Minority Groups and U.S. Society: Themes, Patterns, and the Future Chapter Ten

The Importance of Subsistence Technology Dominant-minority relations are shaped by large social, political, and economic forces and change as these broad characteristics change. In the colonial United States, minority relations flowed from the colonists’ desire to control both land and labor. New technologies of the industrial revolution increased the productivity of the economy and eventually changed every aspect of life in the United States. In the post-industrial society, the processes that allowed upward mobility for European Americans failed to work for racial minority groups, who confronted urban poverty, bankrupt cities, and continuing barriers of racial prejudice and institutional discrimination.

The Importance of Subsistence Technology The emerging information-based, high-tech society is unlikely to offer many opportunities for people with lower educational backgrounds and occupational skills. Upgraded urban educational systems, job training programs and other community development programs might alter the grim scenario of continued exclusion. Inaction and perpetuation of the status quo will bar a large percentage of the population from the emerging mainstream economy, keeping it mired in competition with newer immigrants for jobs in the low-wage, secondary labor market or in alternative opportunity structures, including crime.

The Importance of the Contact Situation, Group Competition, and Power The contact situation is key to understanding the development of dominant-minority group relations. Immigrant and colonized minority groups is a distinction basic that helps clarify group relations centuries after the initial contact period. Prejudice, racism, and discrimination against African Americans remain formidable forces in contemporary America. In contrast, prejudice and discrimination against European American groups have nearly disappeared today. Ethnic enclaves provided another pathway to integration.

The Importance of the Contact Situation, Group Competition, and Power The relevance of ethnocentrism is largely limited to the actual contact situation. There have been numerous instances in which group competition—or even the threat of competition—increased prejudice and led to greater discrimination and more repression. Following the initial contact, the superior power of the dominant group helps it sustain the inferior position of the minority group, but minority groups characteristically use what they have in an attempt to improve their situation.

The Importance of the Contact Situation, Group Competition, and Power It is obvious that competition and differences in power resources will continue to shape intergroup relations (including relations between minority groups themselves) well into the future. Because they are so basic, jobs will continue to be primary objects of competition, but debates about crime and the criminal justice system, welfare reform, national health care policy, school busing, bilingual education, immigration policy, and multicultural curricula in schools will continue to separate us along ethnic and racial lines. These deep divisions reflect fundamental realities about who gets what in the United States, and they will continue to reflect the distribution of power and stimulate competition along group lines for generations to come.

Diversity within Minority Groups Minority group members vary from each other by age, sex, region of residence, levels of education, urban versus rural residence, political ideology, and many other variables. The experience of one segment of the group (college-educated, fourth-generation, native-born Chinese American females) may bear little resemblance to the experience of another (illegal Chinese male immigrants with less than a high school education), and the problems of some members may not be the problems of others.

Diversity within Minority Groups One clear conclusion we can make about gender is that minority group females are doubly oppressed and disempowered. Limited by both their racial/ethnic and gender status, they are among the most vulnerable and exploited segments of the society. At one time or another, the women of every minority group have taken the least-desirable, lowest-status positions available in the economy, often while trying to raise children and attend to other family needs. They have been expected to provide support for other members of their families, kinship groups, and communities, often sacrificing their own self-interest to the welfare of others.

Diversity within Minority Groups The problems and issues of minority women are complexly tied to the patterns of inequality and discrimination in the larger society and within their own groups. Solving the problems faced by minority groups will not resolve the problems faced by minority women and neither will resolving the problems of gender inequality alone. Articulating and addressing these difficulties requires the recognition of the complex interactions between gender and minority group status.

Assimilation and Pluralism The idea that assimilation is a linear, inevitable process has little support. Also without support is the notion that there is always a simple, ordered relationship between the various stages of assimilation: acculturation, integration into public institutions, integration into the private sector, and so forth. Since the 1960s, as many minority spokespersons have questioned the very desirability of assimilation and pluralistic themes increased in prominence as the commitment of the larger society to racial equality faltered.

Assimilation and Pluralism African Americans are highly acculturated, yet present a mixed picture in terms of integration. There is evidence that American Indian culture and language may be increasing in strength and vitality, but on many measures of integration, American Indians remain the most isolated and impoverished minority group in the United States. Hispanic traditions and the Spanish language have been sustained by exclusion and immigration, yet integration is highly variable by Latino ethnic group.

Assimilation and Pluralism Only European American ethnic groups seem to approximate the traditional model of assimilation, yet total assimilation is far from accomplished. Group membership continues to be important because it continues to be linked to fundamental patterns of exclusion and inequality. The group divisions forged in the past and perpetuated over the decades by racism and discrimination will remain to the extent that racial and ethnic group membership continues to be correlated with inequality and position in the social class structure.

Assimilation and Pluralism Some (perhaps most) of the impetus behind the preservation of ethnic and racial identity may be a result of the most vicious and destructive intergroup competition. In other ways, though, ethnicity can be a positive force that helps people locate themselves in time and space and understand their position in the contemporary world. Ethnicity remains an important aspect of self-identity and pride for many Americans from every group and tradition. It seems unlikely that this sense of a personal link to particular groups and heritages within U.S. society will soon fade.

Assimilation and Pluralism Some important questions to ask include: “What blend of pluralistic and assimilationist policies will serve us best in the 21st century?” Are there ways in which the society can prosper without repressing our diversity? How can we increase the degree of openness, fairness, and justice without threatening group loyalties? How much unity do we need? How much diversity can we tolerate? The one-way, Anglo-conformity mode of assimilation of the past is too narrow and destructive to be a blueprint for the future, but the more extreme forms of minority group pluralism and separatism might be equally dangerous.

Minority Group Progress and the Ideology of American Individualism The United States has become more tolerant and open, and minority group members can be found at the highest levels of success, affluence, and prestige. However, it seems that negative intergroup feelings and stereotypes have not so much disappeared as merely changed form—modern or symbolic racism. Many would argue that the most serious problems facing contemporary minority groups are structural and institutional, and not individual or personal. Survival and success in America for all minority groups has had more to do with group processes than with individual will or motivation.

A Final Word U.S. society and its minority groups are linked in fractious unity. This society owes its prosperity and position of prominence in the world no less to the land and labor of minority groups than to that of the dominant group. By harnessing the labor and energy of these minority groups, the nation has grown prosperous and powerful, but the benefits have flowed disproportionately to the dominant group. As we begin the 21st century, the dilemmas of America’s minority groups remain perhaps the primary unresolved domestic issue facing the nation.

A Final Word The answers of the past—the faith in assimilation and the belief that success in America is open to all who simply try hard enough—have proved inadequate, even destructive and dangerous, because they help to sustain the belief that the barriers to equality no longer exist and that any remaining inequalities are the problems of the minority groups, not the larger society. A society that finds a way to deal fairly and humanely with the problems of diversity and difference, prejudice and inequality, and racism and discrimination can provide a sorely needed model for other nations and, indeed, for the world.