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| Education - Anthropology 172AC | |||||||||||||||
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Michelle Martinez
Minorities in the American Class System
After WWII, minorities started moving into the city. Employment Assistant Act of 1956 realized there was poverty in Indian reservations and so made Native Americans move into the city. However, they did not do any better in the city so they became poor there as well. Puerto Ricans moved to the cities and mainland, Chicanos appeared in large numbers in cities, especially California, and Blacks moved out of South into the cities. Minorities ended up gathering in a poor environment. The process of ghettoization was termed for the movement of blacks in Northern cities. Inflation in suburban areas keep them from buying better houses. But then again, Black prefer to live close to home environment so they did not stray away too far from where they came from. Puerto Ricans also experienced ghettoization. There were too few urban Indians to see if they were affected as well. Ghettoization for Mexican Americans were thought of as different because many south western cities were founded by them and grew by expansion to outlying areas. Minorities did not seem to merge as in the melting pot myth, no matter how close they lived together, but interests and living were the same among them. The focus for them was on finding jobs in the city. The minorities had a trend of moving into places that the jobs for them were moving out of. Examples of these were workers moving into the North while the jobs were moving into the South and the blue-collar people moving into seemingly blue-collar cities and finding that the blue-collar jobs have moved into the white-collar suburbs. Besides this, many things were getting in the way of improvements in minority status. Minorities lag behind Anglos in education and will always be trying to catch up. There was also a segmented or "dual labor market" theory that said employers for "better" jobs get worker that are unionized while marginal job employers seek people who don't demand much, such as minorities. The core-sector employers discriminate by always asking for credentials. This is called the "generational hypothesis" where naïve and unskilled people such as minorities take jobs that tend to exploit their skills and make them work for less money than they deserve. Minorities are improving but they still lag behind. The gap in the income between them and Anglos are due to other reasons such as more people in households of minorities, Anglos having more education, working more, and starting in the work force early. If factors were equaled out, the gap would be small and only be due to discrimination. However, data manipulation could be exaggerated. The comparison of the worse and best achievers in each group yields the same results. There is very little minority representation among the elites. Blacks had achieved very little while other minorities hardly reached the level of Blacks. Even with Blacks in power, power is only temporary. Ultimately, whites are still in control. Then again, Wilson argues that discrimination is no longer due to race but more due to income. I think that Moore focused too much on the problem of discrimination among race in minorities. It would have been better if she expanded more on Wilson's argument. Reading her long and tedious essay made me feel pessimistic about the future of minorities. Maybe looking too much at the statistical data keeps minorities thinking that they do not have a choice in the future for they will always be discriminated against and no matter how well they achieve, the Anglos are always going to surpass them. I don't believe that I have learned much from this essay yet I believe this essay could have been written in a more positive light. Class Stratification, Racial Stratification, and Schooling By John U. Ogbu In this essay, Ogbu questions whether or not low school performance is due to children's lower class background. He finds that in his comparisons of black and white Americans, income does matter in helping children learn in school for among each group, middle-class students do better than lower-class students. However, in comparing the two groups together, he finds that white students do better than black students if they are on the same class level. Studies that compare the two groups do not satisfactorily answer why this gap exists between two groups. If we only paid more attention to racial stratification, we can see that these boundaries exist because of the black people's sense of identity. There still exists an opposition to "acting white" so this may account for a reason why this gap does exist. From this essay, I believe that the group mind is at work. People have a tendency to relate to others who are like them. The first attribute that people can compare is their physical nature. This is also what people judge others upon at first. Because of this, people relate to one another because they experience the same discrimination by the color of their skin. As a result of this association, they end up in cliques, comparing themselves to other groups and in the end stratifying the society. I learn much from Ogbu's essays for I believe he always has a different or perhaps even a better perspective of things. He questions ideas that other people take as a given and examines them closely to prove or disprove or to come up with a better solution to the problem. He doesn't focus so much on the ways people are discriminated against. Rather, he tries to find out how and why these boundaries exist and how we might be able to open people's minds to more positive ways of thinking so that the minorities would stop thinking that they are doomed just because of the way they are. Rather, they can change their outlook on life so that their positive attitudes could give them better chances in the future. |
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