Ethnic Inequality

10 Key excerpts on "Ethnic Inequality"

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  Sociology in Practice for Health Care Professionals

  • Ron Iphofen, Fiona Poland(Authors)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Iphofen et al., Sociology in Practice for Health Care Professionals © Ron Iphofen and Fiona Poland 1998 Equal and Unequal Opportunities company, it is important that we can tell the difference between men and women. However, for most of human history females have been regarded as physically and intellectually inferior to males and have consequently not been treated equally. Another difference is ethnicity. We treat people differently according to their skin colour, clothing or behaviour. Ethnicity matters because we need to know the correct way to greet people, whether they intend to be friendly or hostile, or whether they are in any way similar to ourselves or might engage in behaviour which we may not like. There are many historical and cultural reasons for this behaviour, one having to do with the way in which both gender and ethnicity are linked to other scarce and valued resources in society. Most societies value people's achievements in terms of wealth, social prestige or specialist skills. As we discussed in Chapter 2, all societies distinguish individuals in terms of the power they possess. If everyone possessed an equal amount of these valued resources, social inequality would not exist. However, these resources are distributed unevenly. By highlighting differences between people which are seen as vital to a society, we begin to point to patterns of inequality within that society. Inequality becomes patterned or structured when individuals are classified together with others who match them on these key criteria. They then share similar characteristics with those others and, as a result, similar access to the unevenly distributed and valued resources. People and groups are then often evaluated according to how they have been classified with others, so one group is seen as better than or superior to another.

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  Social Inequality as a Global Challenge

  • Medani P. Bhandari, Shvindina Hanna(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • River Publishers

    (Publisher)

  1 Chapter 1 Social Inequality as a Global Challenge: Scenario, Impacts, and Consequences Medani P. Bhandari, PhD 1 1. Introduction “ Inequality—the state of not being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities—is a concept very much at the heart of social justice theories. However, it is prone to confusion in public debate as it tends to mean different things to different people. Some distinctions are com-mon though. Many authors distinguish “economic inequality”, mostly meaning “income inequality”, “monetary inequality” or, more broadly, inequality in “living conditions”. Others further distinguish a rights-based, legalistic approach to inequality—inequality of rights and asso-ciated obligations (e.g. when people are not equal before the law, or when people have unequal political power )” (United Nation 2018:1). Inequality is one of the major human to human divisive factor since the evolutionary history of human development and civilizations. Inequalities present in every sphere of social, political, and economical structure of com-munity, national and international level throughout social, economic, reli-gious, and political histories. The strata created by inequalities are grounded 1 Professor of Sustainability, Akamai University, Hilo, Hawaii, USA; Prof. of Innovation and Finance, Sumy State University, Ukraine. [email protected] 2 Social Inequality as a Global Challenge on innumerable factors—such as social, cultural, political, geographical, or due to environmental (anthropogenic or natural) catastrophe. Inequality can be seen as a communicable global disease. Inequalities can be understood in many forms, however, mostly known, and discussed forms are economic, social, political, cultural, and religious inequalities. As Stewart (2010) notes: “Economic inequalities include access to and ownership of financial, human, natural resource-based and social assets. They also include inequalities in income levels and employment opportunities.

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  Handbook of Social Problems

  A Comparative International Perspective

  • George Ritzer(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Racial and Ethnic Educational Inequality in Global Perspective · 267 Table 16.1 Elements to Include in a Model of Racial/Ethnic Inequality in Education I. Racial/ethnic intergroup relationships, historically and today These relationships might vary within a country from one area or city to another, as well as between countries. A. Identification of racial/ethnic groups 1. What are they? Who decides? 2. What is the relative size of various groups? 3. Possibilities for passing B. Degree of racial/ethnic stratification 1. Relative political power 2. Overlap with economic inequality 3. Extent of social integration a. Extent of geographical segregation b. Extent to which associations in civil society are racially/ethnically integrated c. Rates of intergroup marriage C. How dominant group(s) perceive and treat subordinate group(s) 1. Is a subordinate group perceived as culturally, politically, or religiously threatening? 2. Degree of stigmatization of subordinate groups D. Interaction between racial/Ethnic Inequality and gender inequalities E. Citizenship and immigrant status 1. How easily citizenship is granted 2. To what degree immigration is encouraged 3. Racial/ethnic characteristics of immigrants F. Responses of subordinated racial/ethnic groups to their position 1. Group identity 2. Separatist/oppositional orientation 3. Social movements 4. Regime change 5. Assimilationist orientation II. National characteristics and policies A. Demographic characteristics 1. Population size 2. Population density 3. Ethnic/racial diversity B. Economic features 1. Level of development 2. Percentage in agriculture 3. Percentage urbanized 4. Degree of economic inequality 5. Place in the world system 6. Type of political economy C. Political system 1. Nature of the state 2. State power D. State policies 1. Regarding racial/ethnic groups 2. Regarding immigration 3. Regarding citizenship E. Cultural policies and practices 1.

