Untitled Flashcards Set
STUDY GUIDE | EXAM 1
Race and Ethnicity in Fashion
AMM 1090
Spring 2025
MINORITY GROUPS AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE
Minority Group
A minority group is a subordinate group whose members have significantly less control or power over their lives than those of a dominant or majority group.
Types of Minority Groups
Racial groups
Gender groups
Ethnic groups
Religious groups
Biological Meaning
The idea of biological race is based on the mistaken notion of a genetically isolated human group. The term 'race' as applied to human beings lacks any scientific basis, but we have created different meanings based on physical appearance, geographic location, and culture.
Race is socially constructed
The consequences of misnotions of biological race are:
Pure race ideology
Stereotyping racialized groups based on intelligence tests
The Bell Curve study Eugenics
The Creation and Consequences of Subordinate-Group Status
A subordinate group can emerge through migration, annexation, and/or colonialism.
Migration
A transfer of population. Emigration (by emigrants) means leaving a country to settle in another country
Colonialism
Colonialism is the maintenance of political, social, economic, and cultural dominance over people by a foreign power for an extended period (Bell 1991).
The Spectrum Of Intergroup Status
Relationships between and among racial, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as other dominant-subordinate relationships, are not static. These relations change over time, sometimes in one's own lifetime.
The Consequences Of Subordinate-Group Status
A group with subordinate status faces several consequences such as:
Extermination
Expulsion
Secession
Segregation
Fusion
Extermination
Extermination is the most extreme approach to dealing with a subordinate group by eliminating them. Genocide is the deliberate, systematic killing of an entire people or nation.
Example: The Holocaust was the state-sponsored systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.
Expulsion
Dominant groups may choose to force a specific subordinate group to leave certain areas or even vacate a country
Example: In 2009, France expelled over 10,000 ethnic Roma (Gypsies), forcing them to return to their home countries of Bulgaria and Romania.
Secession
A group ceases to be a subordinate group when it secedes to form a new nation or moves to an already-established nation, where it becomes dominant.
Example: The Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Armenian peoples seceded to form independent states after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Segregation
Segregation is the physical separation of two groups in residence, workplace, and social functions. Generally, the dominant group imposes segregation on a subordinate group.
Example: Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial segregation imposed by the white minority in South Africa from 1948 to 1994.
Fusion
Fusion occurs when a minority and a majority group combine to form a new group. This combining can be expressed as A + B + C S D, where A, B, and C represent the groups present in a society, and D signifies the result, an ethnocultural–racial group that shares some of the characteristics of each initial group.
Example: Interracial marriages
Assimilation
Assimilation is the process by which a subordinate individual or group takes on the characteristics of the dominant group and is eventually accepted as part of that group. Assimilation is a majority ideology the minorities become indistinguishable from the dominant group
Example: Learning the language of the dominant group
Resistance And Change
Resistance
Resistance is subordinate groups' efforts to challenge the dominant group's ideology and power.
Resistance can also be efforts by ethnic groups to maintain their identity
Resistance and Social Movements
The civil rights movement
The feminist movement
LGBTQ+ rights efforts
Black Lives Matter
Intersectionality
Intersectionality refers to the overlapping and interdependent system of advantage and disadvantage that positions people in society based on race, class, gender, and other characteristics (Crenshaw 1989).
Prejudice & Discrimination
Prejudice
Prejudice is a negative attitude toward an entire group of people. Prejudice involves thoughts and beliefs- no actions. Prejudice includes:
Ethnic slurs
Speaking to or about members of a particular group in a condescending way
Microaggressions
Microaggressions are daily verbal indignities that members of a minority group experience. Microaggressions can be intentional or unintentional, and the perpetrator is often unaware of the insult.
Discrimination
Discrimination is the denial of opportunities and equal rights to individuals and groups as a result of prejudice or for other arbitrary reasons. Unlike prejudice, discrimination involves behavior that excludes group members from certain rights, opportunities, or privileges.
Privilege
Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels and gives advantages, favors, and benefits to members of dominant groups.
Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it.
Prejudice
Prejudice is a negative attitude toward an entire group of people. There are four prejudice theories
Scapegoating theory
Authoritarian personality theory
Exploitation theory
Normative approach
Scapegoating Theory
People use some expressions of prejudice to blame others and refuse to accept responsibility.
Scapegoating theory says that prejudiced people believe they are society’s victims.
Example: Adolf Hitler blamed Jews for all German social and economic ills in the 1930s.
Authoritarian Personality Theory
Prejudice may be influenced by one’s upbringing and the lessons learned early in life.
