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1. Cacas, Samuel R. (1994). Asians under attack. Human Rights, 21(4), 34–35. https://libsecure.camosun.bc.ca:2443/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9411160782&site=eds-live

2. Clarkin, Thomas. (2019). Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr. Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia. https://libsecure.camosun.bc.ca:2443/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=89876602&site=eds-live

3. Mohn, Elizabeth. (2019). Racism in the United States. Salem Press Encyclopedia. https://libsecure.camosun.bc.ca:2443/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=139001307&site=eds-live

4. TheCapitol. Net. (3 C.E., Winter 2012). The Hidden, Shameful History of Legalized US Anti-Chinese Racism. Business Wire (English). https://libsecure.camosun.bc.ca:2443/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bwh&AN=bizwire.c40457159&site=eds-live

5. Wong, Eugene F. (2019). Racial/ethnic relations: theoretical overview. Salem Press Encyclopedia. https://libsecure.camosun.bc.ca:2443/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=96397619&site=eds-live

Example of a Parenthetical In-text Citation for this Source

Type of Source

(ex. journal article, book, website)

1. (Cacas, 1994)

2. (Clarkin, 2019)

3. (Mohn, 2019)

4. (TheCapitol.Net, 2012)

5. (Wong, 2019)

1. Periodical

2. Book

3. Journal article

4. Newspaper

5. Journal article

Summarize this source in one to two sentences

1. In Samuel R. Cacas’s article Asians under attack, the article provides information on the nationwide audit released by the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium in April 1994 regarding hate-motivated anti-Asian violence in the U.S.

2. In Thomas Clarkin’s article Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr., the author shows the book Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s was written in 1963 and published in early 1964. King presents historical examples and ethical arguments to explain the Civil Rights movement and to exhort supporters to continue in their efforts at a crucial juncture in U.S. history.

3. In Elizabeth Mohn’s article Racism in the United States, she introduced the history and development of racial discrimination in the United States. He thought it remains a serious issue into the twenty-first century where it continues to define and divide many Americans.

4. The Hidden, Shameful History of Legalized US Anti-Chinese Racism mentions Chinese was forbidden from ever becoming citizens and even entering the country in the United States of America from 1882 through 1943.

5. In Eugene F. Wong’s article Racial/ethnic relations: theoretical overview, he raised theories of racial and ethnic relations fall, generally, into three large groups: assimilation theories, power-conflict theories, and pluralistic theories, and assimilation theories tend to see homogeneity as one outcome of the contradictions—particularly the social inequality—associated with racially and ethnically heterogeneous societies.

Explain why this is an authoritative source in one to two sentences

1. Samuel R. Cacas is a lawyer and writer in San Francisco, and he provided data and results of a consortium's investigation of many incidents.

2. Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Christian minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the Civil Rights Movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968.

3. Elizabeth Mohn is a well known journalist. She has a profound study of the development of racism in the United States.

4. TheCapitol.Net is a privately held, non-partisan publishing and training company based in Alexandria, VA. For over 30 years, TheCapitol.Net and its predecessor, Congressional Quarterly Executive Conferences, have been training professionals from government, military, business, and NGOs on the dynamics and operations of the legislative and executive branches and how to work with them.

5. Eugene Wong is a Chinese-American computer scientist and mathematician. Wong's career has spanned academia, university administration, government and the private sector.

Explain how this source will likely feature in your paper in one to two sentences

1. I can look for evidence at the legal level to prove my point.

2. Martin Luther King can be used as an introduction because he is a well-known anti-racist.

3. This article describes the development of racial discrimination in the United States. I expect to use it as background information in my essay.

4. I can cite reports in the news to make my thesis more accurate.

5. This article analyzes racial relations in great detail, which can make my essay more professional.

ASIANS UNDER ATTACK

Law enforcement reluctant to acknowledge hate crimes, these lawyers say

In the early morning hours of July 6, 1993, a Japanese-American woman called the Los Angeles Police Department to report that her car had been spray-painted with graffiti that read "Go Home Nip." Though no other car in the neighborhood was vandalized, and she is the only Asian-American on the block, police classified the case as simple vandalism that was not hate-motivated.

