Sociology 4949: Outline--Week Seven
I. Blumer: Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position
Rather than look at prejudice as an individual attribute (what kinds of people
are prejudiced; what kinds are not), look at it as a group attribute, having
to do with the positional arrangement of racial groups
A. Four types of feelings that seem to be always present in race prejudice
in the dominant group
1. Feelings of superiority
2. Feelings of difference
3. Feelings of a right to certain privileges and advantages
4 Fear and suspicion that the inferior group harbors ambitions to displace
the dominant group
The subordinate group is "all right in their place," but there is a concern
that they are getting "out of place."
Race prejudice, from Blumer's perspective, ultimately boils down to a sense
of where racial groups belong.
B. This sense of group position is a historical product and highly variable.
1. It is produced by "complex interaction and communication between members
of the dominant group.... leaders, prestige bearers, officials... through
talk, speeches, stories.... news accounts, orations, sermons..."
2. Not a product of personality disorder: e.g. theories of the authoritarian
personality (Look at Jefferson or Washington)
3. Concerned with "an abstract image of the subordinate racial group," and
therefore not readily changed by individual encounters
Thomas Pettigrew: the "ultimate attribution error" How do we account for
the accomplishments of those we view as our inferiors?
4. The collective image of the subordinate group grows up not by generalizing
from experiences gained in close, first-hand contacts, but through the transcending
characterizations that are made of the group in the public arena, wherein
spokesmen appear as representatives and agents of the dominant group.
5. The role of the "big event:" Bacon's rebellion and its eventual interpretation,
the Watts riot, the Los Angeles riot of 1992, the OJ Simpson trial, the Zoot
Suit riots during World War II
6. Strong interest groups (people who are advantaged by the race relations
scheme) influence the lines of discussion (e.g., large landowners in Virginia;
agricultural interests threatened by Japanese success on the West Coast in
the l940s)
C. Comments and questions
1. Is it useful to say that there is no prejudice where there is no real
sense of threat? Compare with Van den Berghe: paternalistic vs competitive
race relations.
2. Think about which of the four elements is still present in the United
States in the 2000s, vis a vis which groups?
3.TPS: What kinds of prejudice were no longer allowable after the Civil Rights
movement and the key civil rights legislation of the 1960s? Can we see the outlines of
a "new" set of prejudices, and how much do they have in common with
the old kind?
a. Who were/are the welfare abusers?
b. Who was/is the target of the "War on Crime" and the "War
on Drugs?"
II. Remember Waldinger: "When the Melting Pot Boils Over: The Irish, Jews, Blacks, and Koreans of New York"
"The story of ethnic progress in America can better be thought of as a collective search for mobility, in which the succession of one migrant group after another ensures a continous competitive conflict over resources."
A good fit with Blumer and also with Lieberson (A Piece of the Pie)
The Politics of integration and resegregation. Major source. Gary Orfield and Susan Eaton: Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown vs Board of Education, 1996
A. Brown vs Board of Education.
1. Integration proceeded very slowly. Orfield: "By 1964, only one-fiftieth of Southern black children attended integrated schools." (that's 10 years after the Supreme Court ordered integration to proceed)
2. But in the years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court established much stiffer standards for southern schools, and by 1970, southern schools were more integrated than schools in other areas of the country.
C. Resegregation: Nixon, Reagan, Bush and the Supreme Court. Nixon's political strategy from the first involved capturing the white southern vote. Note his appointment of Chief Justice Rehnquist, who believed that Brown v Board of Education had been a mistake and had said so at the time.
1. Milliken v. Bradley, 1974. Supreme Court disallowed urban/suburban integration for Detroit. ("By 1991, African Americans in Michigan were more segregated than in any other state." Orfield) 4 of the 5 votes were Nixon appointees.
2. A series of subsequent Supreme Court decisions provided means for resegregating southern schools. The key was the concept of "unitary status:" any school system where segregation had been "remedied" was viewed as having achieved unitary status and was therefore freed from court supervision and could move dramatically in the direction of resegregation, provided they didn't announce that intention.
a. e.g. Austin, Texas, declared unitary in 1983 and district court relinquished jurisdiction in 1986. School board redrew attendance zones and created neighborhood schools. By 1983, one third of elementary schools had minority enrollments over 80%, in a district with a white majority
b. By 1995, 60% of sitting federal judges at all levels had been appointed by Reagan and Bush and the dominant narrative said that the effort to create equality through integrated schools had been a failure and that you couldn't overcome what Justice O'Connor called "natural, if unfortunate, demographic forces."
c. The resegregation of the southern schools has proceeded rapidly. "We have a system of residential segregation in most of our metropolitan areas that often approaches the level of segregation produced by the old apartheid laws. This system, together with the policies and practices of the school systems, produces highly segregated and increasingly unequal education for most minority students." Orfield, p. 50
3. Orfield convinced that this derives from a Republican strategy to make the once solidly Democratic South into a solidly Republican South, with a willingness to write off the black minority's vote. If this seems to you implausible, I would ask that you at least consider the fact that every Republican president since Nixon has owed his electoral majority to Southern white voters. Let's look at the last two presidential elections:
In both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, Bush won the electoral votes of every southern state, with 160 electoral votes. Without the south, the U.S. would have elected Gore in 200 by a landslide, 266 electoral votes for Gore to 111 for Bush. Without the south, Kerry would have won, 252-126.
IV. Tracking and minorities.
A. Jane Mercer, Labeling the Retarded, 1973.
Riverside, California... then included a significant minority population,
both Black and Mexican-American
4 part study
1 How do the schools identify those who are put in special education classes
and what is the relative proportion of minorities in those classes?
a. Mercer found that teachers in the early grades refer kids for testing
and that an IQ test is then used as the primary criterion for assigning
someone to special education.
b. This created the following pattern:
| |
% in population |
% failing IQ test |
| Total population |
100% |
2.14% |
| Anglos |
82% |
0.44% |
| Blacks |
7% |
4.49% |
| Mexican-Americans |
10% |
14.99%
|
2. Mercer conducted a survey, asking people to identify neighbors who were
mentally retarded (notice the language then current; now we would probably
ask about developmental disabilities)
No major differences by ethnicity/race... less than 1% of population
3. Mercer also obtained data for Riverside's Catholic schools and found
a smaller proportion of kids identified as mentally retarded, with less race
and ethnic bias
4. Finally, she developed her own measure of IQ, based on how well people
can perform ordinary tasks, the tasks becoming more complex as people get
older. Her results:
| |
% failing Mercer's test |
| Total population |
0.97% |
| Anglo |
.48% |
| Black |
.41% |
| Mexican-American |
6.0% |
Her hypothesis about the still greater proportion of Mexican-Americans failing
her test: a matter of language skills for people whose first language is Spanish
IV. But Mercer's study was way back in 1973. Wasn't this the 'bad old days,"
when culturally biased tests were still the norm? What about now? Is this still
a current issue? See the Kozol reading, in which he describes the many advantages
of New York City's PS 24. This is a mostly white school, with some Asian, African-American,
and Hispanic children, but most of the African-American and Hispanic children
are in "special" classes, either EMR or TMR
vs.