Class #22, October 17 Classnotes

Civil Rights and Structural Approaches to Ethnicity

Terms

assimilation
cultural pluralism
institutional (covert) discrimination
segregation
melting pot

  1. We changed the class schedule so that we will be viewing films Monday and Wednesday of next week and I reviewed the two films in relation to the writing assignment due on Friday.
    1. The first film is Eyes on the Prize which is a history of the American Civil Rights movement
      1. It is important looking at this film to understand the strategy of nonviolent protest and the way that actions were made politically powerful
      2. In American culture we romanticize the civil rights movement so we tend to think that nothing controversial was done and that the political protests were deeply moral and correct.
      3. However, the civil rights movement challenged the dominant legal and social ethnic groups in very disruptive and creative ways
      4. As such it served as a model for other identity groups that chose to challenge power structures all over the world.
      5. In so doing, it laid the foundation for anti-authoritarian movements that we today call "terrorism"---movements by the Irish Republican Army or the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
    2. We see this played out in the second video, The Road to Bloody Sunday,
      1. The video talks about how the ideas and practices of the American civil rights movement were adopted by students in Northern Ireland and used to promote civil rights issues
      2. This led to the killings on Bloody Sunday
      3. The violent state response led many Catholics to abandon nonviolence and join the Irish Republican Army which also began armed revlutionary struggle
      4. In Northern Ireland, the violent actions of the IRA seem to have been successful in bringing about basic social change in the society.
  2. Last time I wanted to address psychological aspects of race, ethnicity, and prejudice
    1. We have important things to recognize
      1. Members of specific race and ethnic groups are targets of hostility---racism and ethnic prejudice or bigotry
      2. Racism has two roots in individual psychology
        1. Authoritarian personality styles,
          1. people have black and white responses to social events
          2. want to dominate others
          3. tend to view their social situation in terms relative to other groups in their situation.
        2. Intergroup competition that leads to strong identity connections to one's ethnic group
          1. comptetion between groups forces people to join the "gang" of their own group
          2. anomie and individual isolation in modern society encourages people to seek meaning in the traditions and group feeling that comes from identifying with a particular ethnicity
        3. Ethnic stratification leads to conflict and personal attacks across group boundaries---e.g., prejudiced behavior.
      3. When we talk about these explanations being psychological, we mean that the prejudice becomes seated in the personality or emotional life course development of individuals and so to change prejudice you need to change the way these individuals' personalities work.
    2. Sociologists tend to talk about prejudice and ethnic conflict more in terms of structural causes of hostility which are seen as less rooted in the specific psychology of individuals or ethnic groups.
      1. Sociologists rather see ethnic conflict as part of a larger dynamic of immigration and intergenerational assimilation.
      2. Patterns of immigration involve choices by people in specific societies to move for econoimic or political reasons and our focus is usually on their immigration to America
        1. We talk about waves of immigration from specific countries and our picture of ethnic stratification has to do with the time when these waves happened.
          1. Groups that immigrated earlier tend to be of higher status than more recent groups because they have greater access to resources of power and they are more assimilated to American culture
          2. The power of groups also is related to the stage of national development they encountered upon arrival.
            1. For early immigrant groups, the American economy was rural and not so different from the economy of their home country so assimilation was easier.
            2. For immigratns in the 1880-1920 wave which mostly included people from eastern and southern Europe along with Chinese and Japanese laborers,
              1. The American industrial revolution attracted them because there were jobs
              2. The growth of cities meant that urban squalor and neighborhood competition for space and for jobs was an important part of their experience
            3. One of the problem for post 1970 immigrants is that mass manufacturing businesses have begun to move overseas so that there are not many low skilled entry level jobs available and so poverty is a serious problem.
        2. An important part of the dynamic of immigration is that people usually are moving from rural home cultures to urban American culture
          1. This creates a knowledge gap that makes assimilation difficult
          2. Rural people tend to move into "urban ethnic villages" that reproduce their home community pattern
          3. An important aspect of assimilation is that the "strong tie networks" in these urban villages are very different from the weaker, more open networks of the American middle class.