the dominant group. Note that being a numerical minority is not a characteristic of being a minority group; sometimes larger groups can be considered minority groups due to their lack of power.
It is the lack of power that is the predominant characteristic of a minority, or subordinate group. For example, consider apartheid in South Africa, in which a numerical majority the black inhabitants of the country were exploited and oppressed by the white minority.
According to Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris , a minority group is distinguished by five characteristics: 1 unequal treatment and less power over their lives, 2 distinguishing physical or cultural traits like skin colour or language, 3 involuntary membership in the group, 4 awareness of subordination, and 5 high rate of in-group marriage.
Additional examples of minority groups might include the LGBTQ community, religious practitioners whose faith is not widely practised where they live, and people with disabilities. History has shown us many examples of the scapegoating of a subordinate group. In Canada, eastern European immigrants were branded Bolsheviks and interned during the economic slump following World War I. In the United States, many states have enacted laws to disenfranchise immigrants; these laws are popular because they let the dominant group scapegoat a subordinate group.
Prior to the 20th century, racial intermarriage referred to as miscegenation was extremely rare, and in many places, illegal. In the United States, 41 of the 50 states at one time or another enacted legislation to prevent racial intermarriage. In Canada, there were no formal anti-miscegenation laws, though strong informal norms ensured that racial intermixing was extremely limited in scope.
Thompson makes the case, however, that the various versions of the Indian Act, originally enacted in , effectively worked on a racial level to restrict the marriage between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. A key part of the Act enumerated the various ways in which aboriginal people could lose their status and thus their claim to aboriginal land title and state provisions. Until its amendment in , the most egregious section of the Act Section In this way, the thorny question of having multiple racial identities could be avoided.
Prior to the full establishment of British colonial rule in Canada, racial intermarriage was encouraged in some areas to support the fur trade. It is now common for the children of racially mixed parents to acknowledge and celebrate their various ethnic identities. According to census data, 3. This was up from 3. The terms stereotype, prejudice, discrimination, and racism are often used interchangeably in everyday conversation.
But when discussing these terms from a sociological perspective, it is important to define them: stereotypes are oversimplified ideas about groups of people, prejudice refers to thoughts and feelings about those groups, while discrimination refers to actions toward them. Racism is a type of prejudice that involves set beliefs about a specific racial group. As stated above, stereotypes are oversimplified ideas about groups of people.
Stereotypes can be based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation—almost any characteristic. Where do stereotypes come from? In fact new stereotypes are rarely created; rather, they are recycled from subordinate groups that have assimilated into society and are reused to describe newly subordinate groups.
For example, many stereotypes that are currently used to characterize black people were used earlier in Canadian history to characterize Irish and eastern European immigrants. Prejudice refers to beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that someone holds about a group. A prejudice is not based on experience; instead, it is a prejudgment, originating outside of actual experience. Racism is a type of prejudice that is used to justify the belief that one racial category is somehow superior or inferior to others.
While prejudice refers to biased thinking , discrimination consists of actions against a group of people. Discrimination can be based on age, religion, health, and other indicators. Race-based discrimination and antidiscrimination laws strive to address this set of social problems.
Discrimination based on race or ethnicity can take many forms, from unfair housing practices to biased hiring systems. Overt discrimination has long been part of Canadian history.
Discrimination against Jews was typical until the s. McGill University imposed quotas on the admission of Jewish students in , a practice which continued in its medical faculty until the s. Both Ontario and Nova Scotia had racially segregated schools. It is interesting to note that while Viola Desmond was prosecuted for sitting in a whites only section of the cinema in Glasgow, Nova Scotia, she was in fact of mixed-race descent as her mother was white Backhouse These practices are unacceptable in Canada today.
However, discrimination cannot be erased from our culture just by enacting laws to abolish it. The reasons for this are complex and relate to the educational, criminal, economic, and political systems that exist. For example, when a newspaper prints the race of individuals accused of a crime, it may enhance stereotypes of a certain minority.
Another example of racist practices is racial steering , in which real estate agents direct prospective homeowners toward or away from certain neighbourhoods based on their race.
Racist attitudes and beliefs are often more insidious and hard to pin down than specific racist practices. Prejudice and discrimination can overlap and intersect in many ways. To illustrate, here are four examples of how prejudice and discrimination can occur. Unprejudiced nondiscriminators are open-minded, tolerant, and accepting individuals. Unprejudiced discriminators might be those who, unthinkingly, practise sexism in their workplace by not considering females for certain positions that have traditionally been held by men.
