Chapter 3 Racial and Ethnic Inequality - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 31
About This Presentation
Title:

Chapter 3 Racial and Ethnic Inequality

Description:

a socially constructed category of people who share biologically transmitted ... Pluralism a state in which people of all racial and ethnic categories have ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:503
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 32
Provided by: gregro7
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Chapter 3 Racial and Ethnic Inequality


1
Chapter 3Racial and Ethnic Inequality
2
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

3
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

4
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

5
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

6
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

7
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

8
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

9
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

10
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

11
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

12
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

13
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

14
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

15
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

16
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

17
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

18
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

19
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

20
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

21
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

22
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

23
Prejudice
  • Three causes of prejudice
  • personality factors
  • societal factors
  • multiculturalism

24
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

25
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

26
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

27
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

28
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

29
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

30
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

31
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
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com