"One can catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than a gallon of vinegar". This phrase is commonly used in politics, business, and foreign relations as a means of explaining that forced coercion is not always the most effective means of accomplishing one's goals. However, this also relates to how a dominate ethnic group can continually maintain a place of authority over various other subordinate groups.
One of the general areas of racial ethnic relations deals with ethnic stratification, and how that arranges ethnic groups hierarchically and determines their access to the various forms of power. In general social stratification is defined as a system of structured inequality that distributes an unequal amount of a society's valued resources. Ethnic stratification is merely different in that it bases it hierarchy primarily on ethnicity. Overall, within every society there exists a hierarchy based on a variety of factors beyond ethnicity such as age, religion, gender, and class. These systems of inequality are used by the dominant group to ensure a continued occupation of the upper levels of the ethnic hierarchy.
One idea discussed in the chapter was how the dominate group approaches exerting their power over the subordinate groups. Two examples were used in the text, one being Whites in South Africa who used the system of apartheid to keep the significant proportion of non-whites in a state of subjugation. The other was White slave owners in the antebellum South in the US. In both of these cases the dominate groups used extreme force and regularly employed violence and fear to maintain the racial hierarchies they had put in place. Another similarity shared by these two examples is that neither exist any longer. While force has its advantages the most effective way to ensure the continuation of ethnic stratification is through shaping the culture, ideology, and presumptions of a nation so that the general populace will involuntarily see the established system of inequality as natural and fair. Unfortunately, this can be said of the US today as many see our nation as one a meritocracy, in which a person's lot in life is directly influenced by that person's abilities and motivation. The success of certain individuals from an ethnic group that largely occupy the lower end of society only further supports this assumption.
In the end while the US has made great strides in recent decades in making social mobility a greater possibility for individuals who in previous years would not have such opportunity there is more work yet to be done. I believe the first step in this process is to just simply have an open discussion on how race and ethnicity shape our lives even today. By merely admitting that there is still work to be done, rather than simply lure ourselves into a false reality we can begin to further improve these issues of ethnic stratification.
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