Complaints registered by civil rights attorneys of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium fell on deaf ears. "Most police departments don't consider such an incident hate-motivated unless it rises to the level of criminal harassment," says consortium attorney Katherine Imahara.

The consortium's efforts were not in vain, however. The incident, including the inadequate police response, was among 335 incidents listed in the first nationwide audit of hate-motivated anti-Asian violence released last April by the consortium.

"Anti-Asian violence is an almost daily occurrence," notes consortium board member and Asian law Caucus executive director Paul Igasaki.

Based in Washington, D.C., the consortium is the first national Asian-Pacific-American civil rights organization. It was founded last year by the caucus along with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York.

The release of the audit is the consortium's greatest accomplishment to date, according to the group s executive director, Phil Nash.

"The lack of comprehensive data on anti-Asian violence led us to conduct this audit," he explains. "Public institutions have been slow to identify anti-Asian violence as a major problem. Police and district attorneys need to impress on victims the need to identify a crime as hate-motivated."

When the consortium was completing its collection of 1993 figures, only limited data was available from 14 states: Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Maryland, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The majority of the audit's figures came from New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. "Over all, most states do not collect anti-Asian hate crime data with enough specificity to allow thoughtful analysis of trends or issues," according to consortium attorney Liz OuYang.

To remedy this dearth of data, the consortium recommends better federal, state, and municipal funding and training for data-gathering efforts. The group points to the specially trained unit of San Francisco's police department that deals with hate-motivated violence as a national model. Unlike the police department in Los Angeles, San Francisco's reporting policy requires that both criminal and noncriminal hate-motivated incidents be reported.

The audit also notes the involvement on the part of the SFPD's special unit in community-police partnership.efforts that include community policing and participation in a hate crime investigators' association comprised of community groups and law enforcement officials.

What is the consequence of not requiring police to note an incident as hate-motivated on a police report form? The result is often a vicious circle in which the failure to report both criminal and noncriminal hate-motivated activity reinforces distrust between the community residents, victims, and the police. "Although there may be a legal distinction between an incident of hate violence and a hate crime," according to consortium attorney Doreena Wong, "all hate violence incidents must be reported and investigated, regardless of whether a legally defined hate crime has been counted. The reason for this is that many incidents begin as simple name calling and escalate into further violence and more serious injury. Incidents of hate violence should be stopped before they become hate crimes."

Even in areas such as San Francisco, which have special programs to deal with anti-Asian bias, it is important that those who fall victim to violence be extremely vigilant in reporting attacks, particularly in the most common criminal and noncriminal incidents where hate may be only one of the many factors involved. Thus, the consortium suggests that both victim and advocate insist on the proper classification of the incident as a hate-motivated incident as well as appropriate civil rights prosecution.

"Constant communication should take place with the district attorney's office, the police, and the victim and advocate," adds Wong.

The consortium practiced its own advice last year when it insisted that the U.S. Justice Department investigate suspicious murders of Asian-Americans in New Orleans, Louisiana, and in Las Vegas, Nevada, after police in those areas refused to consider any civil rights violations as a part of their investigations.

Because funding for the community and government training and data gathering may not be available in the near future, the audit's recommendation for creating working partnerships among government and community groups may be the most immediately applicable solution.

One of the best partnership arrangements cited by the audit is the Community Justice Council formed in North Richmond, California, following reports of hate-motivated violence committed several years ago by community youth. Composed of ministers, residents, ex-gang members, youths, and seniors, the group has been able to help decrease the number of nonviolent interethnic problems, even though violence-related issues continue to demand attention.

