❤❤❤ Stereotyping Among Minority Groups

Racism is a type of prejudice that is used to justify the belief that one racial category is somehow superior or inferior to others. Retrieved 5 September These stereotype-based expectations may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, in which Nurture In Frankenstein inaccurate expectations about a person's behavior, through social interaction, Stereotyping Among Minority Groups that person to act in stereotype-consistent ways, thus confirming Essay On Laryngectomy erroneous expectations and validating the Stereotyping Among Minority Groups. Unpublished Master Thesis, University of Ottawa. Retrieved 5 September

The Roots of Negative Stereotypes I American Graduate (Long version)

Thinking about others in terms of their group memberships is known as social categorization — the natural cognitive process by which we place individuals into social groups. Just as we categorize objects into different types, so do we categorize people according to their social group memberships. Once we do so, we begin to respond to those people more as members of a social group than as individuals. Imagine for a moment that two college students, Farhad and Sarah, are talking at a table in the student union at your college or university.

At this point, we would probably not consider them to be acting as group members, but rather as two individuals. Farhad is expressing his opinions, and Sarah is expressing hers. Furthermore, he argues that women are getting too many breaks in job hiring and that qualified men are the targets of discrimination. Sarah feels quite the contrary—arguing that women have been the targets of sexism for many, many years and even now do not have the same access to high-paying jobs that men do. You can see that an interaction that began at individual level, as two individuals conversing, has now turned to the group level, in which Farhad has begun to consider himself as a man, and Sarah has begun to consider herself as a woman.

In short, Sarah is now arguing her points not so much for herself as she is as a representative of one of her ingroups—namely, women—and Farhad is acting as a representative of one of his ingroups—namely, men. Sarah feels that her positions are correct, and she believes they are true not only for her but for women in general. And the same is true of Farhad. You can see that these social categorizations may create some potential for misperception, and perhaps even hostility. And Farhad and Sarah may even change their opinions about each other, forgetting that they really like each other as individuals, because they are now responding more as group members with opposing views.

Imagine now that while Farhad and Sarah are still talking, some students from another college, each wearing the hats and jackets of that school, show up in the student union. The presence of these outsiders might change the direction of social categorization entirely, leading both Farhad and Sarah to think of themselves as students at their own college. And this social categorization might lead them to become more aware of the positive characteristics of their college the excellent rugby team, lovely campus, and intelligent students in comparison with the characteristics of the other school.

Now, rather than perceiving themselves as members of two different groups men versus women , Farhad and Sarah might suddenly perceive themselves as members of the same social category students at their college. Perhaps this example will help you see the flexibility of social categorization. We sometimes think of our relationships with others at the individual level and sometimes at the group level.

And which groups we use in social categorization can change over time and in different situations. You are more likely to categorize yourself as a member of your college or university when your rugby or football team has just won a really important game, or at your graduation ceremony, than you would on a normal evening out with your family. In these cases, your membership as a university student is simply more salient and important than it is every day, and you are more likely to categorize yourself accordingly.

During the presentation, each member of the discussion group made a suggestion about how to advertise a college play. The statements were controlled so that across all the research participants, the statements made by the men and the women were of equal length and quality. Furthermore, one half of the participants were told that when the presentation was over, they would be asked to remember which person had made which suggestion, whereas the other half of the participants were told merely to observe the interaction without attending to anything in particular. After they had viewed all the statements made by the individuals in the discussion group, the research participants were given a memory test this was entirely unexpected for the participants who had not been given memory instructions.

The participants were shown the list of all the statements that had been made, along with the pictures of each of the discussion group members, and were asked to indicate who had made each of the statements. The research participants were not very good at this task, and yet when they made mistakes, these errors were very systematic. As you can see in Table The participants evidently categorized the speakers by their gender, leading them to make more within-gender than across-gender confusions. Interestingly, and suggesting that categorization is occurring all the time, the instructions that the participants had been given made absolutely no difference.

There was just as much categorization for those who were not given any instructions as for those who were told to remember who said what. The conclusion is simple, if perhaps obvious: Social categorization is occurring all around us all the time. Indeed, social categorization occurs so quickly that people may have difficulty not thinking about others in terms of their group memberships see Figure The tendency to categorize others is often quite useful.

