It was the nation that was dying, and the vision was for the nation. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree [the tree of life that nourishes the nation] is dead. Black Elk Speaks, p. Of all the statuses a person occupies it is the one that largely defines who that person is and what his or her goals and opportunities are. All people have Master Status. For example, I occupy several statuses in society: white, married, female, middle-aged, upper middle class, professor of Sociology and my Master Status, as is true with most people , is the way in which I define myself to myrself and to others.
Master Status includes those elements of ourselves that we are born with, ascribed statuses , as well as those we accomplish or attain through our own efforts achieved statuses. Achieved statuses on the other hand are those aspects of ourselves that require us to do something to accomplish such as our adult income, education, and occupation SES.
For instance, my Master Status as a professor of Sociology generally becomes evident only when performing the role of professor of Sociology. My Master Status as a white female, although always evident, is largely ignored unless whiteness or femaleness becomes a particular situational issue. A social status any status is a social position which must be filled.
However, any qualified person can fill any social position. Those of you who are reading this are probably college students—a status which must be filled because it is necessary for people in our culture to be formally educated.
Some of you are probably parents—another status that must be filled because it is critical for any culture to add to its population and socialize its young. Some of you are employees who have jobs and go to work everyday—also a necessary status in society because the economy must be supported and maintained and there are basic social services necessary for the smooth operation of an industrialized society. Each status in society has certain obligations, expectations, duties, rights, and functions that go with them.
College students are obligated to pay for their education, expected to do the reading and write the papers that have been assigned, required to come to class and complete the coursework satisfactorily in order to earn a passing grade, study hard, be treated with dignity and respect, and graduate. However, as we all know, some people fail to adequately fill their status.
A social role is the way we fill the various statuses we occupy. You have probably heard someone say that someone else is just taking up space, meaning that they are not doing their job or fulfilling the obligations, expectations, duties, rights, and functions that go with a specific status. They are not playing the role. All of the various aspects of our Master Status, the primary social positions we occupy , and sometimes the way we play our social roles, can and do effect our ranking on the stratification hierarchy.
Because every society has some level of stratification—even in the least complex hunter-gatherer cultures, men have authority over women and the old have authority over the young—our position in our society is based on our Master Statuses. The stratification hierarchy is the layers or levels of any social structure—it is the way people classify or categorize themselves and others.
The American stratification hierarchy is evident to all even though we tend to be relatively oblivious to it. Clearly, a vast difference in definitions of middle class is required in order for people with such disparate incomes to include themselves in this largest layer or social category. Even President George H. Bush, who comes from a very wealthy family and is worth several millions of dollars, spoke of himself as middle class during his abortive run for a second term in The media often referred to former President and Mrs.
Bill Clinton as middle class even though they were worth nearly three million dollars in President George W. Bush and his wife Laura also referred to themselves as middle class and yet they are also worth several million dollars. Our ability to enjoy such resources as personal autonomy—control of our own lives, health, physical comfort, creature comforts, education, employment opportunities in a high paying and satisfying job, the respect of others, and a long life span are all related to our position in the stratification hierarchy.
How we live, where we live, the things with which we surround ourselves, the kind of food we eat, the style and quality of the clothes we wear and the other forms of body adornment we use, the music we listen to, the way we dance, our patterns of speech, virtually everything about us—is determined in greater or lesser extent by our social class, our position on the stratification hierarchy.
The way we treat others and the way we classify others is also largely based on our perceptions of where they are located on the stratification hierarchy. Thomas is justly famous for his work with Florian Znaniecki concerning the assimilation processes undergone by Polish peasant immigrants to the United States.
Once meaning has been assigned, their consequent behavior is shaped by [that] meaning. If people believe in witches such beliefs have tangible consequences—they may for example kill those persons assumed to be witches.
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Compensatory conviction in the face of personal uncertainty: Going to extremes and being oneself. One hundred years of social psychology quantitatively described. Cyberball Version 4. Zhou H, Fishbach A. The pitfall of experimenting on the web: How unattended selective attrition leads to surprising yet false research conclusions. Table courtesy of Statistics Canada, Projecting forward based on current trends, Statistics Canada estimates that by , between 29 and 32 percent of the Canadian population will be visible minorities.
Visible minority groups will make up 63 percent of the population of Toronto and 59 percent of the population of Vancouver Statistics Canada The outcome of these trends is that Canada has become a much more racially and ethnically diverse country over the 20th and 21st centuries. It will continue to become more diverse in the future. In large part this has to do with immigration policy.
Canada is a settler society , a society historically based on colonization through foreign settlement and displacement of aboriginal inhabitants, so immigration is the major influence on population diversity.
