Chapter 3 Racial and Ethnic Inequality

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Chapter 3Racial and Ethnic Inequality
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Race and Ethnicity

• Race
• a socially constructed category of people who
  share biologically transmitted traits that a
  society defines as important
• Sociologists view racial categories at best as
  crude and misleading and at worst as a harmful
  way to divide humanity
• Ethnicity refers to a shared cultural heritage

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Race and Ethnicity

• While race and ethnicity are different, the two
  may go together when groups share not only
  certain physical traits but ethnic traits as well
• examples Korean Americans and Native Americans

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Race and Ethnicity

• The racial and ethnic diversity in the United
  States is a product of immigration
• The Great Immigration extended from the end of
  the Civil War (1865) until the outbreak of World
  War I (1914)
• Nativists opposed immigration as they feared
  that immigrants might overwhelm neighborhoods and
  schools and threaten the countrys mostly English
  culture

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Recent Immigration

• The next great immigration began in 1965 when
  Congress ended the quota system.
• Immigrants came mainly from Mexico and other
  Latin American nations, as well as the
  Philippines, South Korea, and other Asian nations

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Minorities

• Minority any category of people, distinguished
  by physical or cultural traits, that a society
  subjects to disadvantages
• Characteristics
• They share a distinctive identity
• They tend to be disadvantaged
• About one-fourth of the people in the U.S. fall
  into a minority racial or ethnic category

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Patterns of Minority Majority Interaction

• Pluralism a state in which people of all racial
  and ethnic categories have roughly equal social
  standing
• Assimilation the process by which minorities
  gradually adopt the cultural patterns of the
  majority population

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Patterns of Minority Majority Interaction

• Segregation is the physical and social
  separation of categories of people
• Genocide the systematic killing of one category
  of people by another

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Native Americans

• Conflict has marked the relationship between
  Native Americans and explorers/colonizers since
  the late fifteenth century
• At first the U.S. government saw Native peoples
  as independent nations and tried to gain land
  from them through treaties
• It soon used military power against those
  unwilling to bargain

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Native Americans

• In 1871, the U.S. declared Native Americans wards
  of the federal government, granting them various
  forms of assistance
• These attempts to encourage assimilation resulted
  in many Native Americans becoming dependent on
  the governments Bureau of Indian Affairs

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Native Americans

• Native Americans gained full citizenship in 1924.
• During the 1990s, Native American organizations
  reported gains in new membership applications
• One-fifth of all legal gambling in the country
  takes place in casinos on reservations
• Most Native Americans continue to struggle and
  share a profound sense of injustice endured at
  the hands of whites

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People of African Descent

• People of African ancestry arrived in the
  Americas along with the early European explorers
• While slave traders brought 500,000 Africans to
  the U.S. as slaves, not all people of African
  descent were slaves
• The Civil War brought slavery to an end
• Jim Crow laws barred black people from voting,
  sitting on juries, and institutionalized
  segregation policies

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People of African Descent

• By the early 1950s, opposition to segregation was
  building
• the landmark Supreme Court decision in the 1954
  case, Brown v. the Board of Education, eliminated
  separate but equal schooling
• Rosa Parks sparked the bus boycott that
  desegregated public transportation in Montgomery,
  Alabama

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People of African Descent

• In the 1960s the federal government
• passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964
• passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965
• passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
• Together, these laws brought an end to most legal
  discrimination in public life

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People of African Descent

• Today, the struggle isnt over
• below-average incomes
• rate of poverty is twice the national average
• college completion rate is well below the
  national average

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People of Asian Descent

• Asian Americans include people with historical
  ties to dozens of Asian nations.
• The largest number have roots in China, the
  Philippines, India, South Korea, and Japan
• The first Asians to migrate to North America in
  the modern era came from China and Japan because
  of the Gold Rush of 1849
• Once the demand for cheap labor lessened, whites
  pressured legislatures and courts to bar Asians
  from certain work

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People of Asian Descent

• World War II brought important change to Japanese
  and Chinese Americans
• President Roosevelts Executive Order 9066
  forcibly relocated all Japanese Americans to
  internment camps where they stayed until 1944
• Chinese Americans fared better
• In 1943, the federal government ended the 1882
  ban on Chinese immigration and extended
  citizenship to Chinese Americans born abroad

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People of Asian Descent

• Many Asian Americans prospered as the postwar
  economy grew
• By the 1980s, Asian Americans were called the
  model minority based on their cultural
  commitment to study and hard work and their
  outstanding record of achievement
• Many Asian Americans have assimilated into the
  larger cultural mix

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Hispanic People

• Hispanics came to the United States from Central
  and South America, the Caribbean, and Spain
• Since few think of themselves as Hispanics or
  Latinos, there is no single Latino culture
• A high birth rate and heavy immigration have
  resulted in Hispanics surpassing African
  Americans as the nations largest racial or
  ethnic minority

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Hispanic People

• While the social standing of Hispanics is below
  the U.S. average, various categories of Latinos
  have very different rankings
• The most well off are Cuban Americans, who have
  greater education and enjoy higher incomes
• Puerto Ricans have the lowest relative ranking -
  median family income is barely half the national
  average

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Prejudice

• Prejudice is any rigid and irrational
  generalization about an entire category of people
• Stereotypes -exaggerated descriptions that are
  applied to everyone in the same category -
  greatly contribute to the perpetuation of
  prejudice

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Prejudice

• The most serious kind of prejudice is racism -the
  assertion that people of one race are innately
  superior or inferior to others
• In todays society, racism is less blatant than
  it once was
• subtle forms of racism are still very much part
  of our national life

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Prejudice

• Three causes of prejudice
• personality factors
• societal factors
• multiculturalism

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Discrimination

• While prejudice is an attitude, discrimination is
  a matter of actions
• Discrimination can be positive or negative
• Institutional discrimination is built into the
  operation of social institutions, including the
  economy, schools, and the legal system

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Discrimination

• Because prejudice and discrimination reinforce
  each other, societies can subject minorities to a
  vicious cycle of subordination
• One strategy designed to break the vicious cycle
  of prejudice and discrimination is affirmative
  action
• creates policies intended to improve the social
  standings of minorities subject to historical
  prejudice and discrimination

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Structural-Functional Analysis The Importance of
Culture

• The Culture of Poverty
• Values and Disadvantage
• Critics contend that this perspective focuses on
  the result, not the cause, of low social standing

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Symbolic-Interaction Analysis The Personal
Significance of Race

• When race becomes a master status, it becomes a
  personal trait that overwhelms all others and
  defines any person of color
• Critics contend that race involves more than
  individual behavior

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Social-Conflict Analysis The Structure of Society

• The Importance of Class
• Multiculturalism
• Critics contend that social-conflict theory
• understates what people in the U.S. have in
  common
• takes away peoples responsibility for their own
  lives
• tends to minimize the significant strides that
  have been made in dealing with social diversity

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Conservatives Culture and Effort Matter

• Conservatives claim that differences in culture
  set some parts of the population apart from
  others
• People in various racial and ethnic categories
  have different values and priorities
• A free society must be an unequal society

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Liberals Society and Government Matter

• Liberals contend that cultural differences are
  not the main reason for inequality
• they view racial and ethnic inequality as
  resulting mostly from prejudice and
  discrimination built into societys institutions
• they urge people to avoid thinking that
  minorities are themselves the social problem

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Radicals Basic Changes Are Needed

• Radicals suggest two ways to solve the problem of
  racial and ethnic inequality
• overhaul the whole capitalist economic system
• eliminate the concept of race because it provides
  an ideological basis for dividing people