vocabulary | meaning |
Affirmative action | Positive efforts to recruit minority group members or women for jobs, promotions, and educational opportunities |
Amalgamation | The process by which a majority group and minority group combine through intermarriage to form a new group. |
Anti-Semitism | Anti-Jewish prejudice |
Apartheid | The policy of the South African government designed to maintain the separation of Blacks and other non-Whites from the dominant Whites |
Assimilation | The process by which a person forsakes his or her own cultural tradition to become part of a different culture. |
Black Power | A political philosophy promoted by many younger blacks in the 1960’s that supported the creation of Black-controlled political and economic institutions. |
Contact hypothesis | An interactionist perspective which states that interracial contact between people of equal status in cooperative circumstances will reduce prejudice. |
Discrimination | The process of denying opportunities and equal rights to individuals and groups because of prejudice or other arbitrary reasons |
Ethnic group | : A group that is set apart from other because of its national origin or distinctive cultural patterns. |
Ethnocentrism | The tendency to assume that one’s own culture and way of life represent the norm or are superior to all others |
Exploitation theory | A Marxist theory that views racial subordination in the United States as a manifestation of the class system inherent in capitalism |
Genocide | The deliberate, systematic killing of an entire people or nation. |
Glass ceiling | An invisible barrier that blocks the promotion of a qualified individual in a work environment because of the individual’s gender, race, or ethnicity. |
Institutional discrimination | The denial of opportunites and equal rights to individuals and groups that results from the normal operations of a society. |
Issei | Japanese immigrants to the United States |
Minority group | A subordinate group whose members have significantly less control or power over their own lives than the members of a dominant or majority group have over theirs. |
Model or ideal minority | A group that, despite past prejudice and discrimination, succeeds economically, socially, and educationally without resorting to political or violent confrontations with Whites. |
Nisei | Japanese born in the United States who were descendants of the Issei. |
Pluralism | Mutual respect among the various groups in a society for one another’s cultures, which allows minorities to express their own cultures without experiencing prejudice. |
Prejudice | A negative attitude toward an entire category of people, such as a racial or ethnic minority. |
Racial Group | A group that is set apart from others because of obvious physical differences. |
Racism | The belief that one race is supreme and all others are innately inferior. |
Segregation | The act of physically separating two groups; often imposed on a minority group by a dominant group. |
Stereotypes | Unreliable generalizations about all members of a group that do not recognize individual differences within the group. |
Symbolic ethnicity | An ethnic identity that emphasizes such concerns as ethic food and political issues rather than deeper ties to one’s ethic heritage |