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  Grounds for Difference

  • Rogers Brubaker(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Dissimilation and social en-capsulation in the short term (in relation to a disfavored immediate urban milieu) may facilitate long-term assimilation and integration (in relation to a wider middle-class national environment). What can be said in summary about the distinctive ways in which ethnicity—as a category of difference—is implicated in the production and reproduction of inequality? The broad understanding of ethnicity adopted here, embracing race as well as ethnicity-like forms of religion, compli-cates matters. Still, this much can be said: Like gender, and unlike citizen-ship, ethnicity (in contemporary liberal contexts) is internally as well as externally defined, primarily informal and uncodified, and socially embed-ded; its workings are diffuse and distributed rather than concentrated at a few key thresholds. Yet there are key differences between ethnicity and gender. Social separation—whether externally driven (as in the residen-tial, educational, and network segregation of African Americans) or self- organized (as in ethnic niches and neighborhoods and ethnic or religious strategies of insulation)—is central to the inegalitarian workings of ethnic-ity, while social interdependence, as concretized in the household division of labor, is central to the inegalitarian workings of gender. Essentialist un-derstandings of self and other are central to both ethnicity and gender, but while gender essentialism features widely shared understandings of com-plementary difference that generate and legitimize gender-differentiated educational paths and occupational choices, ethnic essentialism can con-stitute ethnic, racial, or religious others as stigmatized, despised, or feared outsiders. General Processes I have argued in the preceding sections, contra Tilly, that citizenship, gen-der, and ethnicity are implicated in very different ways in the production and reproduction of inequality.

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  Health Inequality

  An Introduction to Concepts, Theories and Methods

  • Mel Bartley(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  In this chapter, I will use the term ‘racial or ethnic minority’ to refer to any group of people that is likely to be at risk of unfavourable treatment because of its national origins, shared social histories, or religion. In some contexts, the term ‘ethnic group’ does not seem suitable. On the other hand, the biological-determinist overtones of the term ‘race’ are both scientifically incorrect and unattractive. It must also be acknowledged that an ethnic or racial group does not by any means have to be of a numerical minority in order to experience forms of discrimination and inequity that might be expected to influence their health. The idea of the ‘ethnic majority’ is based more importantly on power than on numbers. None of these are fully satisfactory terms. Inequalities between members of different ethnic groups will be situated within a framework of socio-economic inequalities (Nazroo 2001). It will be argued that Ethnic Inequality in health can best be understood in terms of where members of different groups are situated within social structures, rather than cultural or biological differences between groups (Cooper 1986; Nazroo 1998). However, differences between people that are defined in terms of race or ethnicity, and that give rise to inequalities in life chances, appear in different places for different reasons in history, reasons which are linked to economic and political forces. For this reason, the experiences of these groups can seldom be entirely captured in terms of their income, social class or living conditions at a single point in time alone (Williams 1996; Krieger 1999, 2000; Kuzawa and Sweet 2009).

  The largest-scale historical phenomena giving rise to the existence of racial or ethnic minority groups in industrial nations at the present time have been slavery and colonialism. Slavery brought many thousands of people forcibly from Africa to the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slavery was enormously important in the development of the economic system we would now call industrial capitalism, the exploitation of African people allowing massive accumulations of wealth that later led to the rise of whole industries in the United Kingdom and the United States. British colonialism moved many groups of people round the world in various ways. Three of these streams of migration are most relevant to the present discussion. The first of these was the mass recruitment of Irish workers to build canals and railways in Great Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Abbotts et al. 1997). Then there was the post-war migration of people from the Caribbean Islands and South Asia (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), recruited to make up for severe shortages of workers in the United Kingdom. In the late 1960s and 1970s, there was also movement of people who had originally migrated from India to Kenya and Uganda when these were all part of the British Empire, who were then expelled from the African nations. In 1974, people migrated from Cyprus at the time of the Turkish invasion of the island. However, the Immigration Act of 1962 brought an end to large-scale migration from the ‘New Commonwealth’ nations to Britain (the ‘Old Commonwealth’ nations being Australia, Canada and New Zealand; Smaje 1995).

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  Angles Of Vision

  How To Understand Social Problems

  • Leonard Beeghley(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Table 4.1 displays unemployment rates in the United States and the United Kingdom by race and ethnicity for 1991. It reveals that whites in both nations are sign ificantly less likely to be out of work than members of racial and ethnic minorities. Other indicators of inequality, such as those used earlier in this section, show that racial and ethnic minorities in the UK suffer discrimination similar to that in the United States (Joshi, 1989).