At a time when racial tension is particularly high between groups such as Asian-American merchants and African-American consumers, a joint effort such as this may be the optimal approach. In specifically addressing this conflict, the audit strongly emphasizes that the respective communities must work in coalitions to address job opportunities, public safety, and other common concerns, calling such efforts "the first step toward resolving the problem-solving and resource-sharing needed to make inner cities safe and livable for all Americans."

Indeed, all quarters of the community speaking out against all forms of criminal and noncriminal hate-motivated violence may prove to be the best weapon in preventing and responding to incidents such as the Los Angeles case.

While many of the audit's recommendations may appear most appropriate for Asian-American communities and organizations, the same programs may work for other groups that face hate-motivated violence.

For more information about the audit, contact the Consortium at 1629 K Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., 20006; or call 202/296-2300; fax 202/296-2318.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Asians Under Attack

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By Samuel R. Cacas

Racism in the United States

Racism is the belief that some human beings are superior to others based on the color of their skin, language, or place of birth. The history of racism in the United States can be traced back even before the nation was founded when the first European settlers encountered the native people of the Americas. As was the case in most developed nations of the time, racist attitudes were based on a mistaken scientific belief that darker-skinned races were biologically inferior. Though this belief was eventually disproven, it contributed to centuries of racism and oppression in the United States, most notably in the practice of slavery and the legal segregation of African Americans in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While great strides toward equality were made in the mid-twentieth century, racism did not vanish. It remains a serious issue into the twenty-first century where it continues to define and divide many Americans.

Background

The fear and mistrust of outsiders has long played a part in human history, but the idea of racial superiority is a relatively new concept. Ancient cultures such as the Greeks and Romans believed that their climate or way of life made them superior to other cultures, but not the color of their skin. In fact, the Romans often welcomed people from other cultures into their society as long as they adopted the customs and traditions of the empire.

During the age of exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European sailors first navigated down the coast of Africa and encountered a diverse group of dark-skinned people who had a very different culture than their European counterparts. This time period was also notable for a change in societal thinking as the superstitions of the medieval period gave way to a new emphasis on scientific thought. In observing the natural world, scientists had begun to classify living creatures into subgroups, such as genus and species. With the limited knowledge of the era, these scientists used the false assumption that the darker-skinned peoples of Africa and Asia were somehow a different species of human. They reasoned that since white Europeans had what seemed to them to be a more highly developed culture and better technology, the darker-skinned people must be on a lesser branch of the human family tree. Religion also played a large part in the belief in European superiority. Most Europeans were Christians and believed that they were divinely favored by God, giving them a place in the hierarchy above non-Christians.

In the early nineteenth century, American scientist Samuel Morton performed a series of experiments during which he examined the capacity of skulls from various races. From these experiments, he concluded that humans could be divided into five races, with white people as the most intelligent and black people as the least. The conclusions made by Morton and other scientists may seem absurd to modern sensibilities but were accepted as scientific fact by many people and used to justify the overwhelmingly racist beliefs of the time.

By the mid-twentieth century, advancements in the science of genetics had definitely proven that the idea of one race being inferior to another was completely false. All humans are part of the same species and share more than 99 percent of their DNA, the genetic building block of life. Small variations in DNA may have led to cosmetic differences in people from different parts of the world, but overall, all humans are part of the same biological family.

Overview

When European explorers arrived on the shores of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they brought these false concepts of race with them. They viewed the Native Americans they encountered as uncivilized “savages” and began a centuries-long period of oppression that pushed many native people from their lands and resulted in the deaths of millions through war and disease. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a Native American population that once numbered in the millions was estimated to be fewer than 250,000.

