Sociology 4949: Outline--Week Nine

 

I. Japanese Immigration to the United States: Takaki, chapter 10

A. Initially most of immigrants men but by 1920, women represented 46% of Japanese population in Hawaii and 35% in California... Why so many more women among Japan's immigrants?

B. Hawaii

1. Remember Oliver Cox, Class, Caste, and Race: racism as the product of European colonialism and its later connection with economic advantage... conscious recruitment of ethnically diverse labor force in Hawaii

2. "We worked like machines."

3. Japanese strike of 1909... held out for four months before forced to return to work

a. employers eliminated differential wage by ethnicity

b. employers imported Filipino workers in large numbers

4. 1919: Filipinos went on strike, eventually joined by Japanese

5. "Plantation" housing pattern? p. 261

6. Role of "pidgin" English

7. Japanese families and the education of their children (p. 265)

C. California

1. Very much a racial minority: 2% in 1920

2. Much anti-Japanese sentiment..eventually, in 1924, an immigration reform prohibiting the entry of "aliens ineligible to citizenship"

3. Initially employed in agriculture, railroad construction, canneries

4. Excluded from industrial work by the hostility of the white working class.... thousands became small farmers, who soon benefited in growing and marketing their products from irrigation and the refrigerated railroad car

D. Japanese and Japanese American internment: Video: "A Family Gathering"

 

II. "Minnesota's Immigrant Populations Continue to Increase" June 17, 2004... 8 largest groups: State Demography Center (2009: this is still their most recent report on this topic):

Immigrant Group School Enrollment, 2003-4 Estimate of Population
Latino 38,643 175,000
Hmong 21,613 60,000
Somali 5,734 25,000
Vietnamese 2,910 25,000
Russian 2,346 12,500
Laotian 2,258 13,000
Cambodian 1,718 7,500
Ethiopian 1,329 7,500

 

III The social psychology of prejudice

A. How quickly prejudice can be learned when it is to your advantage, and all the moreso if it is part of a conformity process. Pierre Van den Berghe, Stranger in their Midst (1989): Colonial administrators learn prejudice on their way to Africa aboard the Belgian ship, Tervaete.

B. Cognitive dissonance.

1. Original theory from Leon Festinger: Simultaneously holding two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent creates an internal pressure to reduce the dissonance.

2. Modification by Elliot Aronson: "When a person is involved in a situation where he might consider himself to be stupid or immoral, he engages in self-justifying behavior which involves some form of self-persuasion." Cognitive dissonance particularly strong when:

a. Self-concept is involved

b. Actions are voluntary or nearly so.

c. Individual feels responsible for consequences and they matter.

3. Glass: The Justification of Cruelty--an experiment

a. People were induced to deliver what they thought was a series of shocks to other people who had supposedly also been recruited as volunteers.

b. As part of the process, research subjects were tested for self-esteem.

c. As part of the debriefing, subjects were questioned about their impressions of the volunteers who had been shocked.

d. These "victims" were consistently derogated, and those with the highest self-esteem did it the most.

e. Cognitive dissonance in this experiment: If I see myself as a basically good and decent fellow, how do I justify what would otherwise seem to be cruelty on my part? (Individual version of what Myrdal called "An American Dilemma."

4. Sociological dimension: the stereotypes and rationalizations that justify mistreatment are not individually created but socially created... remember the Blumer article... this is a way to link the macro and micro dimensions, or to take a psychological theory and sociologize it.

5. IMPLICATIONS FOR RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS: the worse a group has been treated, the more it will be steretyped and downgraded ... notice the reversal in our normal sense of causality

C. Learning prejudice as a side effect of competition and conflict

Muzafer Sherif et al: the Eagles and the Rattlers: Cooperation within groups, competition between groups... situations in which one group benefitted at the other group's expense (e.g., group arriving first for a meal)... even people who had rated each other as best friends coming into camp came to see each other as enemies.

V. Race and Crime through the lens of conflict theory

B. Cole: The Color of Punishment...Why so many more drug-related arrests among African Americans than among whites?

Instructor: Imagine if the War on Drugs had concentrated on the white middle class. By 1970, some college campuses reported that at least 70% of their population had tried marijuana . Just to judge by the people I knew well enough to know their drug habits, that may apply to Carleton College during my time there in the 1960s, and of course, our last three presidents all admitted to illegal drug use, though Clinton says he didn't inhale.

The self-report survey reproduced below is fairly typical of the methodology that is used in such surveys. I added a few questions that seemed pertinent to a college audience, some of them relating more to deviant behavior than to crime. This questionnaire was administered to 30 students in a research methods class a few years ago. Students in the course were mostly in the "traditional" college age range, meaning the late teens and early twenties.. I didn't try to identify age or gender as categories in my survey, as I didn't want to do anything that would link a particular individual with their self-report.

SELF-REPORT SURVEY

Please indicate how often in the past two years you did each act:

  Never Once 2-5 times 6-9 times 10+times
1. Stole something worth less than $50 68% 3% 23% 3% 3%
2. Stole something worth more than $50 68% 10% 3%   20%
3. Got drunk (under age) 10%     13% 77%
4. Used fake i.d. to access liquor 50% 3% 7%   40%
5. Used marijuana 17% 3% 23% 7% 50%
6. Used methamphetamines 94%     3% 3%
7. Used cocaine/crack 83%   7% 3% 7%
8. Been in a fistfight 64% 13% 13% 3% 7%
9. Carried a weapon, such as a gun or knife 74%   10% 3% 13%
10. Broke into and entered a home or business 90% 3% 7%    
11.Obtained funds or products using false identification 97%       3%
12. Gambled illegally 61% 3% 20% 3% 13%
13. Hit or threatened a spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend 90% 3% 7%    
14. Used force to obtain sexual access 100%        
15. Had sex with someone incapacitated by drugs or liquor 77%   10% 3% 10%
16. Drove a car while drunk or high 33% 17% 13% 17% 20%
17. Sold drugs 91% 3%   3% 3%
18. Cheated on income tax 97%   3%    
19. Cheated on exams 43% 13% 33% 7% 3%
20. Plagiarized paper 77% 13% 7%   3%
21. Cheated on financial aid

86%

7% 7%    
22. Damaged property worth more than $10 53% 17% 20% 7% 3%

B. Hagan: Crime and Disrepute (1994): comparison of rates of black imprisonment, South Africa under apartheid vs. United States

Black Rates of Incarceration, U.S. vs. South Africa, 1990 (Source: Christie, 1993: 119)

 
United States
South Africa
Black male population
14,625,000
15,050,642
Black male inmates
499,891
107,202
Rate of incarceration per 100,000
3,370
681

update from Justice Policy Institute: In 1980, 143,000 black men in prison and 463,700 black men in college. By 2000, 791,000 black men in prison and 603,032 black men in college.

Bureau of Justice Statistics: Four Measures of Serious Violent Crime

E. How successful has the War on Drugs been in reducing drug use?

A history of dramatic fluctuations in drug use that have little to do with enforcement (e.g. the crack epidemic, the methamphetamine epidemic, the ups and downs in figures for high schoolers)

James Q. Wilson: "Significant reductions in drug abuse will only come from reducing the demand for those drugs... I know of no serious law-enforcement official who disagrees with this conclusion. Typically, police officials tell interviewers they are fighting either a losing war, or at best, a holding action."

What are the consequences for a race or ethnic group if 20% or more of its young men can expect to have been in prison by the time they are in their thirties?

Christopher Uggen's work on felon disenfranchisement, for example, finds that almost 20% of African-American men in Minnesota are disenfranchised.