Ethnicity and Racism Essay

Introduction Ethnic identity in varied urban society is maintained against force to assimilate, in part, by an opposing process of pejorative and odious distinction. Name-calling serves to expound and to restate demarcations against which one positively mirrors oneself and one’s group. Schermerhorn, cited in Sollors (1996), illustrates an ethnic group as follows: A collectivity within a larger society having actual or reputed common ancestry, memories of a common historical past, and a cultural focus on one of more figurative elements defined as the epitome of their people hood. Instances of such symbolic element are: relationship patterns, physical contiguity (as in localism or sectionalism), religious affiliation, language or vernacular forms, tribal association, nationality, phenotypal features, or any combination of these. An essential accompaniment is some consciousness of kind amongst members of the group. (Sollors, 1996, p. xii) Jones ( 1997) characterized ethnic group as â€Å"any group of people who set themselves apart and/or are set apart by others with whom they interrelate or co-exist on the base of their perceptions of cultural delineation and/or common descent† (p. 1). According to Jones, ethnicity contains all of those social and psychological phenomenon linked with a culturally defined group identity. Ethnicity centers on the ways in which social and cultural practices intersect with one another in the recognition of, and relations between ethnic groups (p. 1). The development and expansion of ethnic identity that takes place when an individual recognizes and affiliates with a particular ethnic group is multifarious. This significant personal and group identification has decisive emotional, behavioral, and cognitive implication that affects all aspects of development. Ethnic Groups Perception Phinney (1989, 1990) and others illustrated ethnic identity through components consciousness, self-labeling, attitudes, behaviors that consequence in the individual’s recognition with a particular group and with the attainment of group patterns through membership. Similarly, Bernal and Knight (1993) viewed ethnic identity as a psychological build that includes â€Å"a set of thoughts about one’s own ethnic group membership† (p. 7). These definitions deal with the evocative content and apparent distinctiveness of ethnic identity. Of significance to note is that these components operate at two levels individual and group (Branch, 1994) and within two areas self-given and other credited. Though components are a decisive part of the definition, components in and of themselves do not have expounding capabilities: why and how identity forms and develops. As ethnic groups in the United States are professed as occupying sociopolitical, cultural positions within a hierarchical system, the implementation, demonstration, or privatization of ethnic practices are inclined by factors such as physical, cultural and ethnic markers, antagonism, emulation, social facsimile, power, situational events, and scales of inclusion and contribution ( Hollins, 1996; Jones, 1997). These factors influence the scale to which ethnic identity attribution, or self-labeling, is internally driven, outwardly imposed, or both. Some scholars think that evenness in self-labeling and the acknowledgment and performance of established modes of behavior in social areas in which ethnic identity is reconfirmed and authenticated begins around 8 years old (Aboud, 1984, 1987). However, Spencer ( 1985) pointed out that identity is a developmental process in stable transformation. Developmentally, the traditions young children accept, display, and integrate ethnic identity content into their personal and group identity diverges from the ways they are demonstrated and given significance at other life ages. We know that young children (birth to three and four years old obtain ethnic values, customs, language styles, and behavioral codes long before they are competent to label and know them as ethnic ( Sheets, 1997; Spencer, 1985). Intellectuals who study ethnic identity development in young children from a socialization viewpoint believe that the ethnic identity progression for children of color begins at birth, at the initial interactions between the child, family, and community (Sheets, 1997; Spencer, 1985). Sheets (1997) sustained that the continual existence of personal and societal markers such as skin color, language, food choices, values, and association in a dominant or non-dominant group instills in children ethnic roles and behaviors that practice them for eventual self-labeling. Likewise, Alba (1990) referring to White ethnics, continued that this early home-life frame of satisfactory alternatives creates a exceptional identity. He argued that this personality, conversant by ethnicity, exists at deep levels, present even while individuals reject their ethnicity. This agrees with identity theory