Racial And Ethnic Groups: A Sociological Analysis

Throughout this past week we have studied the theories of how different racial and ethnic groups assimilate to American culture and the hierarchal systems that suppress minorities. , Robert E. Park presented the race relations cycle. In this, he distinguished the four aspects of the development of group relations: competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. The main problem with this is that it oversimplifies the process of migrant groups adapting to the American lifestyle. Milton Gordon, a sociological analyst, presented additionl stages of assimilation starting with cultural and ending with civic. He believed in the melting pot view that over time people would lose their independent racial identities and would eventually mix together in one big American blend.

The Caste School, on the other hand, was an exception to the assimilation perspective as it encouraged white-on-black oppression in the south. These two groups were separated by both economic inequalities and social restrictions such as a prohibition on intermarriage. In some ways the caste system can be compared to a cast that one would put on an arm or leg that’s broken. This is because both restrict something from moving. A cast stops the arm from wiggling so the bone can heal while the Caste school attempted to stop African Americans from moving up in society. This also relates to the film Race: The Power of an Illusion (2003), as it portrayed the many different ways that the whites placed the African Americans and Native Americans at the bottom of the social ladder and ultimately kept them there until the civil rights movement which occurred much