If you found yourself lost in a city, you might look for a police officer or a taxi driver to help you find your way. In this case, social categorization would probably be useful because a police officer or a taxi driver might be particularly likely to know the layout of the city streets. Of course, using social categories will only be informative to the extent that the stereotypes held by the individual about that category are accurate. If police officers were actually not that knowledgeable about the city layout, then using this categorization heuristic would not be informative.

The description of social categorization as a heuristic is also true in another sense: we sometimes categorize others not because it seems to provide more information about them but because we may not have the time or the motivation to do anything more thorough. According to this approach, thinking about other people in terms of their social category memberships is a functional way of dealing with the world—things are complicated, and we reduce complexity by relying on our stereotypes. Although thinking about others in terms of their social category memberships has some potential benefits for the person who does the categorizing, categorizing others, rather than treating them as unique individuals with their own unique characteristics, has a wide variety of negative, and often very unfair, outcomes for those who are categorized.

One problem is that social categorization distorts our perceptions such that we tend to exaggerate the differences between people from different social groups while at the same time perceiving members of groups and particularly outgroups as more similar to each other than they actually are. This overgeneralization makes it more likely that we will think about and treat all members of a group the same way. Tajfel and Wilkes performed a simple experiment that provided a picture of the potential outcomes of categorization.

As you can see in Figure In one of the experimental conditions, participants simply saw six lines, whereas in the other condition, the lines were systematically categorized into two groups—one comprising the three shorter lines and one comprising the three longer lines. Lines C and D were seen as the same length in the noncategorized condition, but line C was perceived as longer than line D when the lines were categorized into two groups.

From Tajfel Tajfel found that the lines were perceived differently when they were categorized, such that the differences between the groups and the similarities within the groups were emphasized. Specifically, he found that although lines C and D which are actually the same length were perceived as equal in length when the lines were not categorized, line D was perceived as being significantly longer than line C in the condition in which the lines were categorized. Similar effects occur when we categorize other people. We tend to see people who belong to the same social group as more similar than they actually are, and we tend to judge people from different social groups as more different than they actually are.

Patricia Linville and Edward Jones gave research participants a list of trait terms and asked them to think about either members of their own group e. The results of these studies, as well as other studies like them, were clear: people perceive outgroups as more homogeneous than their ingroup. Just as White people used fewer piles of traits to describe Blacks than Whites, young people used fewer piles of traits to describe elderly people than they did young people, and students used fewer piles for members of other universities than they did for members of their own university.

This prevents us from really learning about the outgroup members as individuals, and as a result, we tend to be unaware of the differences among the group members. Once we begin to see the members of outgroups as more similar to each other than they actually are, it then becomes very easy to apply our stereotypes to the members of the groups without having to consider whether the characteristic is actually true of the particular individual.

If men think that women are all alike, then they may also think that they all have the same positive and negative characteristics e. And women may have similarly simplified beliefs about men e. The outcome is that the stereotypes become linked to the group itself in a set of mental representations Figure Our stereotypes and prejudices are learned through many different processes. This multiplicity of causes is unfortunate because it makes stereotypes and prejudices even more likely to form and harder to change.

And there is often good agreement about the stereotypes of social categories among the individuals within a given culture. In one study assessing stereotypes, Stephanie Madon and her colleagues Madon et al. The participants tended to agree about what traits were true of which groups, and this was true even for groups of which the respondents were likely to never have met a single member Arabs and Russians.

Even today, there is good agreement about the stereotypes of members of many social groups, including men and women and a variety of ethnic groups. Once they become established, stereotypes like any other cognitive representation tend to persevere. We begin to respond to members of stereotyped categories as if we already knew what they were like. Yaacov Trope and Eric Thompson found that individuals addressed fewer questions to members of categories about which they had strong stereotypes as if they already knew what these people were like and that the questions they did ask were likely to confirm the stereotypes they already had.

In other cases, stereotypes are maintained because information that confirms our stereotypes is better remembered than information that disconfirms them. If we believe that women are bad drivers and we see a woman driving poorly, then we tend to remember it, but when we see a woman who drives particularly well, we tend to forget it. This illusory correlation is another example of the general principle of assimilation—we tend to perceive the world in ways that make it fit our existing beliefs more easily than we change our beliefs to fit the reality around us.

