Majority Minority Relations

This book is designed to develop readers' understanding of the principles and processes that shape the patterns of relations between racial, ethnic, and other groups in society. A wide variety of information is provided about a number of such groups with an emphasis on the relationships between dominant (majority) and subordinate (minority) racial and ethnic groups in the United States and abroad. Coverage includes discussions on the latest African-American perspectives; the Census Bureau's decision to allow people to check more than one race in the 2000 census; the influence of the culture-of-poverty perspective on welfare reform legislation; interracial relationships; Neil Foley's award-winning book The White Scourge ; the debate over Hemstein and Murray's The Bell Curve ; how diversity programs helped an insurance company become more profitab the rising debate over race/ethnicity and langua race/ethnicity in our schools; race/ethnicity onli affirmative action; welfare reform; wage and labor laws, minorities, and the growing income gap; the war on drugs; and more. For those interest in majority-minority relations or race and ethnic relations.

This book examines contemporary relations between ethnic majority and ethnic minority women's movements in Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, and women's movements' participation in and influence on public policy that focuses on violence against women.

The question of how relations between marginalized groups are impacted by their common and sometimes competing search for equal rights has become acutely important. Demographic projections make it easy now to imagine a future majority population of color in the United States. Minority Relations sets forth some of the issues involved in the interplay among members of various racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Robert S. Chang initiated the Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation Project and invited historian Greg Robinson to collaborate. The two brought together scholars from different backgrounds and disciplines to engage a set of interrelated questions confronting groups generally considered minorities. This collection strives to stimulate further thinking and writing by social scientists, legal scholars, and policymakers on inter-minority connections. Particularly, scholars test the limits of intergroup cooperation and coalition building. For marginalized groups, coalition building seems to offer a pathway to addressing economic discrimination and reaching some measure of justice with regard to opportunities. The need for coalitions also acknowledges a democratic process in which racialized groups face significant difficulty gaining real political power, despite such legislation as the Voting Rights Act.

This book examines multiculturalism, interculturalism, and the melting pot metaphor and explores how they emerged, evolved, and were implemented throughout American history. Alfredo Montalvo-Barbot analyzes how these ideologies have been legitimized, institutionalized, and challenged by activists, politicians, and intellectuals and studies how modern interculturalism offers a new model for bridging the cultural divide and for overcoming the limitations of previous state-sponsored multicultural policies and programs.

We need scarcely note that the topic of this book is the stuff of headlines. Around the world, political, economic, educational, military, religious, and social relations of every variety have a racial or ethnic component. One cannot begin to understand the history or contemporary situation of the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Great Britain, Lebanon, Mexico, Canada-indeed, almost any land-without careful attention to the influence of cultural and racial divisions. Preparation of this new edition has brought a strong sense of deja vu, with regard both to the persistence of old patterns of discrimination, even if in new guises, and also to the persistence of limited and constraining explanations. We have also found, however, rich new empirical studies, new theoretical perspectives, and greatly expanded activity and analyses from members of minority groups. Although this edition is an extensive revision, with reference both to the data used and the theoretical approaches examined, we have not shifted from our basically analytical perspective. We strongly support efforts to reduce discrimination and prejudice; but these can be successful only if we try to understand where we are and what forces are creating the existing situation. We hope to reduce the tendency to use declarations and condem nations of other persons' actions as substitutes for an investigation of their causes and consequences.