Prejudiced discriminators include those who actively make disparaging remarks about others or who perpetuate hate crimes. While most white people are willing to admit that non-white people live with a set of disadvantages due to the colour of their skin, very few white people are willing to acknowledge the benefits they receive simply by being white.
White privilege refers to the fact that dominant groups often accept their experience as the normative and hence, superior experience. White people can be assured that, most of the time, they will be dealing with authority figures of their own race.
How many other examples of white privilege can you think of? Discrimination also manifests in different ways.
The illustrations above are examples of individual discrimination, but other types exist. Institutional racism refers to the way in which racial distinctions are used to organize the policy and practice of state, judicial, economic, and educational institutions.
As a result they systematically reproduce inequalities along racial lines. They define what people can and cannot do based on racial characteristics. It is not necessarily the intention of these institutions to reproduce inequality, nor of the individuals who work in the institutions. Rather inequality is the outcome of patterns of differential treatment based on racial or ethnic categorizations of people.
Clear examples of institutional racism in Canada can be seen in the Indian Act and immigration policy, as we have already noted.
The effects of institutional racism can also be observed in the structures that reproduce income inequality for visible minorities and aboriginal Canadians. The median income of aboriginal people in Canada was 30 percent less than non-aboriginal people in Wilson and Macdonald Institutional racism is also deeply problematic for visible minorities in Canada.
While labour participation rates in the economy are more or less equal for racialized and non-racialized individuals, racialized men are 24 percent more likely to be unemployed than non-racialized men.
Racialized women are 48 percent more likely to be unemployed. Moreover, racialized Canadians earned only Those identifying as Chinese earned Block and Galabuzi argue that these inequalities in income are not simply the effect of the time it takes immigrants to integrate into the society and economy.
The income inequality between racialized and non-racialized individuals remains substantial even into the third generation of immigrants. The residential school system was set up in the 19th century to educate and assimilate aboriginal children into European culture. In the schools, they received substandard education and many were subject to neglect, disease, and abuse. Many children did not see their parents again, and thousands of children died at the schools.
When they did return home they found it difficult to fit in. They had not learned the skills needed for life on reserves and had also been taught to be ashamed of their native heritage. Because the education at the residential schools was inferior they also had difficulty fitting into non-aboriginal society. The residential school system was part of a system of institutional racism because it was established on the basis of a distinction between the educational needs of aboriginal and non-aboriginal people.
As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded, the residential school system constituted a systematic assault on aboriginal families, children, and culture in Canada. Some have likened the policy and its aftermath to a cultural genocide Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada While the last of the residential schools closed in , the problem of aboriginal education remains grave, with 40 percent of all aboriginal people aged 20 to 24 having no high school diploma 61 percent of on-reserve aboriginal people , compared to 13 percent of non-aboriginals Congress of Aboriginal Peoples Even with the public apology to residential school survivors and the inauguration of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in , the federal government, and the interests it represents, continue to refuse basic aboriginal claims to title, self-determination, and control over their lands and resources.
Issues of race and ethnicity can be observed through three major sociological perspectives: functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. As you read through these theories, ask yourself which one makes the most sense, and why.
Is more than one theory needed to explain racism, prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination? In the view of functionalism, racial and ethnic inequalities must have served an important function in order to exist as long as they have.
This concept, of course, is problematic. How can racism and discrimination contribute positively to society? Sociologists who adhere to the functionalist view argue that racism and discrimination do contribute positively, but only to the dominant group.
Historically, it has indeed served dominant groups well to discriminate against subordinate groups. Slavery, of course, was beneficial to slaveholders.
Holding racist views can benefit those who want to deny rights and privileges to people they view as inferior to them, but over time, racism harms society. Outcomes of race-based disenfranchisement—such as poverty levels, crime rates, and discrepancies in employment and education opportunities—illustrate the long-term and clearly negative results of slavery and racism in Canadian society. Apart from the issues of race, ethnicity, and social inequality, the close ties of ethnic and racial membership can be seen to serve some positive functions even if they lead to the formation of ethnic and racial enclaves or ghettos.