And stereotypes become difficult to change because they are so important to us—they become an integral and important part of our everyday lives in our culture. Stereotypes are frequently expressed on TV, in movies, and in social media, and we learn a lot of our beliefs from these sources. In short, stereotypes and prejudice are powerful largely because they are important social norms that are part of our culture Guimond, Because stereotypes and prejudice often operate out of our awareness, and also because people are frequently unwilling to admit that they hold them, social psychologists have developed methods for assessing them indirectly.

One difficulty in measuring stereotypes and prejudice is that people may not tell the truth about their beliefs. Most people do not want to admit—either to themselves or to others—that they hold stereotypes or that they are prejudiced toward some social groups. To get around this problem, social psychologists make use of a number of techniques that help them measure these beliefs more subtly and indirectly.

Interestingly, people express more prejudice when they are in the bogus pipeline than they do when they are asked the same questions more directly, which suggests that we may frequently mask our negative beliefs in public. Other indirect measures of prejudice are also frequently used in social psychological research; for instance, assessing nonverbal behaviors such as speech errors or physical closeness.

People who sit farther away are assumed to be more prejudiced toward the members of the group. In these procedures, participants are asked to make a series of judgments about pictures or descriptions of social groups and then to answer questions as quickly as they can, but without making mistakes. In the IAT, participants are asked to classify stimuli that they view on a computer screen into one of two categories by pressing one of two computer keys, one with their left hand and one with their right hand. For instance, in one version of the IAT, participants are shown pictures of men and women and are also shown words related to academic disciplines e.

The basic assumption is that if two concepts are associated or linked, they will be responded to more quickly if they are classified using the same, rather than different, keys. Implicit association procedures such as the IAT show that even participants who claim that they are not prejudiced do seem to hold cultural stereotypes about social groups. Even Black people themselves respond more quickly to positive words that are associated with White rather than Black faces on the IAT, suggesting that they have subtle racial prejudice toward their own racial group. Because they hold these beliefs, it is possible—although not guaranteed—that they may use them when responding to other people, creating a subtle and unconscious type of discrimination.

Do you hold implicit prejudices? Although in some cases the stereotypes that are used to make judgments might actually be true of the individual being judged, in many other cases they are not. Stereotyping is problematic when the stereotypes we hold about a social group are inaccurate overall, and particularly when they do not apply to the individual who is being judged Stangor, Stereotyping others is simply unfair. Even if many women are more emotional than are most men, not all are, and it is not right to judge any one woman as if she is. In the Toronto area, where visible minorities make up 47 percent of the population, Table Visible minority population and top three visible minority groups, selected census metropolitan areas, Canada, Table courtesy of Statistics Canada, Projecting forward based on current trends, Statistics Canada estimates that by , between 29 and 32 percent of the Canadian population will be visible minorities.

Visible minority groups will make up 63 percent of the population of Toronto and 59 percent of the population of Vancouver Statistics Canada The outcome of these trends is that Canada has become a much more racially and ethnically diverse country over the 20th and 21st centuries. It will continue to become more diverse in the future. In large part this has to do with immigration policy.

Canada is a settler society , a society historically based on colonization through foreign settlement and displacement of aboriginal inhabitants, so immigration is the major influence on population diversity. In the two decades following World War II, Canada followed an immigration policy that was explicitly race based. There will, I am sure, be general agreement with the view that the people of Canada do not wish, as a result of mass immigration, to make a fundamental alteration in the character of our population.

Large-scale immigration from the orient would change the fundamental composition of the Canadian population. Any considerable oriental immigration would, moreover, be certain to give rise to social and economic problems of a character that might lead to serious difficulties in the field of international relations. The government, therefore, has no thought of making any change in immigration regulations which would have consequences of the kind cited in Li pp. Today this would be a completely unacceptable statement from a Canadian politician.

Immigration is based on a non-racial point system. Canada defines itself as a multicultural nation that promotes and recognizes the diversity of its population. Nor does it mean that the problems of managing a diverse population have been resolved. In , the U. The term combines a diverse group of people into one category whether they have anything in common or not. What does it actually mean to be a member of a visible minority in Canada? What do these terms mean in practice? For example, in modern history, the elderly might be considered a minority group due to a diminished status resulting from popular prejudice and discrimination against them.