In the two decades following World War II, Canada followed an immigration policy that was explicitly race based. There will, I am sure, be general agreement with the view that the people of Canada do not wish, as a result of mass immigration, to make a fundamental alteration in the character of our population.
Large-scale immigration from the orient would change the fundamental composition of the Canadian population. Any considerable oriental immigration would, moreover, be certain to give rise to social and economic problems of a character that might lead to serious difficulties in the field of international relations. The government, therefore, has no thought of making any change in immigration regulations which would have consequences of the kind cited in Li pp. Today this would be a completely unacceptable statement from a Canadian politician.
Immigration is based on a non-racial point system. Canada defines itself as a multicultural nation that promotes and recognizes the diversity of its population. Nor does it mean that the problems of managing a diverse population have been resolved. In , the U. The term combines a diverse group of people into one category whether they have anything in common or not. What does it actually mean to be a member of a visible minority in Canada?
What do these terms mean in practice? For example, in modern history, the elderly might be considered a minority group due to a diminished status resulting from popular prejudice and discrimination against them. As a minority group, the elderly are also subject to economic, social, and workplace discrimination.
Historically, the concept of race has changed across cultures and eras, eventually becoming less connected with ancestral and familial ties, and more concerned with superficial physical characteristics.
In the past, theorists have posited categories of race based on various geographic regions, ethnicities, skin colours, and more. Their labels for racial groups have connoted regions Mongolia and the Caucus Mountains, for instance or denoted skin tones black, white, yellow, and red, for example.
However, this typology of race developed during early racial science has fallen into disuse, and the social construction of race or racialization is a far more common way of understanding racial categories. According to this school of thought, race is not biologically identifiable. Rather, certain groups become racialized through a social process that marks them for unequal treatment based on perceived physiological differences.
When considering skin colour, for example, the social construction of race perspective recognizes that the relative darkness or fairness of skin is an evolutionary adaptation to the available sunlight in different regions of the world.
Contemporary conceptions of race, therefore, which tend to be based on socioeconomic assumptions, illuminate how far removed modern race understanding is from biological qualities. She is the daughter of a black man Quincy Jones but she does not play a black woman in her television or film roles.
In some countries, such as Brazil, class is more important than skin colour in determining racial categorization. The social construction of race is also reflected in the way that names for racial categories change with changing times. Culturally they remain distinct from immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa or the descendants of the slaves brought to mainland North America. Ethnicity is a term that describes shared culture—the practices, values, and beliefs of a group.
This might include shared language, religion, and traditions, among other commonalities. And like race, individuals may be identified or self-identify with ethnicities in complex, even contradictory, ways. These examples illustrate the complexity and overlap of these identifying terms. Ethnicity, like race, continues to be an identification method that individuals and institutions use today—whether through the census, affirmative action initiatives, non-discrimination laws, or simply in personal day-to-day relations.
These definitions correlate to the concept that the dominant group is that which holds the most power in a given society, while subordinate groups are those who lack power compared to the dominant group.
Note that being a numerical minority is not a characteristic of being a minority group; sometimes larger groups can be considered minority groups due to their lack of power. It is the lack of power that is the predominant characteristic of a minority, or subordinate group.
For example, consider apartheid in South Africa, in which a numerical majority the black inhabitants of the country were exploited and oppressed by the white minority. According to Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris , a minority group is distinguished by five characteristics: 1 unequal treatment and less power over their lives, 2 distinguishing physical or cultural traits like skin colour or language, 3 involuntary membership in the group, 4 awareness of subordination, and 5 high rate of in-group marriage.
Additional examples of minority groups might include the LGBTQ community, religious practitioners whose faith is not widely practised where they live, and people with disabilities. History has shown us many examples of the scapegoating of a subordinate group. In Canada, eastern European immigrants were branded Bolsheviks and interned during the economic slump following World War I.
In the United States, many states have enacted laws to disenfranchise immigrants; these laws are popular because they let the dominant group scapegoat a subordinate group. Prior to the 20th century, racial intermarriage referred to as miscegenation was extremely rare, and in many places, illegal. In the United States, 41 of the 50 states at one time or another enacted legislation to prevent racial intermarriage.
In Canada, there were no formal anti-miscegenation laws, though strong informal norms ensured that racial intermixing was extremely limited in scope. Thompson makes the case, however, that the various versions of the Indian Act, originally enacted in , effectively worked on a racial level to restrict the marriage between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. A key part of the Act enumerated the various ways in which aboriginal people could lose their status and thus their claim to aboriginal land title and state provisions.
