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Handout in

Social Studies 119

(Trends and Issues in Social Studies)

Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical
appearance and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another.

Race: Refers to the categories into which society places individuals on the basis of physical
characteristics (such as skin color, hair type, facial form and eye shape). Though many believe that race is
determined by biology, it is now widely accepted that this classification system was in fact created for
social and political reasons. There are actually more genetic and biological differences within the racial
groups defined by society than between different groups.

Systemic Racism: A combination of systems, institutions and factors that advantage white people and
people of color and cause widespread harm and disadvantages in access and opportunity. One person or
even one group of people did not create systemic racism, rather it: (1) is grounded in the history of our
laws and institutions which were created on a foundation of white supremacy;* (2) exists in the
institutions and policies that advantage white people and disadvantage people of color; and (3) takes
places in interpersonal communication and behavior (e.g., slurs, bullying, offensive language) that
maintains and supports systemic inequities and systemic racism.

* In the above definition, the term “white supremacy” refers to the systematic marginalization or
oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges people who
identify as white. It does not refer to extremist ideologies which believe that white people are genetically
or culturally superior to non-whites and/or that white people should live in a whites-only society.

Prejudice and Discrimination

By Saul McLeod, published 2008

Prejudice is an unjustified or incorrect attitude (usually negative) towards an individual based solely on
the individual’s membership of a social group.
For example, a person may hold prejudiced views towards a certain race or gender etc. (e.g. sexist).

Discrimination is the behavior or actions, usually negative, towards an individual or group of people,
especially on the basis of sex/race/social class, etc.
Difference between Prejudice and Discrimination
A prejudiced person may not act on their attitude.  Therefore, someone can be prejudiced towards a
certain group but not discriminate against them.  Also, prejudice includes all three components of an
attitude (affective, behavioral and cognitive), whereas discrimination just involves behavior.
There are four main explanations of prejudice and discrimination:
1. Authoritarian Personality
2. Realistic Conflict Theory - Robbers Cave
3. Stereotyping
4. Social identity Theory
Conformity could also be used as an explanation of prejudice if you get stuck writing a psychology essay
(see below).

Examples of Discrimination
Racial Discrimination
Apartheid (literally "separateness") was a system of racial segregation that was enforced in South Africa
from 1948 to 1994.  Non-white people where prevented from voting and lived in separate communities.
World War II - In Germany and German-controlled lands, Jewish people had to wear yellow stars to
identify themselves as Jews. Later, the Jews were placed in concentration camps by the Nazis.s

Age Discrimination
This is a type of discrimination against a person or group on the grounds of age.

Gender Discrimination
In Western societies, while women are often discriminated against in the workplace, men are often
discriminated against in the home and family environments. 
For instance after a divorce women receive primary custody of the children far more often than men.
Women on average earn less pay than men for doing the same job.

Another Example

The US has been convulsed by nationwide protests over the death of an African-American man in
police custody.

George Floyd, 46, died after being arrested by police outside a shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Footage of the arrest on 25 May shows a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on Mr Floyd's
neck while he was pinned to the floor.

Mr Chauvin, 44, has since been charged with murder.

Transcripts of police bodycam footage show Mr Floyd said more than 20 times he could not breathe as he
was restrained by the officers.

The key events that led to Mr Floyd's death happened within just 30 minutes. Based on accounts from
witnesses, video footage and official statements, here's what we know so far.
Social stratification refers to differential access to resources, power, autonomy, and status across
social groups. Social stratification implies social inequality; if some groups have access to more
resources than others, the distribution of those resources is inherently unequal. Societies can be
stratified on any number of dimensions. In the United States, the most widely recognized stratification
systems are based on race, social class, and gender.

Systems of Stratification

When we look around the world and through history, we see different types of stratification systems.
These systems vary on their degree of vertical mobility, or the chances of rising up or falling down the
stratification ladder. In some so-called closed societies, an individual has virtually no chance of moving
up or down. Open societies have more vertical mobility, as some people, and perhaps many people, can
move up or even down. That said, a key question is how much vertical mobility really exists in these
societies. Let’s look at several systems of stratification, moving from the most closed to the most open.

