Title: Chapter 3 Racial and Ethnic Inequality
1Chapter 3Racial and Ethnic Inequality
2Race 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
3Race 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
4Race 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
5Recent 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
6Minorities
- 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
7Patterns 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 -
8Patterns 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
9Native 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
10Native 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
11Native 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
12People 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
13People 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
14People 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
15People 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
16People 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
17People 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
18People 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
19Hispanic 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
20Hispanic 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
21Prejudice
- 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
22Prejudice
- 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
23Prejudice
- Three causes of prejudice
- personality factors
- societal factors
- multiculturalism
24Discrimination
- 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
25Discrimination
- 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
26Structural-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
27Symbolic-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
28Social-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
29Conservatives 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
30Liberals 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
31Radicals 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