Until its amendment in , the most egregious section of the Act Section In this way, the thorny question of having multiple racial identities could be avoided. Prior to the full establishment of British colonial rule in Canada, racial intermarriage was encouraged in some areas to support the fur trade. It is now common for the children of racially mixed parents to acknowledge and celebrate their various ethnic identities.
According to census data, 3. This was up from 3. The terms stereotype, prejudice, discrimination, and racism are often used interchangeably in everyday conversation. But when discussing these terms from a sociological perspective, it is important to define them: stereotypes are oversimplified ideas about groups of people, prejudice refers to thoughts and feelings about those groups, while discrimination refers to actions toward them.
Racism is a type of prejudice that involves set beliefs about a specific racial group. As stated above, stereotypes are oversimplified ideas about groups of people. Stereotypes can be based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation—almost any characteristic.
Where do stereotypes come from? In fact new stereotypes are rarely created; rather, they are recycled from subordinate groups that have assimilated into society and are reused to describe newly subordinate groups. For example, many stereotypes that are currently used to characterize black people were used earlier in Canadian history to characterize Irish and eastern European immigrants.
Prejudice refers to beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that someone holds about a group. A prejudice is not based on experience; instead, it is a prejudgment, originating outside of actual experience. Racism is a type of prejudice that is used to justify the belief that one racial category is somehow superior or inferior to others.
While prejudice refers to biased thinking , discrimination consists of actions against a group of people. Discrimination can be based on age, religion, health, and other indicators. Race-based discrimination and antidiscrimination laws strive to address this set of social problems.
Discrimination based on race or ethnicity can take many forms, from unfair housing practices to biased hiring systems. Overt discrimination has long been part of Canadian history. Discrimination against Jews was typical until the s. McGill University imposed quotas on the admission of Jewish students in , a practice which continued in its medical faculty until the s.
Both Ontario and Nova Scotia had racially segregated schools. It is interesting to note that while Viola Desmond was prosecuted for sitting in a whites only section of the cinema in Glasgow, Nova Scotia, she was in fact of mixed-race descent as her mother was white Backhouse These practices are unacceptable in Canada today.
However, discrimination cannot be erased from our culture just by enacting laws to abolish it. The reasons for this are complex and relate to the educational, criminal, economic, and political systems that exist. For example, when a newspaper prints the race of individuals accused of a crime, it may enhance stereotypes of a certain minority. Another example of racist practices is racial steering , in which real estate agents direct prospective homeowners toward or away from certain neighbourhoods based on their race.
Racist attitudes and beliefs are often more insidious and hard to pin down than specific racist practices. Prejudice and discrimination can overlap and intersect in many ways.
To illustrate, here are four examples of how prejudice and discrimination can occur. Unprejudiced nondiscriminators are open-minded, tolerant, and accepting individuals. Unprejudiced discriminators might be those who, unthinkingly, practise sexism in their workplace by not considering females for certain positions that have traditionally been held by men. Prejudiced discriminators include those who actively make disparaging remarks about others or who perpetuate hate crimes.
While most white people are willing to admit that non-white people live with a set of disadvantages due to the colour of their skin, very few white people are willing to acknowledge the benefits they receive simply by being white. White privilege refers to the fact that dominant groups often accept their experience as the normative and hence, superior experience. White people can be assured that, most of the time, they will be dealing with authority figures of their own race.
How many other examples of white privilege can you think of? Discrimination also manifests in different ways. The illustrations above are examples of individual discrimination, but other types exist.
Institutional racism refers to the way in which racial distinctions are used to organize the policy and practice of state, judicial, economic, and educational institutions. As a result they systematically reproduce inequalities along racial lines. They define what people can and cannot do based on racial characteristics. It is not necessarily the intention of these institutions to reproduce inequality, nor of the individuals who work in the institutions. Rather inequality is the outcome of patterns of differential treatment based on racial or ethnic categorizations of people.
Clear examples of institutional racism in Canada can be seen in the Indian Act and immigration policy, as we have already noted. The effects of institutional racism can also be observed in the structures that reproduce income inequality for visible minorities and aboriginal Canadians. The median income of aboriginal people in Canada was 30 percent less than non-aboriginal people in Wilson and Macdonald Institutional racism is also deeply problematic for visible minorities in Canada.
While labour participation rates in the economy are more or less equal for racialized and non-racialized individuals, racialized men are 24 percent more likely to be unemployed than non-racialized men. Racialized women are 48 percent more likely to be unemployed. Moreover, racialized Canadians earned only Those identifying as Chinese earned Block and Galabuzi argue that these inequalities in income are not simply the effect of the time it takes immigrants to integrate into the society and economy.
