Chapter Main Points

  • Dominant–minority relations are shaped by the characteristics of society. In particular, the nature of the subsistence technology will affect group relations, culture, family structure, and virtually all aspects of social life. The single most important factor in the development of dominant–minority relations is the contact situation; it will have long-term consequences.
     
  • The Noel hypothesis states that ethnic or racial stratification will result when a contact situation is char­acterized by ethnocentrism, competition, and a differential in power. American colonists enslaved Africans instead of white indentured servants or American Indians because only the Africans fit all three conditions. American slavery was a paternalistic system.
     
  • The Blauner hypothesis states that minority groups created by colonization will experience greater, more long-lasting disadvantages than minority groups created by immigration.
     
  • Prejudice and racism are more the results of systems of racial and ethnic inequality than they are the causes. They serve to rationalize, “explain,” and stabilize these systems.
     
  • The colonists’ competition with American Indians centered on control of the land. American Indian tribes were conquered and pressed into a paternalistic relationship with white society. American Indians became a colonized minority group subjected to forced acculturation.
     
  • Mexican Americans were the third minority group created during the preindustrial era. Mexican Americans competed with white settlers over land and labor. Like Africans and American Indians, Mexican Americans were a colonized minority group subjected to forced acculturation.
     
  • Conquest and colonization affected men and women differently. Women’s roles changed, sometimes becoming less constrained by patriarchal traditions. These changes were always in the context of increas­ing powerlessness and poverty for the group as a whole. Minority women have been doubly oppressed by their gender and their minority group status in comparison to white women and minority men.