As a minority group, the elderly are also subject to economic, social, and workplace discrimination. Historically, the concept of race has changed across cultures and eras, eventually becoming less connected with ancestral and familial ties, and more concerned with superficial physical characteristics. In the past, theorists have posited categories of race based on various geographic regions, ethnicities, skin colours, and more. Their labels for racial groups have connoted regions Mongolia and the Caucus Mountains, for instance or denoted skin tones black, white, yellow, and red, for example. However, this typology of race developed during early racial science has fallen into disuse, and the social construction of race or racialization is a far more common way of understanding racial categories.

According to this school of thought, race is not biologically identifiable. Rather, certain groups become racialized through a social process that marks them for unequal treatment based on perceived physiological differences. When considering skin colour, for example, the social construction of race perspective recognizes that the relative darkness or fairness of skin is an evolutionary adaptation to the available sunlight in different regions of the world.

Contemporary conceptions of race, therefore, which tend to be based on socioeconomic assumptions, illuminate how far removed modern race understanding is from biological qualities. She is the daughter of a black man Quincy Jones but she does not play a black woman in her television or film roles. In some countries, such as Brazil, class is more important than skin colour in determining racial categorization.

The social construction of race is also reflected in the way that names for racial categories change with changing times. Culturally they remain distinct from immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa or the descendants of the slaves brought to mainland North America. Ethnicity is a term that describes shared culture—the practices, values, and beliefs of a group. This might include shared language, religion, and traditions, among other commonalities. And like race, individuals may be identified or self-identify with ethnicities in complex, even contradictory, ways.

These examples illustrate the complexity and overlap of these identifying terms. Ethnicity, like race, continues to be an identification method that individuals and institutions use today—whether through the census, affirmative action initiatives, non-discrimination laws, or simply in personal day-to-day relations. These definitions correlate to the concept that the dominant group is that which holds the most power in a given society, while subordinate groups are those who lack power compared to the dominant group.

Note that being a numerical minority is not a characteristic of being a minority group; sometimes larger groups can be considered minority groups due to their lack of power. It is the lack of power that is the predominant characteristic of a minority, or subordinate group. For example, consider apartheid in South Africa, in which a numerical majority the black inhabitants of the country were exploited and oppressed by the white minority. According to Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris , a minority group is distinguished by five characteristics: 1 unequal treatment and less power over their lives, 2 distinguishing physical or cultural traits like skin colour or language, 3 involuntary membership in the group, 4 awareness of subordination, and 5 high rate of in-group marriage.

Additional examples of minority groups might include the LGBTQ community, religious practitioners whose faith is not widely practised where they live, and people with disabilities. History has shown us many examples of the scapegoating of a subordinate group. In Canada, eastern European immigrants were branded Bolsheviks and interned during the economic slump following World War I. In the United States, many states have enacted laws to disenfranchise immigrants; these laws are popular because they let the dominant group scapegoat a subordinate group. Prior to the 20th century, racial intermarriage referred to as miscegenation was extremely rare, and in many places, illegal.

In the United States, 41 of the 50 states at one time or another enacted legislation to prevent racial intermarriage. In Canada, there were no formal anti-miscegenation laws, though strong informal norms ensured that racial intermixing was extremely limited in scope. Thompson makes the case, however, that the various versions of the Indian Act, originally enacted in , effectively worked on a racial level to restrict the marriage between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people.

A key part of the Act enumerated the various ways in which aboriginal people could lose their status and thus their claim to aboriginal land title and state provisions. Until its amendment in , the most egregious section of the Act Section In this way, the thorny question of having multiple racial identities could be avoided. Prior to the full establishment of British colonial rule in Canada, racial intermarriage was encouraged in some areas to support the fur trade. It is now common for the children of racially mixed parents to acknowledge and celebrate their various ethnic identities. According to census data, 3. This was up from 3. The terms stereotype, prejudice, discrimination, and racism are often used interchangeably in everyday conversation.

But when discussing these terms from a sociological perspective, it is important to define them: stereotypes are oversimplified ideas about groups of people, prejudice refers to thoughts and feelings about those groups, while discrimination refers to actions toward them. Racism is a type of prejudice that involves set beliefs about a specific racial group. As stated above, stereotypes are oversimplified ideas about groups of people. Stereotypes can be based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation—almost any characteristic.

Where do stereotypes come from? In fact new stereotypes are rarely created; rather, they are recycled from subordinate groups that have assimilated into society and are reused to describe newly subordinate groups. For example, many stereotypes that are currently used to characterize black people were used earlier in Canadian history to characterize Irish and eastern European immigrants. Prejudice refers to beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that someone holds about a group.