While the practice of slavery was an ancient institution, the enslavement of Africans that began in the sixteenth century was particularly harsh. In many cultures where slavery was practiced, slaves were typically captured during warfare and could sometimes earn their freedom after a period of time. The African slaves brought to the Caribbean islands and southern United States were treated solely as property, a designation that was passed down to their descendants. The racial hierarchy created by slavery was absolute, with even free black people not allowed the same rights as whites. Black people—slave or free—were not counted as citizens of the United States. However, as the US Constitution was being hammered out in 1787, southern lawmakers wanted blacks to be counted as population to increase the political power of slave-holding states. In the end, the Founding Fathers reached a compromise—three-fifths of all blacks would be counted toward the population.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a growing abolitionist movement began to take hold in the United States, but the practice of slavery continued. Many of the country’s early leaders and presidents, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves themselves. Even many abolitionists who wanted to end slavery still held the belief that black people were inferior to whites. The idea of a racial hierarchy in the United States was so entrenched that people believed even one drop of “black blood” in a family lineage meant a person was black.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the fight over slavery led to the bloody four years of the Civil War. In the wake of the North’s victory in 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Three years later, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to black Americans and the Fifteenth Amendment gave them the right to vote in 1870. However, these glimmers of hope were dashed when white lawmakers across the South began instituting a series of oppressive legal measures called Jim Crow laws. These laws made segregation legal and created obstacles that often prevented blacks from voting. The Jim Crow laws stayed in effect in many places until the 1960s.

Technically, black Americans had their freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote, but the legal system across the South and in some areas of the North had been stacked against them. During their time as slaves, most blacks had been denied education, giving them very few options to earn a living as free individuals. Many became sharecroppers, which was basically a legal form of slavery. Sharecroppers were poor people who worked for wealthy landowners and paid the landowner a portion of the crops they harvested as income for the right to work the land. As a result, homeownership and generational wealth became rare among African Americans. African Americans still lag behind white Americans in both these categories in the twenty-first century.

While black Americans were struggling with the realities of freedom, they also increasingly became the targets of violence by some whites. Black families were attacked and some were forced from their land, black schools and churches were burned, and many African Americans were the victims of beatings and murders. Between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 African Americans were lynched in the United States, with the majority of the murders taking place in the South. The violence and terror was meant to reinforce the racial caste system that had been in place before the Civil War. Much of this violence was carried out by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a secret organization formed in 1865 to terrorize black Americans. The group became entrenched in the American South by 1870 and amassed a great deal of political power. The group maintained a foothold in the United States into the twentieth century and still exists in the twenty-first century, though in a significantly weakened capacity.

The years after the Civil War also saw an increase in the number of immigrants from China and other Asian countries. This influx also brought a rise in racist attitudes against these newcomers. Many Chinese immigrants who came to the United States worked as laborers building railroad lines, which were important for transportation and shipping across the country. Some immigrants came to the United States just to work and then return home. Others stayed in the country permanently. By the 1870s, an economic downturn made jobs harder to come by and led many white Americans to resent the Chinese immigrants. They believed that the immigrants were taking jobs that were meant for them. The anti-Chinese attitudes in the United States increased so dramatically that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This law banned Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. Schools in California, where many Chinese immigrants had settled, began segregating white students from Chinese and Japanese students. Chinese immigrants would not be allowed back into the United States until 1943, and even then few Chinese immigrants were permitted into the country. It would not be until the 1960s that the United States ended immigration laws that were biased toward a particular nation.

Native Americans, who had long been affected by the injustices of white society, faced additional hardships during the nineteenth century, as an expanding American population pushed farther and farther west. As the US government took more native land, the people were forced onto reservations. In an effort to assimilate native people into Western society, native children were taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools away from their communities. The government claimed this was done to “civilize” the children by teaching them to read and write English and to adapt to the dominant culture. However, these schools did more harm than good as the children were separated from their families, communities, and cultures.

By the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans had begun to make significant strides in the fight for equality. The 1954 US Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education made segregation illegal across the country. A growing civil rights movement also brought African Americans together to stand up for themselves and their communities. They organized protests against racism, violence, and inequality, calling on the nation’s leaders to change the laws and dismantle the racist power structure that held control over large sections of the United States. The movement achieved enormous success with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based or race, religion, sex, or national origin. A year later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that banned racial discrimination in voting.