  The data presented in this section lead to three conclusions. First, racial and Ethnic Inequality in the United States has declined in certain areas, such as civil rights, infant mortality, and occupational prestige. Things are better now than in the past, which means that members of minority groups have more opportunities to succeed. Second, much inequality still exists, as shown by enduring contrasts in infant mortality, residential segregation, occupational prestige, and income. Third, inequality among racial and ethnic groups in the United States resembles that in the UK. These conclusions suggest that even though inequality has declined, the divisions established when the new nation was formed continue today.

  Consequences of Racial and Ethnic Inequality

  One result of continuing inequality based on discrimination has been the creation of an underclass: people who are persistently poor, residentially homogeneous, and relatively isolated from the rest of the population. More graphically, the term connotes people confined to a ghetto (an area inhabited by one group). The obvious candidates in this country are whites living in certain areas of Appalachia, Native Americans living on reservations, and African Americans. I focus on the last, who compose about 60 percent of the underclass (Ruggles, 1990:112).

  As mentioned earlier, beginning around 1920 large numbers of African Americans migrated out of the rural South to northern cities. They sought freedom from serfdom; they found a trap in the form of housing segregation. In addition to the generally high level of housing segregation that all African Americans endure, sixteen large U.S. cities display hypersegregation: Only a few African Americans live in integrated areas; most reside in neighborhoods that are virtually all black. They are more isolated than any other minority group. The increasing rate of poverty that occurred during the 1980s (described in Chapter 5 ) has made this problem worse.5

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  Identity at Work

  • John Chandler(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Heath and Cheung (2006) demonstrate how, even when educational levels are controlled for, there is an ‘ethnic penalty’ for minority ethnic groups in Britain. Men from such groups are more likely to be unemployed, find themselves in lower-level jobs and be paid less. The situation for minority ethnic women is slightly different – their unemployment rates are also higher than white women but they earn as much or, in the case of some ethnic groups, more than white women.

  Such statistics suggest the presence of racial/Ethnic Inequality. They suggest a pattern of disadvantage and relative advantage, but they cannot reveal why and how this comes about. The following sections explore some of the possible roots of such inequality and what it means to live with it.

  Sources of inequality

  One obvious explanation for any observed ethnic or racial inequality is direct discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or race – or racism if this is seen as a ‘discourse and practice of inferiorizing ethnic groups’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: 12). Consider the following historical case as discussed by May and Cohen (1974). In 1919 there were disturbances with a ‘racial’ dimension in several British dock towns (Liverpool, Cardiff and others). These involved stabbings, fighting, robbery and looting. As the Times report of the time put it, describing one such incident: ‘White men appear[ed] determined to clear out the blacks who have been advised to stay indoors. This counsel many of them disregarded… Whenever a negro was seen he was chased and if caught severely beaten’ (1974: 114). At least one black man was killed in the disturbances – drowned in the dock as he tried to flee, to cries of ‘Let him drown!’ from the mob (114). This is an example of direct action by one racial (white) group against another group. How do you react to such an account? Do you consider it to be a remote historical event – perhaps an indicator of how things have moved on? Perhaps, perhaps not. Even if such extreme violence against those of another ‘race’ is now rare is it not possible that such racialized animosity still exists? That discrimination and racism still exist? McDermott (2006), a white researcher’s study of two communities in the US, vividly demonstrates anti-black prejudice, ‘a prejudice that often coexists with friendliness, civility and an avowed opposition to explicitly racial discrimination’ (2006: ix). It would be hard to claim that applies to the US but not to the UK, even if its origins or prevalence might vary between the two cases. In the UK direct discrimination

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  Race and Ethnicity in America

  • John Iceland(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Other work also has shown that people’s views about race are strongly associated with their support for welfare programs in particu-lar. For example, researcher Martin Gilens has shown that the desire to cut spending for food stamps is associated with the old stereotype that blacks lack a strong work ethic. 3 This chapter explores various theories on the root causes of racial and Ethnic Inequality in more detail, including human capital and social capi-tal theories; cultural theories that emphasize differences in norms, values, and behaviors across groups; assimilation theory, which is most impor-tant for immigrant groups; and theories that emphasize the role of racism and discrimination by both individuals and social institutions. Some of the theories are complementary or have overlapping elements. For exam-ple, theories that highlight the importance of culture often acknowledge that racism in broader society has helped shaped cultural responses (such as oppositional behaviors) among individuals. Likewise, differences in human capital can be affected by racism and discrimination that generate unequal educational opportunities across groups. More generally, these theories will help provide a context for understanding the patterns and trends in inequality discussed in subsequent chapters. As we shall see, some theories are better at explaining inequality than others, and the explanatory power of theories varies across the groups being considered. But even before we discuss these theories, it is important to take a step back and explore the meaning of the terms race and ethnicity to come to a better understanding of the groups we are comparing. what is race and ethnicity? When Tiger Woods burst onto the golfing scene, winning his first major championship, the Masters, at the age of twenty-one in 1997, he not only bested the competition but obliterated it with a record-breaking twelve-stroke victory.

