Chapter Main Points

  • Group relations change as the subsistence technology and the level of development of the larger society change. As nations industrialize and urbanize, dominant–minority relations change from paternalistic to rigid competitive forms.
     
  • In the South, slavery was replaced by de jure segregation, a system that combined racial separation with great inequality. The Jim Crow system was intended to control the labor of African Americans and eliminate their political power.
     
  • Black Southerners responded to segregation, in part, by moving to urban areas outside the South, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. The African American population enjoyed greater freedom and developed some political and economic resources away from the South, but a large concentration of low-income, relatively powerless African Americans developed in ghetto neighborhoods. The resources and relative freedom of blacks living outside the South became an important foundation for the various movements that dramatically changed American race relations, starting in the middle of the 20th century.
     
  • The African American community developed a separate institutional life centered on family, church, and community. An African American middle class emerged, as well as a protest movement. Combining work with family roles, African American women were employed mostly in agriculture and domestic service during the era of segregation and were one of the most exploited groups.
     
  • Urbanization, specialization, bureaucratization, the changing structure of the occupational sector, the growing importance of education, and other trends have changed the shape of race relations. The shifts in subsistence technology created more opportunity and freedom for all minority groups but also increased the intensity of struggle and conflict.
     
  • Paternalistic systems are associated with an agrarian subsistence technology and the desire to control a large, powerless labor force. Under industrialization, group relationships feature more competition for jobs and status, and lower levels of contact between groups. As a postindustrial society began to emerge, group relations in the United States shifted from rigid to fluid competitive. The postindustrial subsistence technology is associated with the highest levels of openness and opportunity for minorities, along with continuing power differentials between groups.
     
  • Modern institutional discrimination consists of subtle, indirect, difficult-to-document forms of dis­crimination that are built into society’s daily operation, including past-in-present discrimination and other policies, such as the use of racially biased school aptitude tests and drug laws, that are more punitive for minority groups. Affirmative action policies are intended, in part, to combat these forms of discrimination.