The close ties promote group cohesion, which can have economic benefits especially for immigrants who can use community contacts to pursue employment. They can also have political benefits in the form of political mobilization for recognition, services, or resources by different communities.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission for aboriginal residential school survivors or the policy of multiculturalism are examples. Finally, the close ties of racial or ethnic groups also provide cultural familiarity and emotional support for individuals who might otherwise feel alienated by or discriminated against by the dominant society.
Critical sociological theories are often applied to inequalities of gender, social class, education, race, and ethnicity. A critical sociology perspective of Canadian history would examine the numerous past and current struggles between the Anglo-Saxon ruling class and racial and ethnic minorities, noting specific conflicts that have arisen when the dominant group perceived a threat from the minority group.
Modern Canada itself can in fact be described as a product of internal colonialism. While Canada was originally a colony itself, the product of external colonialism, first by the French and then the English, it also adopted colonial techniques internally as it became an independent nation state. Internal colonialism refers to the process of uneven regional development by which a dominant group establishes its control over existing populations within a country.
Typically it works by maintaining segregation among the colonized, which enables different geographical distributions of people, different wage levels, and different occupational concentrations to form based on race or ethnicity.
For critical sociology, addressing the issues that arise when race and ethnicity become the basis of social inequality is a central focus of any emancipatory project.
They are often complex problems, however. Feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins developed intersection theory , which suggests we cannot separate the effects of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other attributes. When we examine race and how it can bring us both advantages and disadvantages, it is important to acknowledge that the way we experience race is shaped, for example, by our gender and class.
Multiple layers of disadvantage intersect to create the way we experience race. For example, if we want to understand prejudice, we must understand that the prejudice focused on a white woman because of her gender is very different from the layered prejudice focused on a poor Asian woman, who is affected by stereotypes related to being poor, being a woman, and being part of a visible minority.
For symbolic interactionists, race and ethnicity provide strong symbols as sources of identity. In fact, some interactionists propose that the symbols of race, not race itself, are what lead to racism. Famed interactionist Herbert Blumer suggested that racial prejudice is formed through interactions between members of the dominant group: without these interactions, individuals in the dominant group would not hold racist views.
These interactions contribute to an abstract picture of the subordinate group that allows the dominant group to support its view of the subordinate group, thus maintaining the status quo.
An example of this might be an individual whose beliefs about a particular group are based on images conveyed in popular media. These beliefs are unquestioned because the individual has never personally met a member of that group. A culture of prejudice refers to the idea that prejudice is embedded in our culture. We grow up surrounded by images of stereotypes and casual expressions of racism and prejudice. Consider the casually racist imagery on grocery store shelves or the stereotypes that fill popular movies and advertisements.
It is easy to see how someone living in Canada, who may know no Mexican Americans personally, might gain a stereotyped impression from such sources as Speedy Gonzalez or Taco Time fast-food restaurants, or Hollywood.
Because we are all exposed to these images and thoughts, it is impossible to know to what extent they have influenced our thought processes. Throughout Western history intergroup relations relationships between different groups of people have been subject to different strategies for the management of diversity.
The problem of management arises when differences between different peoples are regarded as so insurmountable that it is believed they cannot easily coincide or cohabit with one another. How can the unity of the self-group or political community be attained in the face of the divisive presence of non-selves or others? The solutions proposed to intergroup relations have ranged along a spectrum between tolerance and intolerance. The most tolerant form of intergroup relations is multiculturalism, in which cultural distinctions are made between groups, but the groups are regarded to have equal standing in society.
At the other end of the continuum are assimilation, expulsion, and even genocide—stark examples of intolerant intergroup relations. Genocide , the deliberate annihilation of a targeted usually subordinate group, is the most toxic intergroup relationship.
Historically, we can see that genocide has included both the intent to exterminate a group and the function of exterminating of a group, intentional or not. But how do we understand genocide that is not so overt and deliberate? During the European colonization of North America, some historians estimate that aboriginal populations dwindled from approximately 12 million people in the year to barely , by the year Lewy European settlers coerced aboriginal people off their own lands, often causing thousands of deaths in forced removals, such as occurred in the Cherokee or Potawatomi Trail of Tears in the United States.
Settlers also enslaved aboriginal people and forced them to give up their religious and cultural practices. Smallpox, diphtheria, and measles flourished among North American aboriginal people who had no exposure to the diseases and no ability to fight them. Quite simply, these diseases decimated them.
How planned this genocide was remains a topic of contention.
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