Patterns of Minority Group Treatment
Population Transfer
Direct or Indirect
Direct - dominant makes life so miserable for minority that they decide to leave on their own - sometimes involves kicking them out of the country
Example - British expelled Acadians from Nova Scotia in the 1750s; Asian population kicked out of Uganda in 1972
Indirect - minorities are moved to a new location by force
Examples - Trail of Tears (Native Americans from 1831-1877), Japanese Internment Camps (1942-1945)
Dominant group separates from minority by sending them to a new area
Segregation
Examples
Segregation was legal in the U.S. until the 1960s
Minorities in the U.S. are still living in specific areas even though segregation ended over 50 years ago.
Middle Ages - Jews were forced to live in walled-off ghettos
Minorities must live in different areas and use different facilities than the dominant group
Physically separating a minority group from the dominant group
De facto segregation
Segregation is based on social norms
De jure segregation
Segregation is law
Assimilation
May also occur over time through intermarriage and daily interactions between people of different cultures
Can occur voluntarily or involuntarily
Involuntarily - Bulgaria forcibly assimilated the Turkish population by forbidding them from practicing their culture - resulted in thousands of deaths
Voluntarily - United States - "melting pot"
Blending people from different cultures into one single culture
Extermination
Ethnic cleansing - population transfer and extermination combined - removing a group through terrorism, mass murder, and expulsion
Example - Serbia in 1998 - wanted to get rid of 1.7 Albanians living in Kosovo, so 1.5 million Albanians were kicked out of their homes and 10,000 of them were killed - stopped by NATO
Genocide - destroying all or almost all of a national, religious, ethnic or racial group
Example - Rwanda in 1994 - tensions between the Tutsi and Hutu groups led to violence that resulted in the Hutus killing 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Thousands more died when 2 million others fled Rwanda
Example - Holocaust during WWII - Adolf Hitler's forces killed 6 million Jews and 5 million people from other groups deemed undesirable
Most extreme - eliminating a group
Subjugation
Example - Apartheid in South African
All groups were separated and a small group of white people were in power - ended in the 1990s
The most extreme form is slavery
Countries use force to control minority groups
Legal Protection
Countries use legal action to protect the rights of minorities
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965 in the U.S., Race Relations Act in the United Kingdom, and affirmative action programs in the United States are all examples
However, legal protection such as affirmative action are criticized for "reverse discrimination"
Cultural Pluralism
Allows each group in a country to keep cultural identiy
Example - Switzerland
Each of the groups work peacefully together and no group is dominant over the others
3 main languages for each major ethnic groups: French, German, Italian
