Chapter Summary for Chapter 15
Racial segregation underpinned the apartheid system in South Africa. Since the ending of the apartheid regime the country has adopted one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, though South Africa is still dealing with bigotry and intolerance. This chapter explores race and ethnicity, discrimination and prejudice, and ethnic conflicts around the world.
Race is a widely used term, often used in everyday language to describe biological differences. However, there is no scientific basis for the concept to be used within social science. ‘Race’ is sociologically important because of racialization: the process by which race is used to classify individuals or groups of people within societies.
Ethnicity refers to the cultural practices and outlooks of a community, which identifies them as a distinctive social group. Ethnicity is a social phenomenon, which has no basis in human biology.
‘Minority group’ refers to more than a numerical minority in a population. ‘Minorities’ are disadvantaged groups with some shared sense of identity. Prejudice is holding beliefs which prejudge all members of a social group, typically based on limited information and stereotypes, often linked to scapegoating of those groups for social problems. Discrimination refers to actual behaviour towards a social group which disadvantages that group. Racism is prejudice based on racialized differences.
Racism is prejudice based on socially significant physical distinctions. Institutional racism is prejudice that pervades society’s structures in a systematic way. The Macpherson Report described institutional racism as ‘the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin’. The concept of a ‘new racism’ – sometimes called cultural racism – is used to describe recent racism based on the identification of cultural differences as justification for the exclusion of certain social groups.
Ethnocentrism is a suspicion of outsiders, combined with a tendency to evaluate other cultures negatively in terms of one’s own culture. Group closure describes the ways in which social groups maintain boundaries separating them from others. It is often linked to attempts at securing a favourable allocation of resources to a specific group.
Models of ethnic integration include: assimilation – immigrants are expected to give up their culture and adopt the dominant culture of the host society; the ‘melting pot’ – based on mixing together different cultural traditions to produce new cultural forms; and cultural pluralism – where ethnic groups maintain cultural differences whilst participating in the broader life of the society. Multiculturalism argues that different groups should exist as equal partners with no dominant culture. Sen (2007) argues that, in practice, individuals can easily live with a multiplicity of identifications with no sense of these being contradictory or problematic.
In the UK, as in many other countries, younger members of ethnic minority groups were born in Britain. This population is concentrated in the most densely populated urban centres. Patterns of inequality in both employment and housing are complex. Some ethnic minority groups do better than the white majority, but others fare much worse. Patterns of male and female employment show specific differences. Members of ethnic minority groups are over-represented in the criminal justice system both as offenders and victims, but not as officials.
Ethnic conflicts involve open hostilities between ethnic groups, as in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Ethnic cleansing is the attempt to create ethnically ‘pure’ areas through expulsion of other ethnic groups. Genocide is the systematic elimination of one ethnic group by another, as in Rwanda in 1994. Many conflicts around the globe are based on divisions between ethnic groups rather than between nations.
Migration is by no means a modern phenomenon, but is a process with its origins in the earliest times of human settlement. Today around 175 million people, some 3% of the global population, live in countries other than those in which they were born, leading some to call this the ‘age of migration’.
Four models of migration describe the main population movements since 1945: the classic model – nations of immigrants extend citizenship to newcomers; the colonial model – former imperial powers accept migration from former colonies and extend citizenship rights; the guest workers model – immigrants are accepted on a temporary basis as workers but gain no citizenship rights; illegal forms of immigration – immigrants enter illegally and exist outside the ‘official’ society.
Recent migration in Europe has seen a movement from East to West and of refugees from former Yugoslavia seeking to avoid ethnic conflict at home. An ethnic unmixing has occurred in countries of the former Soviet Union, as ethnic Russians seek to move to Russia. Movement between EU states has increased, as citizens have the right to work in any EU country. Border controls within the EU have been reduced by some states. Illegal migration to the EU is a problem, particularly for Italy, as nationals from Albania, former Yugoslavia, Turkey and North Africa attempt the sea crossings. Trade in human migrants has become a fast growing aspect of organized crime.
Four trends look likely to shape migration in coming years: acceleration in numbers on the move; diversification of types and reasons for migration; globalization, as migration involves more countries; and feminization, as the global labour market seeks domestic and sex workers. Migration involves both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors: migrants may feel pushed by poverty or political oppression and/or pulled by greater religious and political freedoms or improved economic conditions.
Diaspora describes the scattering of an ethnic population from its homeland into other areas, often in forced conditions. Cohen sees five types of diaspora. Victim diasporas (the African slave trade), labour diasporas (indentured Indian workers under British colonialism), trading diasporas (Chinese people moving to Southeast Asia, buying and selling goods), imperial diasporas (British imperialism took people into new countries) and cultural diasporas (cemented by literature, religion and so on). All diasporas involve movement to a new place, shared memories of the homeland, strong ethnic identity and sense of solidarity and a contribution to pluralistic host countries.
Globalization looks likely to increase migration and to alter migration patterns. A key task will be how to create harmonious societies that are more cosmopolitan in character than in previous times.