A prejudice is not based on experience; instead, it is a prejudgment, originating outside of actual experience. Racism is a type of prejudice that is used to justify the belief that one racial category is somehow superior or inferior to others. While prejudice refers to biased thinking , discrimination consists of actions against a group of people. Discrimination can be based on age, religion, health, and other indicators. Race-based discrimination and antidiscrimination laws strive to address this set of social problems. Discrimination based on race or ethnicity can take many forms, from unfair housing practices to biased hiring systems. Overt discrimination has long been part of Canadian history. Discrimination against Jews was typical until the s.

McGill University imposed quotas on the admission of Jewish students in , a practice which continued in its medical faculty until the s. Both Ontario and Nova Scotia had racially segregated schools. It is interesting to note that while Viola Desmond was prosecuted for sitting in a whites only section of the cinema in Glasgow, Nova Scotia, she was in fact of mixed-race descent as her mother was white Backhouse These practices are unacceptable in Canada today. However, discrimination cannot be erased from our culture just by enacting laws to abolish it.

The reasons for this are complex and relate to the educational, criminal, economic, and political systems that exist. For example, when a newspaper prints the race of individuals accused of a crime, it may enhance stereotypes of a certain minority. Another example of racist practices is racial steering , in which real estate agents direct prospective homeowners toward or away from certain neighbourhoods based on their race. Racist attitudes and beliefs are often more insidious and hard to pin down than specific racist practices.

Prejudice and discrimination can overlap and intersect in many ways. To illustrate, here are four examples of how prejudice and discrimination can occur. Unprejudiced nondiscriminators are open-minded, tolerant, and accepting individuals. Unprejudiced discriminators might be those who, unthinkingly, practise sexism in their workplace by not considering females for certain positions that have traditionally been held by men. Prejudiced discriminators include those who actively make disparaging remarks about others or who perpetuate hate crimes.

While most white people are willing to admit that non-white people live with a set of disadvantages due to the colour of their skin, very few white people are willing to acknowledge the benefits they receive simply by being white. White privilege refers to the fact that dominant groups often accept their experience as the normative and hence, superior experience. White people can be assured that, most of the time, they will be dealing with authority figures of their own race. How many other examples of white privilege can you think of? Discrimination also manifests in different ways. The illustrations above are examples of individual discrimination, but other types exist. Institutional racism refers to the way in which racial distinctions are used to organize the policy and practice of state, judicial, economic, and educational institutions.

As a result they systematically reproduce inequalities along racial lines. They define what people can and cannot do based on racial characteristics. It is not necessarily the intention of these institutions to reproduce inequality, nor of the individuals who work in the institutions. Rather inequality is the outcome of patterns of differential treatment based on racial or ethnic categorizations of people. Clear examples of institutional racism in Canada can be seen in the Indian Act and immigration policy, as we have already noted.

The effects of institutional racism can also be observed in the structures that reproduce income inequality for visible minorities and aboriginal Canadians. The median income of aboriginal people in Canada was 30 percent less than non-aboriginal people in Wilson and Macdonald Institutional racism is also deeply problematic for visible minorities in Canada. While labour participation rates in the economy are more or less equal for racialized and non-racialized individuals, racialized men are 24 percent more likely to be unemployed than non-racialized men. Racialized women are 48 percent more likely to be unemployed. Moreover, racialized Canadians earned only Those identifying as Chinese earned Block and Galabuzi argue that these inequalities in income are not simply the effect of the time it takes immigrants to integrate into the society and economy.

The income inequality between racialized and non-racialized individuals remains substantial even into the third generation of immigrants. The residential school system was set up in the 19th century to educate and assimilate aboriginal children into European culture. In the schools, they received substandard education and many were subject to neglect, disease, and abuse. Many children did not see their parents again, and thousands of children died at the schools. When they did return home they found it difficult to fit in. They had not learned the skills needed for life on reserves and had also been taught to be ashamed of their native heritage.