in social psychology, which conjectures that the multi-identities within an individual function at diverse levels of importance. Stryker (1968) recognized this degree of confession and commitment as salience. This constituent of choice in identity labeling for White ethnics seems to be less challenging for White ethnics than for ethnics phenotypically or ethnically marked. However, for a developing ethnic identity, feelings of shared aims with a particular ethnic group implies explicit movement toward a conscious acknowledgment of and assurance with the group (Alba, 1990), resulting in self-identification with diverse degrees of salience. Thus, deliberately or unconsciously, cognitively or behaviorally, individuals use ethnic identities to classify themselves and others for the rationale of social interactions in varied settings. The Consequences of Stereotyping There is an immense and admired literature on the effects of stereotyping, The overt rationale of an ethnic epithet is to slur and to injure. But calling names is also an endeavor, whether quite deliberately realized or not, to control the behavior of the ridiculed group. This attempt at social control by disparaging labeling is an effort to influence reality by the mysterious identity of the spoken symbol with the nonverbal fact. The belief is that if one can name or add a label to an object, in this case, an ethnic individual or group, then one can use power over it by just calling its name. If the name is abusive, condescending, scolding, or ridiculing, it is expected that this description will elicit an proper response, such as causing the wounded to cower, to be degraded, to be scolded and thus to feel blameworthy, or to act out the prediction of ridiculousness. Usually this prediction is fulfilled in the eye of the beholder by selectively perceiving or misperceiving the genuine behavior of the group over which he seeks control. Yet the resultant social process of labeling and stereotyping at times also leads to redefinitions of the relations between groups and sometimes eventually has the portended effect upon the behavior and self-concept of the victim, a consequence that has been called â€Å"in authentication.† The social psychosomatic process of being proscribed entails losing one’s legitimacy by acquiring a fake image of one. The stereotypes expressed by nicknames are one device by which several minority group persons are deindividualized or depersonalized. Minority group members recognize numerous of the values of the society in which they live, including at times the conventional images of themselves. Blacks, for instance, in the past had many nicknames for other ethnic blacks that were a system of color-caste coding and gestured an recognition of one decisive factor of white racism. This and other examples prove to one of the disastrous implications of name-calling-eventual self-derogation of a group. Not simply do groups sometimes understand the stereotyped image of themselves, but at times they emphasize it by conforming to its behavioral expectations. They have then avowed the other’s image and are thus proscribed. Conversely, minorities, particularly blacks, have opposed stereotypes in creative ways. Derogatory labels, together with names such as nigger, through inversion, have been given optimistic meanings within the group. Broader stereotypes, such as robbery, sexual abandon, juvenile behavior, and laziness, through conversion, are acted out as techniques of hostility and mockery against whites. For these and other reasons, the issue of ethnic slurs is typically regarded, analytically, as a predicament in social psychology and, normatively, as a social problem. Situational and Environmental Context The context and circumstances (e.g., locations, sociopolitical radicalized ramifications, economic circumstances, and time) in which ethnic identity opens out is another element of ethnic identity (Branch, 1994). This is an area in require of research. Family socialization outlines that inspire values and social and behavioral codes in their progeny vary within similar groups and are reliant in part on particular circumstances such as socioeconomic status, generational influences, and geographic location (Hollins, 1996; McAdoo, 1993). If home-rearing performs finds out how people use their cultural resources to settle in to new and discrete environments ( Mintz & Price, 1992), this signifies that the mechanism of ethnic identity not only activate differently at diverse developmental ages, but also might be expressed another way in different contextual settings. For instance, attainment of values and behavioral and social prototypes are mechanism in the ethnic identity improvement of young children that can herald self-labeling and appreciation. Also, self-labeling informed by framework is not as easy as suggested. It may or may not designate recognition, commitment, and salience; the capability to self-label