Social Stratification and Inequality

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poverty.

Prejudice and discrimination exist in societies throughout the world. The sociological perspectives explain the causes of prejudice and discrimination and Sociologists distinguish between individual discrimination (negative treatment of one person by another) and institutional discrimination (negative treatment of a minority group that is built into society’s institutions). Race-ethnicity is a meaningful part in getting a mortgage or a car loan. Researchers found that even when two mortgage applicants were identical in terms of credit histories, African Americans and Latinos were 60 percent more likely than whites to be denied. In terms of health care, researchers correlated the age, sex, race, and income of patients and found that whites were more likely than minorities to be given coronary bypass surgery or receive knee replacements.

Next the six major patterns of minority and dominant group relations will be discussed. Genocide is the actual or attempted organized elimination of a race or ethnic group that is described as less than fully human. Examples are the Holocaust and the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans. Labels that mechanize others help people isolate; they can separate their acts from their sense of being good and moral people. Population transfer is forced movement of a minority group. Indirect transfer involves making life so unbearable that members of a minority will leave; direct transfer involves forced expulsion. A combination of mass murder and population transfer occurred in Bosnia, in former Yugoslavia, as Serbs engaged in the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Croats, with survivors forced to flee the area. Internal colonialism is a society’s policy of exploiting a minority by using social institutions to deny it access to full benefits. Slavery is an extreme example as well as South Africa’s system of apartheid. Segregation is the formal separation of groups that accompanies internal colonialism. Dominant groups maintain social distance from minorities yet still exploit their labor. Assimilation is the process by which a minority is absorbed into the mainstream. Forced assimilation occurs when the dominant group stops the minority from using its own religion, language, or customs. Permissive assimilation is when the minority adopts the dominant group’s patterns in its own way and/or at its own speed. Multiculturalism, also called pluralism, allows or encourages ethnic variation. An excellent example of Switzerland is multiculturalism. The French, Italians, Germans, and Romansh have kept their own languages and live in political and economic unity.

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