Because the education at the residential schools was inferior they also had difficulty fitting into non-aboriginal society. The residential school system was part of a system of institutional racism because it was established on the basis of a distinction between the educational needs of aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded, the residential school system constituted a systematic assault on aboriginal families, children, and culture in Canada. Some have likened the policy and its aftermath to a cultural genocide Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada While the last of the residential schools closed in , the problem of aboriginal education remains grave, with 40 percent of all aboriginal people aged 20 to 24 having no high school diploma 61 percent of on-reserve aboriginal people , compared to 13 percent of non-aboriginals Congress of Aboriginal Peoples Even with the public apology to residential school survivors and the inauguration of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in , the federal government, and the interests it represents, continue to refuse basic aboriginal claims to title, self-determination, and control over their lands and resources.

Issues of race and ethnicity can be observed through three major sociological perspectives: functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. As you read through these theories, ask yourself which one makes the most sense, and why. Is more than one theory needed to explain racism, prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination? In the view of functionalism, racial and ethnic inequalities must have served an important function in order to exist as long as they have. This concept, of course, is problematic. How can racism and discrimination contribute positively to society? Sociologists who adhere to the functionalist view argue that racism and discrimination do contribute positively, but only to the dominant group.

Historically, it has indeed served dominant groups well to discriminate against subordinate groups. Slavery, of course, was beneficial to slaveholders. Holding racist views can benefit those who want to deny rights and privileges to people they view as inferior to them, but over time, racism harms society. Outcomes of race-based disenfranchisement—such as poverty levels, crime rates, and discrepancies in employment and education opportunities—illustrate the long-term and clearly negative results of slavery and racism in Canadian society.

Apart from the issues of race, ethnicity, and social inequality, the close ties of ethnic and racial membership can be seen to serve some positive functions even if they lead to the formation of ethnic and racial enclaves or ghettos. The close ties promote group cohesion, which can have economic benefits especially for immigrants who can use community contacts to pursue employment.

They can also have political benefits in the form of political mobilization for recognition, services, or resources by different communities. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission for aboriginal residential school survivors or the policy of multiculturalism are examples. Finally, the close ties of racial or ethnic groups also provide cultural familiarity and emotional support for individuals who might otherwise feel alienated by or discriminated against by the dominant society.

Critical sociological theories are often applied to inequalities of gender, social class, education, race, and ethnicity. A critical sociology perspective of Canadian history would examine the numerous past and current struggles between the Anglo-Saxon ruling class and racial and ethnic minorities, noting specific conflicts that have arisen when the dominant group perceived a threat from the minority group. Modern Canada itself can in fact be described as a product of internal colonialism. While Canada was originally a colony itself, the product of external colonialism, first by the French and then the English, it also adopted colonial techniques internally as it became an independent nation state.

Internal colonialism refers to the process of uneven regional development by which a dominant group establishes its control over existing populations within a country. Typically it works by maintaining segregation among the colonized, which enables different geographical distributions of people, different wage levels, and different occupational concentrations to form based on race or ethnicity. For critical sociology, addressing the issues that arise when race and ethnicity become the basis of social inequality is a central focus of any emancipatory project.

They are often complex problems, however. Feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins developed intersection theory , which suggests we cannot separate the effects of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other attributes. When we examine race and how it can bring us both advantages and disadvantages, it is important to acknowledge that the way we experience race is shaped, for example, by our gender and class. Multiple layers of disadvantage intersect to create the way we experience race. For example, if we want to understand prejudice, we must understand that the prejudice focused on a white woman because of her gender is very different from the layered prejudice focused on a poor Asian woman, who is affected by stereotypes related to being poor, being a woman, and being part of a visible minority.

For symbolic interactionists, race and ethnicity provide strong symbols as sources of identity. In fact, some interactionists propose that the symbols of race, not race itself, are what lead to racism. Famed interactionist Herbert Blumer suggested that racial prejudice is formed through interactions between members of the dominant group: without these interactions, individuals in the dominant group would not hold racist views.

These interactions contribute to an abstract picture of the subordinate group that allows the dominant group to support its view of the subordinate group, thus maintaining the status quo. An example of this might be an individual whose beliefs about a particular group are based on images conveyed in popular media. These beliefs are unquestioned because the individual has never personally met a member of that group. A culture of prejudice refers to the idea that prejudice is embedded in our culture. We grow up surrounded by images of stereotypes and casual expressions of racism and prejudice.

