Interracial Relations Issues - Essay Example

Segregation Introduction The issue of interracial relations has always been among the most controversial and difficult problems in American society.Racial segregation has a long history in the US, beginning with slavery and evolving into racially separated housing, schooling, buses, and trains. Furthermore, for much of the last century, racial, gender, ethnic, and religious minorities have been facing legal exclusion and unequal treatment. Representatives of minorities were segregated into low paid and fewer prospective jobs, while some minorities – for example, Chinese or Korean – were legally forbidden to own land. Until the second decade of the last century, even white women were legally deprived of the political rights and in many states, they could not enter certain occupational fields, such as law, journalism, and medicine (Danziger & Gottschalk, 1995). Only in the second half of the 20th century, the federal government, the Supreme Court, Republicans and Democrats, and various human rights organizations made attempts to implement the systematic approach to resolve the problem of segregation in employment and education. Initially, several court decisions such as the 1954 Brown case (347 U.S. 483, 1954) reduced de jure discrimination in the US. The subsequent affirmative action policy in employment and education launched in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order number 10925 as the central axis of the US employment and educational policies required federal contractors and educational institutions to take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are treated equally without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity was established to control and implement the new policy intended to reduce and eventually eliminate discrimination in American society. Unfortunately, the results of these policies are highly controversial and incomplete at best: de facto segregation and discrimination persists in employment, education, military service, housing and other realms of social relationships (Lipset, 1992). Perhaps the only outcome of the continuous corrective actions is that the forms of modern segregation and discrimination are milder than those observed in the second half of the 20th century. Despite variety of theoretical models suggested by US scholars to explain the ongoing discrimination in various fields of social life (Massey & Denton 1993; Borjas 1998), the key question still remains unanswered: why several decades of intensive legal and social efforts did so little in terms of eliminating such negative phenomenon as discrimination of minorities? Although the legal status of minorities is an essential factor in fighting discrimination and segregation, there are likely other equally important factors involved. Main Discussion The efforts to cope with the problem of minorities’ segregation and discrimination undertaken during the last five decades largely failed. The seeming success of affirmative action when in 1970 – 1980’s the number of students who belonged to racial or national minorities significantly increased, was achieved by reverse discrimination of the white majority: cases of Bakke and Webber (Ball, 2000) in 1970’s made this fact evident to the public. Eventually, the surveys of public opinion demonstrated the controversy caused by lack of understanding of the affirmative policy in the nation. A recent survey performed by CNN in 1995 discovered that 80 percent of the respondents felt “affirmative action programs for minorities and women should be continued at some level” (RCPO, 1995). However, at the same time any possibility of reverse discrimination, which in fact had been the main feature of affirmative action programs since 1964, was opposed by 63 percent of participants (RCPO, 1995a). Affirmative action programs in education seem to cause more damage than positive effects. Laws passed to protect minorities from discrimination often led to reverse discrimination instead of improving the situation. As a result, sometimes it is not even necessary to have a good command of English to be enrolled in college: the most important thing needed is to be a Hispanic or Afro American (Krauthammer, 2001). Such approach rather leads to increased hidden tensions between the majority and minority groups than eliminates segregation. Large disparities between the representatives of minorities and the majority in the US are repeatedly documented, and the list of such disparities includes not only differences in income and earnings, but also ‘educational opportunities, health care, and residential segregation' (Heckman, 1998; p.104). Thus, a comprehensive analysis of 112 metropolitan areas authors of which examined the influence of spatial, economic, and demographic factors on the racial income inequality demonstrated, "… racial educational inequality and unemployment differences were the strongest predictors of racially based income inequality" (Jaret et al, 2003: 305). Up to this day, no one can identify an effective remedy to improve the situation with income inequalities between the majority and minorities. Insufficient effect of the legislative and economic tools used to fight segregation suggests that there may be some hidden factors involved. Prejudice and negative stereotypes are likely to be on the list of such factors. The term ‘stereotype' relates to the system of social beliefs concerning representatives of other social groups. Stephen L. Franzoi (1996) defines stereotype as "… a fixed way of thinking about people that put