The income inequality between racialized and non-racialized individuals remains substantial even into the third generation of immigrants. The residential school system was set up in the 19th century to educate and assimilate aboriginal children into European culture.
In the schools, they received substandard education and many were subject to neglect, disease, and abuse. Many children did not see their parents again, and thousands of children died at the schools. When they did return home they found it difficult to fit in.
They had not learned the skills needed for life on reserves and had also been taught to be ashamed of their native heritage. Because the education at the residential schools was inferior they also had difficulty fitting into non-aboriginal society.
The residential school system was part of a system of institutional racism because it was established on the basis of a distinction between the educational needs of aboriginal and non-aboriginal people.
As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded, the residential school system constituted a systematic assault on aboriginal families, children, and culture in Canada. Some have likened the policy and its aftermath to a cultural genocide Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada While the last of the residential schools closed in , the problem of aboriginal education remains grave, with 40 percent of all aboriginal people aged 20 to 24 having no high school diploma 61 percent of on-reserve aboriginal people , compared to 13 percent of non-aboriginals Congress of Aboriginal Peoples Even with the public apology to residential school survivors and the inauguration of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in , the federal government, and the interests it represents, continue to refuse basic aboriginal claims to title, self-determination, and control over their lands and resources.
Issues of race and ethnicity can be observed through three major sociological perspectives: functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. As you read through these theories, ask yourself which one makes the most sense, and why. Is more than one theory needed to explain racism, prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination? In the view of functionalism, racial and ethnic inequalities must have served an important function in order to exist as long as they have. This concept, of course, is problematic.
How can racism and discrimination contribute positively to society? Sociologists who adhere to the functionalist view argue that racism and discrimination do contribute positively, but only to the dominant group. Historically, it has indeed served dominant groups well to discriminate against subordinate groups. Slavery, of course, was beneficial to slaveholders.
Holding racist views can benefit those who want to deny rights and privileges to people they view as inferior to them, but over time, racism harms society.
Outcomes of race-based disenfranchisement—such as poverty levels, crime rates, and discrepancies in employment and education opportunities—illustrate the long-term and clearly negative results of slavery and racism in Canadian society.
Apart from the issues of race, ethnicity, and social inequality, the close ties of ethnic and racial membership can be seen to serve some positive functions even if they lead to the formation of ethnic and racial enclaves or ghettos.
The close ties promote group cohesion, which can have economic benefits especially for immigrants who can use community contacts to pursue employment.
They can also have political benefits in the form of political mobilization for recognition, services, or resources by different communities. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission for aboriginal residential school survivors or the policy of multiculturalism are examples. Finally, the close ties of racial or ethnic groups also provide cultural familiarity and emotional support for individuals who might otherwise feel alienated by or discriminated against by the dominant society. Critical sociological theories are often applied to inequalities of gender, social class, education, race, and ethnicity.
A critical sociology perspective of Canadian history would examine the numerous past and current struggles between the Anglo-Saxon ruling class and racial and ethnic minorities, noting specific conflicts that have arisen when the dominant group perceived a threat from the minority group. Modern Canada itself can in fact be described as a product of internal colonialism.
While Canada was originally a colony itself, the product of external colonialism, first by the French and then the English, it also adopted colonial techniques internally as it became an independent nation state. Internal colonialism refers to the process of uneven regional development by which a dominant group establishes its control over existing populations within a country.
Typically it works by maintaining segregation among the colonized, which enables different geographical distributions of people, different wage levels, and different occupational concentrations to form based on race or ethnicity. For critical sociology, addressing the issues that arise when race and ethnicity become the basis of social inequality is a central focus of any emancipatory project. They are often complex problems, however. Feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins developed intersection theory , which suggests we cannot separate the effects of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other attributes.
When we examine race and how it can bring us both advantages and disadvantages, it is important to acknowledge that the way we experience race is shaped, for example, by our gender and class. Multiple layers of disadvantage intersect to create the way we experience race. For example, if we want to understand prejudice, we must understand that the prejudice focused on a white woman because of her gender is very different from the layered prejudice focused on a poor Asian woman, who is affected by stereotypes related to being poor, being a woman, and being part of a visible minority.
For symbolic interactionists, race and ethnicity provide strong symbols as sources of identity. In fact, some interactionists propose that the symbols of race, not race itself, are what lead to racism. Famed interactionist Herbert Blumer suggested that racial prejudice is formed through interactions between members of the dominant group: without these interactions, individuals in the dominant group would not hold racist views.
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