Consider the casually racist imagery on grocery store shelves or the stereotypes that fill popular movies and advertisements. It is easy to see how someone living in Canada, who may know no Mexican Americans personally, might gain a stereotyped impression from such sources as Speedy Gonzalez or Taco Time fast-food restaurants, or Hollywood. Because we are all exposed to these images and thoughts, it is impossible to know to what extent they have influenced our thought processes.

Throughout Western history intergroup relations relationships between different groups of people have been subject to different strategies for the management of diversity. The problem of management arises when differences between different peoples are regarded as so insurmountable that it is believed they cannot easily coincide or cohabit with one another. How can the unity of the self-group or political community be attained in the face of the divisive presence of non-selves or others? The solutions proposed to intergroup relations have ranged along a spectrum between tolerance and intolerance. The most tolerant form of intergroup relations is multiculturalism, in which cultural distinctions are made between groups, but the groups are regarded to have equal standing in society.

At the other end of the continuum are assimilation, expulsion, and even genocide—stark examples of intolerant intergroup relations. Genocide , the deliberate annihilation of a targeted usually subordinate group, is the most toxic intergroup relationship. Historically, we can see that genocide has included both the intent to exterminate a group and the function of exterminating of a group, intentional or not. But how do we understand genocide that is not so overt and deliberate? During the European colonization of North America, some historians estimate that aboriginal populations dwindled from approximately 12 million people in the year to barely , by the year Lewy European settlers coerced aboriginal people off their own lands, often causing thousands of deaths in forced removals, such as occurred in the Cherokee or Potawatomi Trail of Tears in the United States.

Settlers also enslaved aboriginal people and forced them to give up their religious and cultural practices. Smallpox, diphtheria, and measles flourished among North American aboriginal people who had no exposure to the diseases and no ability to fight them. Quite simply, these diseases decimated them. How planned this genocide was remains a topic of contention. Importantly, genocide is not a just a historical concept, but one practised today. Recently, ethnic and geographic conflicts in the Darfur region of Sudan have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

As part of an ongoing land conflict, the Sudanese government and their state-sponsored Janjaweed militia have led a campaign of killing, forced displacement, and systematic rape of Darfuri people. A treaty was signed in Expulsion refers to a dominant group forcing a subordinate group to leave a certain area or country. As seen in the examples of the Beothuk and the Holocaust, expulsion can be a factor in genocide. However, it can also stand on its own as a destructive group interaction. Expulsion has often occurred historically with an ethnic or racial basis. The Great Expulsion of the French-speaking Acadians from Nova Scotia by the British beginning in is perhaps the most notorious case of the use of expulsion to manage the problem of diversity in Canada.

The British conquest of Acadia which included contemporary Nova Scotia and parts of New Brunswick, Quebec, and Maine in created the problem of what to do with the French colonists who had been living there for 80 years. In the end, approximately three-quarters of the Acadian population were rounded up by British soldiers and loaded onto boats without regard for keeping families together. Many of them ended up in Spanish Louisiana where they formed the basis of contemporary Cajun culture. Their property and possessions were sold to pay for their forced removal and internment. Over 22, Japanese Canadians 14, of whom were born in Canada were held in these camps between and , despite the fact that the RCMP and the Department of National Defence reported there was no evidence of collusion or espionage.

In fact, many Japanese Canadians demonstrated their loyalty to Canada by serving in the Canadian military during the war. This was the largest mass movement of people in Canadian history. Segregation refers to the physical separation of two groups, particularly in residence, but also in workplace and social functions. It is important to distinguish between de jure segregation segregation that is enforced by law and de facto segregation segregation that occurs without laws but because of other factors.

A stark example of de jure segregation is the apartheid movement of South Africa, which existed from to Under apartheid, black South Africans were stripped of their civil rights and forcibly relocated to areas that segregated them physically from their white compatriots. Only after decades of degradation, violent uprisings, and international advocacy was apartheid finally abolished.

De jure segregation occurred in the United States for many years after the Civil War. For the next five decades, blacks were subjected to legalized discrimination, forced to live, work, and go to school in separate—but unequal —facilities. Legislation in Ontario and Nova Scotia created racially segregated schools, while de facto segregation of blacks was practised in the workplace, restaurants, hotels, theatres, and swimming pools. Similarly, segregating laws were passed in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Ontario preventing Chinese- and Japanese-owned restaurants and laundries from hiring white women out of concern that the women would be corrupted Mosher Retrieved 24 February Duke University.

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