them into categories and doesn't allow for individual variations" (p. 92). Being a fixed form of thinking, stereotypes help us be economical of our time, and thus play the key role in how we perceive people that surround us. Unfortunately, our society often creates, communicates, and promotes negative stereotypes which lead to unfair discrimination and persecution of the target groups. Such stereotypes form the basis of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and many other negative social phenomena. It is not a secret that many representatives of the white majority in the US have negative stereotypes of the minorities attributing them such qualities as irresponsibility, superstition, and unintelligence often assigned to African Americans by white respondents although no credible studies conducted up to date revealed any reliable evidence that white race is more responsible, less superstitious, and more intelligent than any other. The origin of negative stereotypes lies in the sphere of human psychology, and evidently, owes a debt to ethnic prejudice – "… negative attitude toward a group of people who have some characteristic in common that is not shared by all people" (Encyclopedia Americana, 1986: 545a). One of the most known accounts of the relationship between prejudice and negative stereotype was suggested by Milton Rokeach, an outstanding social psychologist, who established a strong link between prejudice and the perception of intergroup differences (Rockeach, 1973). Humans are social beings who have the strong need for other representatives of their species to feel comfortable and secure. Therefore, affiliation with a certain group is an essential aspect of any individual's life. However, an individual affiliated with a certain group starts to distinguish between his/her group and people who belong to other groups which result in the development of two concepts: in-group and out-group. In-group is defined as "… a group to which a person belongs and which forms a part of his or her social identity" while out-group is "any group to which a person does not belong" (Franzoi, 1996: 272). The major difference between the individual's perception of in-group and out-group members is the following: members of in-groups possess overwhelmingly good personal qualities, while out-group members are perceived with a certain share of negativism (Rockeach, 1973). This unique psychological mechanism is likely to be an important contributor to the ongoing discrimination and segregation in the US. This mechanism provides a valid explanation for the phenomenon of ‘voluntary segregation': segregation and racial isolation which results from voluntary choices of the minority representatives in housing, education, etc. Conclusion The fact that a continuous comprehensive legislative campaign alone failed to fully eliminate de facto segregation in the US suggests that this social issue has multiple roots with legally supported historical inequalities between the majority and minority population being only one aspect of the problem. The set of negative stereotypes which developed over the centuries when the white majority and the minorities lived on the same territory is an equally important factor in the ongoing discrimination. Unfortunately, this factor can not be fully addressed by the legislative initiatives: although legally maintained inequalities contributed seriously to its development it belongs to the realm of social psychology and requires other methods of influence. In the long-term perspective adequately planned and correctly implement legal actions are likely to help eliminate the negative stereotypes, but if the process is as continuous as the process of their formation the task of achieving full equality in the US will turn into a matter of centuries. References Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) Ball, H. The Bakke case. University Press of Kansas, 2000. Borjas, G.J. 1998. "To Ghetto or Not to Ghetto: Ethnicity and Residential Segregation." Journal of Urban Economics 44:228-253 Danziger, S. & Gottschalk, P. (1995). America Unequal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Fedorko, L. (Ed.) (1986). Understanding Psychology. New York: Random House. Heckman, J. (1998). Detecting Discrimination. The Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, 101-116. Jaret, Ch., Reid, L. W. & Adelman, R. M. (2003). Black/White Income Inequality and Metropolitan Socioeconomic Structure. Journal of Urban Affairs 25(3), 305-333. Krauthammer, C. (2001, July 15). Affirmative action has become a naked spoils system. Dallas Morning News, A12. Lipset, S. M. (1992). Equal chances versus equal results. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 523, 63-74. Massey, D.S. & N.A. Denton (1993). American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Roper Center for Public Opinion (RCPO) (1995). Question ID: USYANKP.95007, Q21, the electronic database of Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. Retrieved June 26, 2007, from, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe Roper Center for Public Opinion (RCPO) (1995a). Question ID: USYANKP.95007, Q18a, the electronic database of Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. Retrieved June 26, 2007, from, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe Encyclopedia Americana (1986). Prejudice and Discrimination. Volume 19. Grolier Incorporated, 545a-548. Franzoi, S. (1996). Social Psychology. Toronto: Brown and Benchmark. Rockeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. New York: Free Press. Read More