does not mean that contextually the same decisive factor is used to determine the labeling of others. Sheets (1998) found that five year old children from African, Mexican, Minh, Loatian American, and Black/White racially mixed groups were capable to categorize themselves ethnically. These children willingly provided distinctive physical markers (eye shape, skin tone, and hair texture) and cultural fundamentals (native language, food preferences, and ways of eating) as proof to discriminate themselves from others. though, they used trustworthy or communally accepted reasons to categorize others. For instance, they say an individual is â€Å"Loas† because â€Å"My daddy said so† or someone is â€Å"Mexican† because â€Å"He was born in the hospital.† The self-labeling at this age was also detach from attitudes of relationship, obligation, and salience, but not from exclusive cultural behaviors linked with group patterns. Research that scrutinizes how environmental framework affects children’s ethnic identity development–and its effect on present and successive development–or what types of sociopsychological events influence change in the development of individual and group ethnic membership were not accessible. The mechanism and progression of ethnic identity appear to be extremely receptive to changing contextual social, political, and economic conditions. Ethnic identity cannot be sufficiently examined as secluded elements, rather it must be examined as suggested by Mintz and Price ( 1992), as systems or patterns in their societal context. Jones (1997) argued that ethnic identity is â€Å"based on uneven, situational, subjective identification of self and others, which are entrenched in continuing daily practices and chronological experience† (p. 13). Future Prospect The diverse reactions are due to a numeral of factors, which are not essentially mutually exclusive: an enthusiasm for the immediate surcease of bigotry; an intolerance with the slowness of progress thus far; an indecision about the permanency of newly gained perfection; a premonition, anxiety, or resentment about enduring injustices; and, most lately, a belief that being renowned as a disadvantaged minority will take group preferences and remedies or that being denied such appreciation will dispossess them of just treatment. Obscured in history are the colonial exclusions, whippings, tongue borings, and hangings of heretics, rebels, and witches; the mob attacks on Mormons, Asians, Mexican Americans, Filipinos, and Italians; the blazing down of Catholic churches; and the lynching and shootings of Blacks and Indians. Neither amongst American Indians nor between Whites and Indians, Whites and Blacks, French and English, Dutch and Swedes, Russians and Americans, Catholics and Protestants, and Protestants and Protestants are there the defensive and regal wars that once raged on American soil; nor have American ethnic groups pretended the wide-ranging violence that existed or exists in numerous parts of Europe and Asia, such as between Russians and Poles, Greeks and Turks, Jews and Arabs, Spaniards and Basques, Irish and English, Japanese and Chinese, and Tibetans and Chinese. Gone are the Anglophobes, Francophobes, Spanophobes, and Germanophobes, who alleged that Britain, France, Spain, and Germany correspondingly were plotting to destroy our government. Also gone are the once popular beliefs that Masons, Illuminati, the pope, communists, and international Jewry had permeated government and courts or that America was jeopardized by Chinese and Japanese invasions. On a local level, the Florida parliament in 1995 awarded compensation to nine Black survivors of White mob attacks seven decades earlier. In that similar year, Mississippi finally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment eliminating slavery. Some hundred years after 31 Chinese gold miners in Oregon were cruelly killed in 1887 were the files on what had happened first made public. On a state level, four decades passed before Congress chosen compensation for the unfair internment of American Japanese and Aleuts during World War II, and not until 1993 did Congress pass a declaration making an apology for the overthrow a hundred years earlier of the Hawaiian monarchy. Religionists, too, have more and more recognized past wrongs. On almost a hundred diverse occasions Pope John Paul II apologized for Catholic wrongs against Jews, Africans, Indians, Protestants, women, and even the astronomer Galileo. In 1995, on the 150th anniversary of its beginning, the Southern Baptist Convention overwhelmingly voted to request forgiveness of â€Å"all African-Americans† for past support of slavery. Two years later, Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, and United Methodist leaders in South Carolina issued a statement owning up their sins of racism. Last has been a development of minority community and political action groups, which as never before look for civic and political acknowledgment and power. No longer are hyphenated groups viewed as unpatriotic, and no longer are they reliant on the altruism of others to resolve their problems, or, in the case of immigrants, to rely on motherland governments to speak on their behalf. Rather, much in the way of Blacks, they hold marches, pageants, demonstrations, and political forums, often with the support of second- and third-generation local or federal politicians of their own group. