Terms Flashcards
(9 cards)
segmented assimilation
- idea that the path of assimilation varies by group
* it’s not always linear, some experience downward mobility
immigrant replenishment
- Waters and Jimenez
* continuous flow of immigrants
macro-micro link
• Macro - big picture; historical/international
• Micro - smaller scale; day to day interactions
ex: macro - US relation to Middle East
micro - Middle Easterners experience in the US
macro - Bracero Treaty, IRCA, DACA, etc.
micro - Mexican-American+undocumented immigrant experience
stereotype threat
• idea that stereotypes reinforce and affect people’s behavior and performance
• Given the prompt that reinforces these stereotypes, does that have an independent effect on performance?
- These experiments often involved Stanford undergraduates
- Controlled for actual SAT test scores
- Real GRE test items
- Given 2 kinds of randomly assigned prompts
• Diagnostic (actual measure of ability on that task)
• Non-diagnostic (not correlated with ability)
• Idea that stereotype threat is not activated under the
non-diagnostic condition
culture of poverty
• Oscar Lewis
• Traditionally (in literature, etc.), 2 opposing views of poverty
• Positive
- Poor are “blessed, virtuous, upright, serene, independent, honest, kind, and happy” (p. xliii in La Vida)
• Negative
- Poor are “evil, mean, violent, sordid, and criminal”
• He sees it as a subculture that develops over time
• Coping mechanism for dealing with poverty over many generations of living in poverty
• Develops under these conditions:
- Cash economy
- Persistently high rate of unemployment
- Low Wages
- Lack of social and economic institutions to help
organize social life
- Dominant class define success as accumulation of
wealth , upward mobility, etc. – sees poverty as a
result of personal shortcomings
• Features
- Chronic Underemployment
- Low rates of marriage
- Feelings of marginality, helplessness
- Strong present-time orientation
- Little ability to defer gratification
- High sense of fatalism
• Influenced the Moynihan Report (written by later U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan).
• Oscar Lewis felt that the culture of poverty develops as a coping mechanism for survival
• This theory is largely out of favor
- Sounds like one is “blaming the victim”
- This idea leads one to believe that the poor are living in poverty due to their own shortcomings
- However, it works to keep people in poverty
- But still embraced by some conservative social commentators.
• Think about how this is linked to Ogbu
voluntary vs involuntary minorities
• He uses the terms “voluntary minorities” and “immigrant minorities” interchangeably
• This chapter argues that there are 5 essential differences:
1. Frame of reference for comparing present
status and future possibilities.
- voluntary: reference group is country of origin; ex: Mexicans okay with working for minimum wage because its better than the wages back home
- involuntary: reference group is dominant group in society; ex: blacks comparing themselves to whites may feel discontent and think things will never get better
2. Folk theory for getting ahead, especially
through education
- voluntary: think hardships have to do with being foreign; believe/tell their children that doing good in school will shield them from experiencing what parents are experiencing
- involuntary: do not believe education will provide SES mobility; distrust dominant society and believe it will take more to overcome societal barriers agains them
3. A sense of collective identity
- voluntary: sense of collective identity comes from home country, includes language and shared culture
- involuntary: collective identity derived from group experience with racism
4. A cultural frame of reference for judging
appropriate behavior and affirming group
membership and solidarity
- voluntary: not in opposition to norms of achievement
- involuntary: In opposition to that of the dominant-group; norms emerge out of need to maintain their distinctness from the dominant (white society).
5. An assessment of the extent to which one may
trust members of the dominant group and the
institutions they control, such as the schools.
- voluntary: trust dominant institutions, believe educational opportunities greater here than country of origin, rationalize racist experiences with being foreign and having to tolerate it
- involuntary: dominant institutions not to be trusted
Accomodation
• Accommodation is a process of adjustment, that is, an organization of social relations and attitudes to present or to reduce conflict
Assimilation
• Process of interpenetration and fusion of cultures
contact-hypothesis
- Park
- “contact, competition, accommodation and eventual assimilation”
- social contact initiates interaction and the final product is assimilation