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  Social Injustice and Inequality in the Developed World

  • Sudha Menon(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Society Publishing

    (Publisher)

  They incorporate the accompanying: Equality of rights, principally suggesting the disposal of all types of segregation and regard for Non-Economic Challenges to Social Equality and Justice 93 the central opportunities and common and political privileges considered (Figure 4.1). Figure 4.1. Equity versus equality. Sources: Image by Karegivers. This speaks to the most essential type of fairness. As expressed in article 1 of the Universal Declaration, “every single individual are brought into the world free and equivalent in poise and rights,” and article 2 is considerably increasingly explicit: “Everybody is qualified for all the rights and opportunities set out right now, qualification of any sort, for example, race, shading, sex, language, religion, political or another assessment, nationality, property, birth or another status (United Nations, 2006).” 4.5. MEASUREMENT OF INEQUALITY 4.5.1. Economic Inequality Most lists have decided to control for imbalance by financial methods, since it has received the biggest measure of consideration by researchers in the earlier decades: monetary disparity has been, as it were, linked with the Social Injustice and Inequality in the Developed World 94 term disparity. Monetary disparity is commonly estimated through pay, utilization with the distinction whether creators need to represent individual, family unit, pre-charge, and after-charge salary or if riches ought to likewise incorporate land and money related resources. Palma (2011) fights that an impressive contrast may exist among utilization and salary, since utilization shows a smaller circulation change than a pay Gini coefficient. One method for estimating of circulation is the percentile-proportion, for example, a marker which shows the proportion between the pay of the best 10% of salary workers and the most reduced 10% of pay workers.

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  Poverty

  • Ruth Lister(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  The chapter begins by placing poverty briefly but firmly in the context of socioeconomic inequality and social class. It then paints an impressionistic picture of the material impact of poverty in wealthy societies before turning to look at the ways in which the social divisions of gender, ‘race’ and disability shape and mediate how it is experienced. As Sandra Fredman points out, most ‘groups which suffer discrimination on status grounds are disproportionately represented among people living in poverty’ (2011: 567). In addition to structural inequalities, it considers how poverty is experienced at the two ends of the life-course – a notion that captures the complexity of individuals’ passage through a lifetime and is of particular relevance to a gendered understanding of poverty (Bennett and Daly, 2014; Bennett, 2015; Dermott and Pantazis, 2018) – childhood and old age. In practice, individual social divisions intersect and interact with one another and with phases of the life-course either to reinforce or to mitigate their individual impact (Bassel and Emejulu, 2018; Dermott and Main, 2018); but for ease of analysis they will be discussed separately here.

  The final dimension considered is spatial. This also raises an issue about the levels at which poverty is lived simultaneously: most basically, as an individual of a particular gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, religion, social class, age, sexual orientation and with or without disabilities; plus, in many cases, within a family or multiperson household, which can affect the degree and nature of poverty; and finally within the wider neighbourhood and the physical and social environment created by it (Burchardt et al., 2002). Moreover, power is exercised at these levels and beyond – from the micro-household to the macro-national/global – to exclude individuals and groups from access to adequate resources (Jordan, 1996).

  Inequality, social class and polarization

  John Scott has analysed this process of exclusion through the representation of deprivation and privilege as ‘polarised departures from the normal range of lifestyles that are enjoyed by the citizens of a society’ (1994: 173). Differential power and opportunity at each end of the hierarchy of inequality mean that ‘the deprived are excluded from public life; the privileged are able to exclude the public from their special advantages’ (1994: 151; see also Dorling 2015). Scott emphasizes that deprivation and privilege are distinct ‘conditions and social statuses’ and not simply rankings at the bottom and top of a statistical hierarchy (1994: 173). He concludes that the causes of poverty are inseparable from the causes of wealth (see also Ridge and Wright, 2008; Platt and Dean, 2016). This echoes R. H. Tawney’s famous dictum that ‘what thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice the problem of riches’ (1913). And when ‘the problem’ is thereby understood as inequality, it clarifies ‘the need for structural change’ (Titmuss, 1965, cited in Shildrick and Rucell, 2015: 34; see also O’Hara, 2020).

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