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have outreach programs to all main minority groups, together with the solicitation of funds. On both local and national levels, political officeholders are sure to have famous minority representatives as advisers or staff. Assistance all of the above were the press, radio, and television, which no longer disregarded prejudice, discrimination, or violence against minorities, but depicted such behavior as communally unacceptable and ethically wrong and called upon political and public officials to take corrective action. In brief, today’s minority groups have more fortifications, opportunities, and freedoms than their parents or grandparents had or dreamed of perhaps having and they are challenging and taking advantage of them as never before. Increasingly, changes for the better have taken place. Admitting such does not mean that there still is not victims and troubles, but rather proves that vary is possible and that cynicism and suspicion are unwarranted. A subsequent principle is comparing intergroup relations in America to those in other countries. Here, too, America detachable very well, as is obvious by what is and has been going on in other countries, as well as by the needs of so many foreigners to leave their homelands. We merely do not have the wars, ethnic conflicts, and calls for secession, self-determination, or ethnic sanitization that take place in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Spain, England, Northern Ireland, India, Indonesia, Rwanda–or in our border neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Few Native Americans, Hawaiians, and Alaskans want secession, and few Puerto Ricans want whole independence from America. Still fewer are the figure of Americans who relinquish their citizenship and leave to live in another country. Third, intergroup relations can be evaluated to the nationally appreciated values of equal rights and opportunities for life, autonomy, and the detection of happiness, where individuals are moderator in spite of their race, religion, ethnicity, age, and sex. By this decisive factor, it is very understandable particularly to minorities that problems still exist, that racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Asianism, anti-Hispanicism, anti-Native Americanism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and sexism have not moved out. The fourth criterion entailed comparing a group’s progress or need of it to other groups. The consequences, certainly, depend on the groups being compared. while the situation of American Blacks is evaluated to that of American Indians or Haitians, Blacks are doing very well, but when contrasted to that of Irish Catholics or Jews, they are far behind. If being murdered and robbed of one’s home are the most terrible that can happen a group, then Indians were the leading victims, followed by Blacks, who were the only group brought here against their will as slaves, alienated from their families, and not permitted to enable their customs, languages, and even names. Mexicans all through the Southwest were made strangers in their own land, as were national Hawaiians, both of whose lands were taken by fraud and conquest. Alaskan natives were not asked whether they required their land sold by Russia to America. Asians were the most redundant groups, and Catholics the most hated religious group. Frequently derelict in group comparisons are the momentous numbers of minorities who, despite discrimination, achieved, such as Arabs, Armenians, Asians, Cubans, Greeks, Huguenots, Jews, Latvians, Mormons, Quakers, and West Indians. Also derelicted are the ethnic and socioeconomic subdivisions within a explicit victimized group as with late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century comparatively well-off northern Italians and poor southern ones, as well as with moderately poor eastern and well-off western European Jews. These days, too, perceptible differences in accomplishment exist between such Hispanic groups as Cubans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans–with Cubans usually having a much higher mean income and educational attainment than the two other groups and than Whites usually. Briefly, the picture that appears from group-to-group comparisons is a mixed one, depending on which groups are being evaluated. A fifth principle is that of Utopia. All too perceptibly, America is not a Garden of Eden, Elysian Field, Happy