Slavery

The most closed system is slavery, or the ownership of people, which has been quite common in human
history (Ennals, 2007). Slavery is thought to have begun 10,000 years ago, after agricultural societies
developed, as people in these societies made prisoners of war work on their farms. Many of the ancient
lands of the Middle East, including Babylonia, Egypt, and Persia, also owned slaves, as did ancient China
and India. Slavery especially flourished in ancient Greece and Rome, which used thousands of slaves for
their trade economies. Most slaves in ancient times were prisoners of war or debtors. As trade died down
during the Middle Ages, so did slavery.

But once Europeans began exploring the Western Hemisphere in the 1500s, slavery regained its
popularity. Portuguese and Spanish colonists who settled in Brazil and Caribbean islands made slaves of
thousands of Indians already living there. After most of them died from disease and abuse, the Portuguese
and Spaniards began bringing slaves from Africa. In the next century, the English, the French, and other
Europeans also began bringing African slaves into the Western Hemisphere, and by the 1800s they had
captured and shipped to the New World some 10–12 million Africans, almost 2 million of whom died
along the way (Thornton, 1998).

The United States, of course, is all too familiar with slavery, which remains perhaps the most deplorable
experience in American history and continues to have repercussions for African Americans and the rest of
American society. It increasingly divided the new nation after it won its independence from Britain and
helped lead to the Civil War eight decades later. The cruel treatment of slaves was captured in Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s classic but controversial book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which ignited passions on both sides
of the slavery debate.

Slavery still exists in parts of Africa, Asia, and South America, with some estimates putting the number
of slaves in the tens of millions. Today’s slaves include (a) men first taken as prisoners of war in ethnic
conflicts; (b) girls and women captured in wartime or kidnapped from their neighborhoods and used as
prostitutes or sex slaves; (c) children sold by their parents to become child laborers; and (d) workers
paying off debts who are abused and even tortured and too terrified to leave (Bales, 2007; Batstone,
2007).

Estate Systems
Estate systems are characterized by control of land and were common in Europe and Asia during the
Middle Ages and into the 1800s. In these systems, two major estates existed: the landed gentry or nobility
and the peasantry or serfs. The landed gentry owned huge expanses of land on which serfs toiled. The
serfs had more freedom than slaves had but typically lived in poverty and were subject to arbitrary control
by the nobility (Kerbo, 2009).
 Estate systems thrived in Europe until the French Revolution in 1789 violently overturned the existing
order and inspired people in other nations with its cries for freedom and equality. As time went on,
European estate systems slowly gave way to class systems of stratification (discussed a little later). After
the American colonies won their independence from Britain, the South had at least one characteristic of
an estate system, the control of large plots of land by a relatively few wealthy individuals and their
families, but it used slaves rather than serfs to work the land.

Much of Asia, especially China and Japan, also had estate systems. For centuries, China’s large
population lived as peasants in abject conditions and frequently engaged in peasant uprisings. These
escalated starting in the 1850s after the Chinese government raised taxes and charged peasants higher
rents for the land on which they worked. After many more decades of political and economic strife,
Communists took control of China in 1949 (DeFronzo, 2007).

Caste Systems

In a caste system, people are born into unequal groups based on their parents’ status and remain in these
groups for the rest of their lives. For many years, the best-known caste system was in India, where,
supported by Hindu beliefs emphasizing the acceptance of one’s fate in life, several major castes dictated
one’s life chances from the moment of birth, especially in rural areas (Kerbo, 2009). People born in the
lower castes lived in abject poverty throughout their lives. Another caste, the harijan, or untouchables,
was considered so low that technically it was not thought to be a caste at all. People in this caste were
called the untouchables because they were considered unclean and were prohibited from coming near to
people in the higher castes. Traditionally, caste membership in India almost totally determined an
individual’s life, including what job you had and whom you married; for example, it was almost
impossible to marry someone in another caste. After India won its independence from Britain in 1949, its
new constitution granted equal rights to the untouchables. Modern communication and migration into
cities further weakened the caste system, as members of different castes now had more contact with each
other. Still, caste prejudice remains a problem in India and illustrates the continuing influence of its
traditional system of social stratification.

A country that used to have a caste system is South Africa. In the days of apartheid, from 1950 to 1990, a
small group of white Afrikaners ruled the country. Black people constituted more than three-quarters of
the nation’s population and thus greatly outnumbered Afrikaners, but they had the worst jobs, could not
vote, and lived in poor, segregated neighborhoods. Afrikaners bolstered their rule with the aid of the
South African police, which used terror tactics to intimidate blacks (I. Berger, 2009).