These and other laws were a great benefit not only to African Americans, but also to members of other oppressed groups in the United States. However, while they changed the legal acceptance of racism, they had a limited effect on the prejudicial attitudes that still pervaded many parts of the United States. For example, despite the passage of anti-discrimination laws and numerous Supreme Court decisions, the city of Boston, Massachusetts, continued to fight for the desegregation of city schools until the 1980s.

African Americans in some major cities also felt that the police unfairly targeted them because of their race. This led to several incidents of violence, such as the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The riots broke out after four white officers with the Los Angeles Police Department were found not guilty in the 1991 beating of a black motorist. African Americans in the poorest sections of the city responded to the verdict with days of rioting that left 63 people dead, more than 2,300 injured, and caused more than $1 billion in damages. Similar incidents of violence and protests also occurred in the mid-2010s after several young black men were shot by police officers in separate incidents. Though not all the incidents were connected to racist attitudes, many African Americans felt that they represented a growing disconnect between black communities and law enforcement in the United States.

According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, about 71 percent of black Americans and 56 percent of white Americans believe that the United States has not made enough progress battling racial inequality in the nation. About 84 percent of blacks and 58 percent of whites believe that the legacy of slavery still has a negative impact on the lives of African Americans. More than half of black Americans said that their race has hurt them in their ability to get ahead in American society, and exactly 50 percent of African Americans believe that they will never achieve equal rights with whites.

Racism in the United States

Background

Overview

The Hidden, Shameful History of Legalized US Anti-Chinese Racism

A whole class of people, forbidden from ever becoming citizens … forbidden from even entering the country—their rights torn up and trampled on—left with nowhere to turn for political redress. This was the United States of America from 1882 through 1943—if you had the misfortune to be Chinese.

Now, for the first time, the complete legislative history of the 9 major pieces of Chinese exclusion legislation that dealt with this oppression has been compiled into a single comprehensive volume. Forbidden Citizens: Chinese Exclusion and the U.S. Congress: A Legislative History tells the story of this shameful history, using the very words spoken on the floor of the U.S. House and Senate chambers during these debates.

Compiled by Martin Gold, the book, to be published July 4, 2012, documents the legislative debates and actual texts of the 9 exclusion measures—giving modern readers a chance to watch this disturbing history come alive in the words of those who created it—quoting both supporters and opponents of the bills in full detail.

Forbidden Citizens should be of great interest to historians, Chinese-Americans, and those who believe in the struggle to achieve a just society.

“Will appeal not only to legal scholars and civil rights activists, but to any American curious about this grim chapter of our history.”—Christopher Corbett, author, The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West

"Thorough, thoughtful and highly relevant today. This work presents the best scholarship in a most accessible manner.”—Frank H. Wu, Chancellor & Dean, University of California Hastings College of the Law

Martin B. Gold, partner at Covington & Burling and former Floor Advisor and Counsel to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, is a prominent Washington attorney who was active in the successful effort to get an official expression of regret from the U.S. Senate for the anti-Chinese legislation enacted by prior Congresses. As a member of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, Gold spearheaded official recognition of Feng Shan Ho, a Chinese diplomat who saved thousands of Austrian Jews from the Holocaust.

For more about Forbidden Citizens, see http://ForbiddenCitizens.com

Journalists: to request interviews and/or review copies, contact Stuart Johnson: (202) 618-1648, [email protected]

ABOUT THE COMPANY:

TheCapitol.Net is a privately held, non-partisan publishing and training company based in Alexandria, VA. For over 30 years, TheCapitol.Net and its predecessor, Congressional Quarterly Executive Conferences, have been training professionals from government, military, business, and NGOs on the dynamics and operations of the legislative and executive branches and how to work with them.

Racial/ethnic relations: theoretical overview

Theories of racial and ethnic relations fall, generally, into three large groups: assimilation theories, power-conflict theories, and pluralistic theories. In the first school, assimilation, the supplanting of minority identity with that of the majority, is seen as both a natural and desired occurrence. Therefore, assimilation theories tend to see homogeneity as one outcome of the contradictions—particularly the social inequality—associated with racially and ethnically heterogeneous societies. Power-conflict theories, on the other hand, emphasize the conflicts among groups as they vie for power within the larger society.