Isle, Golden Land, or heaven on earth. Yes, we have approach a far way from the discrimination and favoritism of early America or of Europe, Africa, and Asia, but we have a long way to go before it can be realistically said that Americans live by the Golden Rule. The last and politically latest criteria (at least in America) are those of assortment and relative representation. originally, the terms usually implied that if a group did not have a percentage of jobs, school admissions, positions, elections, and so on, equal to its percentage of the local or state population, or to its percentage of the workforce, it was a sign of being discriminated against. For instance, since African Americans are some   twelve percent of the population, or women some fifty percent, it was argued, they should have that percentage of jobs, college admissions, political appointments, and the like. Consequently of the enduring nonrepresentational or exclusion of minorities, and the growing public and court refusal of race-conscious solutions, calls began being made for ascertaining multiculturalism and diversity. Schools, workplaces, political offices, media, and much else, were reproved to form workforces that replicate the makeup of America, thereby reassuring a greater minority inclusion than by just calling for equal opportunity for all minorities. By this decisive factor, with the omission of the armed forces, sports, and civil service jobs, few arenas of society are free of discrimination. It mean First, bad as prejudice was, it has been waning for all minority groups, though differentially so. Second, how much of a reject has there been, how fast or slow has it occurred, what has caused either, and how best to spiral the speed of reform are justifiable topics of concern and debate. Third, the dearth of usually agreed upon criteria for measuring progress distorts the realism of the progress made and not made. Worse yet, in numerous cases, the absence has aggravated intergroup relations, wherein one group’s self-interests conflict with those of other groups. Instead of figuring coalitions to resolve problems of common concern, numerous groups believe in centering on their own priorities. Without a coalitional conformity on what needs to be done, the speed of further development will be delayed, but not stopped. Too much goodwill subsists in America, and too numerous reforms have taken place, at too high a cost in lives and energy, to be stopped. The recognizable glass is neither empty nor full, but being filled and the earlier the better. References: Aboud F. E. ( 1984). â€Å"Social and cognitive bases of ethnic identity constancy.† Journal of Genetic Psychology, 145, 227 – 229. Aboud F. E. ( 1987). â€Å"The development of ethnic self-identification and attitudes.† In J. S. Phinney & M. J. Rotheram (Eds.), Children’s ethnic socialization: Pluralism and development (pp. 32 – 55 ). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Alba R. D. ( 1990). Ethnic identity: The transformation of White America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Branch C. W. ( 1994). â€Å"Ethnic identity as a variable in the learning equation.† In E. R. Hollins , J. E. King, & W. G. Hayman (Eds.), Teaching diverse populations: Formulating a knowledge base (pp. 207 – 224 ). Albany: State University of New York Press. Hollins E. R. ( 1996). Culture in school learning; Revealing the deep meaning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Jones S. ( 1997). The archaeology of ethnicity: Constructing identities in the past and present. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McAdoo H. P. (Ed.). ( 1993). Family ethnicity: Strength in diversity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Mintz S. W., & Price R. ( 1992). The birth of African-American culture: An anthropological perspective. Boston: Beacon Press. Sheets R. H. ( 1997). â€Å"Reflection 1: Racial and ethnic awareness.† In J. Carnes & R. H. Sheets (Eds.), Starting small: Teaching tolerance in preschool and the early grades (pp. 16 – 21 ). Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center. Sheets R. H. ( 1998). Ethnic identity behavioral displays in an urban Kindergarten classroom: Implications for practice. Unpublished manuscript. Sodowsky G. R., Kwan K. K., & Pannu R. ( 1995). â€Å"Ethnic identity of Asians in the United States.† In J. G. Ponterotto, J. M. Casas, L. A. Suzuki, & C. M. Alexander (Eds.), Handbook of multicultural counseling (pp. 123 – 154 ). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sollors W. (Ed.). ( 1996). Theories of ethnicity: A classical reader. New York: New York University Press. Spencer M. B. ( 1985). â€Å"Cultural cognition and social cognition as identity factors in Black children’s personal growth.† In M. Spencer, G. Brookins, & W. Allen (Eds.), Beginnings: The social and affective development of Black children (pp. 215 – 230 ). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates