STEM Culture: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class Chapter 1

Chapter 1 of Healey’s Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class (Diversity in the United States: Questions and Concepts) introduces the concepts of dominant, minority groups, their stratification and attitudes among these groups.

The United States is a nation of immigrants and, as such, it is a diverse society with many different groups and cultures. However, dominant-minority relations are proving problematic for the social mobility and wellbeing of many groups.

Rather than numbers of a population, minority group status has to do with power and status in society. A minority group has the following five defining characteristics (Wagley and Haris, 1958):

  1. A pattern of disadvantage,
  2. Identification by some visible mark,
  3. Awareness of its disadvantaged status,
  4. A membership determined at birth,
  5. A tendency to marry within the group.

The pattern of disadvantage is a key aspect of minority status. This disadvantaged status is a result of actions taken by the dominant group which benefits from and attempts to sustain the unequal status.

Race is often used to identify minority group members. Though is has been abandoned by scientists as a biological concept, it somehow still has power over societal attitudes. Ethnic groups can be identified by their visible traits, such as language, dress style, and religion.

Individuals of minority groups are aware of their minority group status and their shared disadvantaged status. Alarmingly, studies have shown that those of dominant and minority group status have very different views on the severity and extent of discrimination in the United States, where in 2001 70% of whites and 40% of blacks agreed with the statement “blacks are treated the same as whites in my local community”.

Minority group status is involuntary, cannot be changed and is ascribed for life.  Finally, minority groups tend to marry within their own groups.

Minority groups and social class are correlated. Stratification can happen in three different ways; i) class, ii) prestige, and iii) power. Class can relate to economic means or production of goods. Prestige relates to honor, esteem, or respect given to others. Power is the ability to influence others, have an impact on decision-making process of society, and pursue and protect one’s self-interest and achieve one’s goals. One’s social mobility, or easy access to opportunities, can be affected by class, prestige and power, both in positive and negative ways.

Concepts in analyzing dominant-minority relations revolve around prejudice, discrimination, ideological racism and institutional discrimination. Prejudice and discrimination occur on the individual level, whereas ideological racism and institutional discrimination are at the societal level. Prejudice is the tendency of an individual to think about other groups in negative ways, to attach negative emotions to this groups, and to prejudge individuals on the basis of their group memberships. Discrimination is the unequal treatment of a person or persons based on group memberships. Ideological racism, a belief system that asserts that a particular group is inferior, is the group or societal equivalent of individual prejudice. Institutional racism is the societal equivalent of individual discrimination and refers to the pattern of unequal treatment based on group membership that is build into the daily operations of society.

Institutional discrimination helps to sustain and reinforce the unequal positions of racial and ethnic groups in the stratification system.