Diversity and Society, Fifth Edition

Joseph F. Healey

Part 1

Chapter 1

Diversity in the United States:

Questions and Concepts

Overview

This chapter raises many of the questions and themes that will concern us throughout the text. It also defines some of the most important concepts in the text, including minority groups, prejudice, discrimination, and racism.Inequality and race are dealt with in some detail. In addition, this chapter introduces the idea of diversity within minority groups, especially in the context of gender differentiation.

Learning Goals

  1. Students will understand that our nation is one of immigrants.Moreover, they will understand the ways in which questions of unity and diversity are among the most pressing to face the United States today.
  2. Students will understand several theoretical perspectives concerned with stratification, including theories by Marx, Weber, Lenski, and Hill Collins.
  3. Students will understand the connection between minority group status and stratification.Specifically, they will understand that social classes and minority group status can vary independentlybut are correlated.
  4. Students will understand both the biological and social dimensions of race and gender and understand how they serve as visible distinguishing traits that denote group membership and affect life chances.
  5. Students will explore the social construction of racial identity.
  6. Students will understand key concepts related to stratification, including but not limited to minority group, dominant group, ethnic and racial groups, stratification, class, power, prestige, social mobility, gender, patriarchy, matrix of domination, prejudice, modern racism, institutional and individual discrimination, and ideological racism.
  7. Students will examine debates concerning the social construction of gender.Specifically, they will learn arguments from both biological and sociological viewpoints regarding whether gender roles are learned or genetic.
  8. Students will understand that prejudice is the tendency to think and feel negatively about members of other groups, while discrimination refers to negative acts against people from another group.Prejudice has affective and cognitive components. Students will also examine the relationship between prejudice and discrimination.
  9. Students will understand that different theories of prejudice propose different causes, including intergroup conflict and cultural and structural variables.
  10. Students will learn that intergroup relations in the United States can be examined in a comparative and global perspective.

