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Dominant-Minority Relations

Good Essays

Corine Lightner
POL 140
Essay #1 (Ch. 3 & 4)
Dominant-Minority Relations In the early years of the United States, dominant-minority relations were shaped by the agrarian technology and the economic need to control land and labor. The agrarian era ended in the 1800s, and the U.S. has gone through two major transformations in subsistence technology since, each of which has transformed dominant-minority relations and required the creation of new structures and processes to maintain racial stratification and white privilege (Healey, p. 131). The early 1800s to the mid-1900s was the industrial revolution, where machines replaced animal and human labor. Today’s society is known as the postindustrial or deindustrialized society which …show more content…

This was followed by a more fluid competition system of the post-industrial society, where more opportunity exists still, but intergroup conflict results from the greater competition between groups and racial stratification and inequality persist in the form of modern institutional discrimination.
The structure of gender relations throughout these transitions, help us understand the sense of minority group powerlessness. Slaves in the American system were brutally repressed and exploited, but females faced greater subordination. For black female slaves, inequalities tripled and they became the most vulnerable group to sexual victimization. For example, the men of the dominant group saw their female slaves as a resource for more profit. They were often raped and used to breed more slaves for their owners to sell. Under the Jim Crow system, African American women were “free” but were relegated to domestic service or agricultural positions, and denied access to the education needed for social mobility. In the postindustrial era, structural inequality is less overt, but exclusions for opportunity abound in housing, and career mobility.
The repetition of the past is astounding. In the era of globalization, the subsistence economy is global, and new groups are increasingly integrated into this system. While slavery seems to be of past eras, its modern form has found its place in the current global economy. Most Americans today seem to look at slavery as a

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