Assimilation/Order Theories

The modern study of racial and ethnic relations can be traced to the early twentieth century with Robert Ezra Park’s theory of the race relations cycle, one of the earliest of the assimilationist/order theories of racial and ethnic relations. The race relations cycle theory posits that, through a series of stages, minority groups are assimilated into the majority society.

Park’s cycle is straightforward in its delineation of the stages of assimilation. The first stage represents contact between minority and majority groups. The particular ways in which groups make contact vary over time and place. Social push/pull factors such as unemployment, religious and political persecution, and war can necessitate large-scale migration of groups. So too, annexation, colonialism, slavery, extermination, and expulsion can initiate involuntary mass movements of peoples. However contact is initially effected, contact itself is followed by competition (up to and sometimes including violence) for scarce resources such as land, jobs, housing, services, and so on. Accommodation, a condition of relative tolerance in which the knowing of one’s place marks the status quo, is the next stage in the cycle/order. The intensity of group competition is dissipated in the form of getting along and the need to end group competition. At last, given the process of gradual acculturation (cultural and behavioral incorporation of the minorities), assimilation results in the merging of the minority group into the larger, dominant, or host group. What this process suggests is that the minority groups lose a significant degree of their cultural identity.

In actual heterogeneous societies, any number of factors might inhibit the linear progression of the cycle. Doubtless in some societies, assimilation might not occur at all. Nevertheless, the socially ordered character of the race relations cycle does imply the longitudinal assimilation of minorities.

Park’s stages were augmented by Milton Gordon’s perspective, presented in his influential work Assimilation in American Life (1964). Gordon begins at the assimilative stage and adds incremental definitions to the final process of assimilation itself. According to Gordon, assimilation moves through the following stages in the this order: first, cultural assimilation (acculturation), whereby cultural/behavioral differences become increasingly minimized; second, secondary structural assimilation, in which small group and informal organizations are integrated; third, primary structural assimilation, in which larger and more formal social organization are opened to the minority. Miscegenary barriers, if they exist at all, are set aside in the fourth stage, marital assimilation, within which racial and/or ethnic intermarriage takes place routinely over time. Of such profound influence are the previous assimilative increments on the psyche of the minority group that, during the fifth stage, identification assimilation, the minority group begins to perceive its fundamental identification as that of the majority group. Consequently, the reciprocal attitudes of minority and majority are close enough that hostility and other forms of socially negative residues are essentially destroyed during the sixth stage, attitude-receptional assimilation; in the seventh stage reciprocal behaviors are subsequently of a positive character, in keeping with attitudes, and hence mutual civility is established. Eighth and finally, the assimilative process is culminated in a kind of civic assimilation, or confluence of interest, membership, and harmony. Amalgamation is thus presumed to end racial and ethnic conflict.

Many sociologists of racial and ethnic relations have been influenced by Gordon’s assimilationist theories. However, other theorists recognized some of the innate problems with assuming that full participation in society is the inevitable outgrowth of assimilation. As early as 1915, philosopher and educator Horace Kallen coined the term cultural pluralism to acknowledge the rights of different ethnicities to maintain their cultural heritage; in 1963, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (the future US senator), in Beyond the Melting Pot, noted that, despite assimilation, European ethnic groups retained their identification with the home culture beyond the third immigrant generation. Most assimilationist theories had considered different groups of European, or white, peoples immigrating to North America. In 1964, however, Gunnar Myrdal, in An American Dilemma, pondered why these assimilation theories had not proved to hold for African Americans, concluding that the “lag in public morals” might make assimilation and enjoyment of full rights impracticable for that group. In his 1978 book Human Nature, Class, and Ethnicity, Gordon himself acknowledged that his theory does not adequately address issues of power and conflict.