Example: The Authoritarian Personality study in which the authors claimed they had isolated the characteristics of the authoritarian personality.
Exploitation Theory
People use others unfairly for economic advantage.
Example: A minority member is hired at a lower wage level.
Normative Approach
The normative approach considers that prejudice is influenced by societal norms and situations that encourage or discourage the tolerance of minorities.
Example: A person from an intolerant household is more likely to be openly prejudiced.
Stereotypes
Stereotypes are unreliable generalizations about all group members and do not consider individual differences.
Example: Racial profiling, any police-initiated action based on race, ethnicity, or national origin rather than the person’s behavior.
Color-blind Racism
Color-blind racism refers to using race-neutral principles to defend the racially unequal status quo.
Example: Opposing affirmative actions in universities without acknowledging the disparities in access to quality education
THE SOCIAL DISTANCE SCALE AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Social Distance
Social distance is the tendency to approach or withdraw from a racial group. Bogardus (1968) created a scale to measure social distance empirically.
Bogardus Scale
The Bogardus scale asks people how willing they would be to interact with various racial and ethnic groups in specific social situations. The situations describe different degrees of social contact or social distance.
Example: people are asked whether they would be willing to work alongside, be a neighbor to, or be related by marriage to someone of a different group
Diversity Training to Reduce the Social Distance
Prejudice carries a cost for an organization's productivity. When people feel unsafe and excluded in their workplace, an organization will develop a reputation for being unfriendly to particular groups. Therefore, diversity training seeks to build skills in employees to interact with people from different backgrounds.
Discrimination
People use some expressions of prejudice to blame others and refuse to accept responsibility. To understand discrimination, it is important to distinguish between:
Relative deprivation
Absolute deprivation
Relative Deprivation
Relative deprivation is the conscious experience of a negative discrepancy between legitimate expectations and present actualities.
Example: after settling in the United States, immigrants often can experience better economic opportunities compared to their home countries. However, immigrants still perceive that they are deprived in relation to other groups.
Absolute Deprivation
Absolute deprivation implies a fixed standard based on a minimum subsistence level, often determined by the government.
Example: A Japanese American who is promoted to a management position may still be a victim of discrimination if he or she had been passed over for years because of corporate reluctance to place an Asian American in a highly visible position
Hate Crimes
Hate crimes occur when offenders are motivated by bias against race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability.—and provide evidence that hatred prompted them to commit the crime. Hate crimes are sometimes called bias crimes.
Example: Charleston church shooting
The Hate Crime Statistics Act
The Hate Crime Statistics Act created a national mandate to monitor hate crimes in each state.
Institutional Discrimination
Institutional discrimination is the denial of opportunities and equal rights to individuals and groups that results from the normal operations of a society.
Example: Barriers to accessing the right to vote
Affirmative Action
Affirmative action is the positive effort to recruit minority group members, including women, for jobs, promotions, and educational opportunities. The phrase affirmative action first appeared in an executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Example: University quotas for minority groups
Immigration Ethnicity, Whiteness, and Religion
Immigration
Coming into a new country as a permanent resident. In the United States,
the source regions of immigrants have changed. First, settlers came from
Europe, then Latin America, and now, increasingly, Asia. Europeans were the
dominant immigrant group through the 1950s. Most of today’s 41.7 million foreign-born people are from Latin America rather than Europe.
Patterns of Immigration
Immigration to the United States has three unmistakable patterns:
1. The number of immigrants has fluctuated dramatically over time, largely because of government policy changes
2. Settlement has not been uniform across the country but centered in certain regions and cities
3. The immigrants’ countries of origin have changed over time. First, we look at the historical picture of immigrant numbers
Major Immigration Policies
Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882
National origin system, 1921
Immigration and Nationality Act, 1965 (Hart-Cellar Act)
Immigration Reform and Control Act, 1986 (IRCA)
Naturalization
In naturalization, citizenship is conferred on a foreign-born person. Congress has outlined the process for achieving citizenship. Naturalization extends to foreigners the same benefits given to native-born U.S. citizens. However, naturalized citizens cannot serve as the U.S. president.
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION
Cultural appropriation refers to misusing or misrepresenting symbols and images from different cultures
Key terms
Inspiration: the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.
Copyright: the exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, sell, or distribute the matter and form of something (such as a literary, musical, or artistic work)
Imitation: something produced as a copy
Purpose of the study: Reflect on appropriation its impact on communities, identities, economies, and aesthetics.
Findings
The internet and social media have proliferated the consciousness and criticism of appropriation
Recently, celebrities have come out to apologize for cultural appropriation for wearing customs or starting a fashion line associated with a specific culture