Homework:

1. Explain the difference between open and closed societies.

2. Define the several systems of stratification.

Ethnocentrism is the term anthropologists use to describe the opinion that one’s own way of life is
natural or correct. Some would simply call it cultural ignorance. Ethnocentrism means that one may see
his/her own culture as the correct way of living. For those who have not experienced other cultures in
depth can be said to be ethnocentric if they feel that their lives are the most natural way of living. Some
cultures may be similar or overlap in ideas or concepts, however, some people are in a sense, shocked to
experience differences they may encounter with individuals culturally different than themselves. In
extreme cases, a group of individuals may see another cultures way of life and consider it wrong, because
of this, the group may try to convert the other group to their own ways of living. Fearful war
and genocide could be the devastating result if a group is unwilling to change their ways of living.

An example of ethnocentrism in culture is the Asian cultures across all the countries of Asia. Throughout
Asia, the way of eating is to use chopsticks with every meal. These people may find it unnecessary to find
that people in other societies, such as the American society, eat using forks, spoons, knives, etc. Since
these countries use chopsticks to eat every meal, they find it foolish for other cultures to not use utensils
similar to chopsticks; however, they do accept the fact that they use different utensils for eating. This
example is not something extreme that could lead to genocide or war, but it is a large enough gap between
these cultures for people to see their way of eating as the natural or best way to typically eat their food.

Another example of ethnocentrism is colonialism. Colonialism can be defined as cultural domination with
enforced social change. Colonialism refers to the social system in which the political conquests by one
society of another leads to “cultural domination with enforced social change”. A good example to look at
when examining colonialism is the British overtake of India. The British had little understanding of the
culture in India which created a lot of problems an unrest during their rule.

Functionalism, also called structural-functional theory, sees society as a structure with interrelated
parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of the individuals in that society. Functionalism
grew out of the writings of English philosopher and biologist, Hebert Spencer (1820–1903), who saw
similarities between society and the human body; he argued that just as the various organs of the body
work together to keep the body functioning, the various parts of society work together to keep society
functioning (Spencer 1898). The parts of society that Spencer referred to were the social institutions, or
patterns of beliefs and behaviors focused on meeting social needs, such as government, education, family,
healthcare, religion, and the economy.

Émile Durkheim, another early sociologist, applied Spencer’s theory to explain how societies change and
survive over time. Durkheim believed that society is a complex system of interrelated and interdependent
parts that work together to maintain stability (Durkheim 1893), and that society is held together by shared
values, languages, and symbols. He believed that to study society, a sociologist must look beyond
individuals to social facts such as laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashion, and rituals,
which all serve to govern social life. Alfred Radcliff-Brown (1881–1955) defined the function of any
recurrent activity as the part it played in social life as a whole, and therefore the contribution it makes to
social stability and continuity (Radcliff-Brown 1952). In a healthy society, all parts work together to
maintain stability, a state called dynamic equilibrium by later sociologists such as Parsons (1961).

Durkheim believed that individuals may make up society, but in order to study society, sociologists have
to look beyond individuals to social facts. Social facts are the laws, morals, values, religious beliefs,
customs, fashions, rituals, and all of the cultural rules that govern social life (Durkheim 1895). Each of
these social facts serves one or more functions within a society. For example, one function of a society’s
laws may be to protect society from violence, while another is to punish criminal behavior, while another
is to preserve public health.

Another noted structural functionalist, Robert Merton (1910–2003), pointed out that social processes
often have many functions. Manifest functions are the consequences of a social process that are sought
or anticipated, while latent functions are the unsought consequences of a social process. A manifest
function of college education, for example, includes gaining knowledge, preparing for a career, and
finding a good job that utilizes that education. Latent functions of your college years include meeting new
people, participating in extracurricular activities, or even finding a spouse or partner. Another latent
function of education is creating a hierarchy of employment based on the level of education attained.
Latent functions can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful. Social processes that have undesirable
consequences for the operation of society are called dysfunctions. In education, examples of dysfunction
include getting bad grades, truancy, dropping out, not graduating, and not finding suitable employment.

Francis Arthur P. Limbaga

Instructor