Other theories have arisen to fill that gap, including the competition theory (for example, Susan Olzak’s The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict, 1992) and the “human ecology” school, which consider that part of the assimilation process concerned with the movement of groups and their competition for resources. Such theories paved the way for the more modern emphasis on power-conflict theories.

Power-Conflict Theories

If assimilation/order theories are designed to endorse the integrative and harmonious prognosis of intergroup relations, power/conflict theories address the issues of group dominance and inequality. Inherent in power-conflict models of race relations is the concept of one group’s having power over other groups’ identity and, in that sense, their racial or ethnic destiny along all measures of social existence.

Karl Marx can be credited with the popularization of conflict theory as part of the Marxist models of race relations. Despite Marx’s emphasis on social class as the most important unit of analysis in analyzing social inequality, with race and ethnicity as epiphenominal variables, the adaptation of Marxian class conflict theory to race and ethnic relations is commonplace. The blend of race and ethnicity as ultimately reducible to class oppression in the form of “neo-Marxist” analysis as emphasized by W. E. B. Du Bois (“Is Man Free?,” Scientific Monthly, May 1948) and Oliver C. Cox (Caste, Class, and Race, 1948).

Closely aligned to the neo-Marxist perspective is the internal colonial model (Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America, 1972), which determines that domestic minority groups and communities are exploited, oppressed, and otherwise treated differentially in ways very similar to the international, or external, colonial model associated with the heyday of European exploitation of large areas of the non-European world. Unlike most Marxist theories, however, internal colonialism sees racism and class (economic) oppression as two separate, if interrelated, dynamics. Perhaps the most outstanding example of internal colonialism is the system of slavery that arose in colonial America, particularly as Southern farmers came to exploit imported African Americans—a system that persisted into US nationhood and, effectively through Jim Crow laws, beyond emancipation following the Civil War.

Racial and Ethnic Pluralism

In opposition to both the cycle/order and the power-conflict theories of racial and ethnic relations stand theories of racial and ethnic pluralism, very often institutionally suggested by the term diversity. Particularly in the United States during the 1960s, for example, the belief that relative social equality was tantamount to the desire of minority groups to become assimilated into the Anglo-American “core culture” was questioned via the various movements to maintain unique racial and ethnic identities while still demanding equal and global opportunity. The American Indian Movement, Black Power, Brown Power, gay rights, various white ethnic, Asian American, and feminist dimensions all definitively stipulated that a person’s cultural roots should remain intact and sacrosanct. It can be suggested that the desire among racial and ethnic minorities (as well as other types of minorities) to become socially equal to members of the dominant group and to be recipients of equal opportunity is not synonymous with forfeiting an individual’s racial or ethnic identity and culture.

Pluralistic models include the idea of oppositional culture, or cultures of resistance, as partial antidotes to majority domination. Such cultures arise primarily among non-European groups who have not experienced the same degree of full social participation and civil rights afforded through assimilation to white subgroups. Ethnic groups who follow the oppositional culture model tend to be “bicultural,” asserting language and cultural traditions that stand in contrast to white Anglo-Protestant traditions: African American Kwanzaa, Latino or Asian American bilingualism, French Canadian bilingualism, and so on. Such cultural resistance or opposition has found ultimate expression in anticolonialism, such as Molefi Kete Asante’s Afrocentrism, black nationalist movements, pan-Asian movements, and Jewish Zionism.

The resistance to assimilation is both a blessing and a curse in heterogeneous societies. It is a blessing because it holds open the possibility that minority groups do not have to give up a sense of their respective cultural uniqueness and peoplehood in order to fit in and succeed in the mainstream society. It may, on the other hand, be a curse in that the very blessing itself constitutes the seeds for potential intolerance of other groups and hence a rebirth of social inequality and tragedy. The primary difference is that in time only the identities of the victims change, as do the identities of those who would make them victims of racial and ethnic persecution, for they themselves are likely to be descendants of minorities.