Outline

  • Introduction
  • The United States is a nation of immigrants and we continue to argue about who we are and who we should be. Which is the real America: the land of tolerance and opportunity or the one nation of narrow-mindedness and inequity?
  • The Increasing Variety of American Minority Groups
  • Since the 1960s, the number of immigrants arriving in the United States each year has tripled and includes groups, literally, from all over the globe.
  • Declining predominance of non-Hispanic whites. Indeedby the middle of this century, non-Hispanic whites will become a numerical minority.
  • HispanicAmerican and Asian American and Pacific Islander populations will grow dramatically. Hispanic Americans are the largest minority group in 2002, surpassing blacks, and will grow to more than 30% of the population by 2060.
  • Increasing numbers of multiracial and multiethnic people.
  • What Is a Minority Group?
  • Wagley and Harris’s (1958) definition focuses on distribution of resources and power.
  • Members experience a pattern of disadvantage or inequality.
  • Members share a visible trait or characteristic that differentiates them from other groups. However, group names have serious shortcomings. Names are social conventions whose meanings change from time to time and place to place.To underscore the social construction of racial and ethnic groups, we use group names interchangeably (e.g.,blacks and AfricanAmericans; Hispanic Americans and Latinos).
  • Members share commonalities and differences and do not necessarily use ethnic or racial labels when they think about their identity or who they are.
  • The minority group is a self-conscious social unit.
  • Membership in the group is usually determined at birth.
  • Members tend to form intimate relationships (close friendships, dating partnerships, and marriages) within the group.
  • Minority groups, also known as subordinate groups, have differential access to what is valued by society (e.g., jobs, housing, police protection).
  • The dominant group, also known as the core group, benefits from existing social arrangements.
  • The Pattern of Inequality
  • Theoretical Perspectives
  • Karl Marx—Argued that the most important source of inequality in society was the system of economic production
  • Max Weber—Expanded on Marx by identifying three separate stratification systems:(a) Ownership or control of property, wealth, and income; (b) prestige or respect given to us by others; and (c) power or the ability to influence others.
  • Gerhard Lenski—Following Weber, Lenski distinguished between class, prestige, and power.Analyzed stratification in the context of a society’s level of development.
  • Minority Group Status and Stratification
  • Patricia Hill Collins (2000) calls for an approach to the study of inequality and group relations that recognizes the multiplicity of systems of inequality and privilege that operate in society. This is because some systems arebased on social class, while others divide people by gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, disability, and multiple other criteria. Collins stresses intersectionality, a view that acknowledges that everyone has multiple group memberships and that these crisscross and create verydifferent realities for people with varying combinations of statuses.
  • Minority group status and stratification affects access to wealth and income, prestige, and power.It is a powerful determinant of life chances.
  • Social classes and minority groups are correlated but exist as separate social realities.For example, some groups experience greater social mobility than others.
  • Visible Distinguishing Traits
  • Race
  • A recent concern in western European history, primarily since the 1500s, during the age of discovery
  • Race has both a biological and social dimension.
  • Race has been widely misunderstood. False ideas and exaggerated importance attached to race have led to some of the greatest tragedies in human history.
  • Racial taxonomies have major limitations, including the ability to identify clear dividing lines between racial groups, primarily since race is ambiguous.At what point, for example, is a person “white”?
  • Skin color is derived from melanin, which is thought to relate to climate and the amount of sunlight in a given ecology.More sunlight = more melanin = darker skin.
  • Gender
  • Gender serves as an additional source of social differentiation.
  • Gender roles and relationships vary across time and from society to society.Nevertheless, gender and inequality have usually been closely related, with men typically claiming more power, prestige, and property than women.
  • It is important to discuss the intersectionality of divergent experiences for women and men within different minority groups so that we can see the ways race, ethnicity, gender, and class combine to produce a matrix of domination.
  • Focus on Gender: Are Gender Roles Learned or Genetic?
  • Key Concepts in Dominant–Minority Relations
  • Prejudice—The tendency of an individual to think about other groups in negative ways, to attach negative emotions to those groups, and to prejudge individuals on the basis of their group membership.
  • Causes of Prejudice
  • One firm conclusion that has emerged is that prejudice is not a single, unitary phenomenon.
  • Competition Between Groups and the Origins of Prejudice
  • One common factor that seems to account for the origin of all prejudices is competition between groups—some episode in which one group successfully dominates, takes resources from, or eliminates a threat from some other group.
  • Culture, Socialization, and the Persistence of Prejudice
  • Prejudice originates in group competition of some sort but often outlives the conditions of its creation. But how does prejudice persist through time? According the Myrdal, prejudice is perpetuated through time by a self-fulfilling prophecy or a vicious cycle.
  • Modern Racism
  • The new forms of prejudice have been described with a variety of terms. In modern societies in which there is a strong emphasis on mutual respect and tolerance, prejudice tends, in the modern atmosphere of “political correctness,”to be expressed in subtle, indirect ways.
  • This new form of prejudice has been called a number of things, including modern racism, symbolic racism, and color-blindracism, and there is considerable debate over its exact shape, extent, and indeed existence.
  • The Sociology of Individual Prejudice
  • The sociological approach to prejudice stresses that prejudice is created as a result of competition betweengroups and becomes part of the taken-for-grantedworld.
  • Discrimination
  • The unequal treatment of people based on their membership in a group.
  • Ideological Racism
  • A belief system that asserts that a particular group is inferior.This is the societal equivalent of individual prejudice.
  • Ideological Racism and Individual Prejudice
  • Racism is not a prerequisite for prejudice may exist even in the absence of an ideology of racism.
  • Ideological Racism, White Racial Identity, and White Privilege
  • Ideological racism is a component of culture that helps reproduce individual prejudice across time.
  • Institutional Discrimination
  • A pattern of unequal treatment based on group membership, a pattern built into the daily operations of society, whether or not it is consciously intended.
  • Focus on Contemporary Issues: Immigration and Globalization
  • The most powerful dimension ofglobalization, especially for understanding contemporary immigration, is economic—the movement of jobs and opportunities from place to place. Peopleflow from areas of lower opportunity to areas with greater opportunity. Some Americans see these newcomers as threats to Anglo American culture and the English language, and others associate them with crime, violence, and drug smuggling. Still others see them as people simply trying to survive as best they can, desperate to support themselves and their families. Few, however, see these immigrants as the human consequences of the economic globalization of the world (e.g.,migrants moved to more difficult and dangerous crossing routes, including the deadly, forbidding Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, resulting in an untold number of deaths on the border since the mid-1990s).
  • A Global Perspective
  • It is important to expand our perspective beyond the experiences of just a single nation.