In 1865, slavery was abolished in the United States. Due to the 15th Amendment in 1869, African Americans were no longer denied voting rights based off their skin color. In 1954, in the Brown v. Board of education case, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended all laws allowing segregation and discrimination in public locations based off skin color, race, religion, or national origin; including the Jim Crow Laws. The first African American, Barak Obama was inaugurated as president of the United States in 2009. With all these accomplishments and opportunities opened for African Americans, is there still white on black racial discrimination in the United States of America? The masses have moved
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Race is a human group having some common, observable, features that set it off from other human groups. Although it is simply a biological concept, people attach cultural meaning to the differences. With different races, there is intergroup conflict, which is a conflict between groups who are racially or culturally different. Social scientists used to think that intergroup conflict caused prejudice, but through research a theory came out to explain. The theory of the authoritarian personality explains the development of prejudice. Some people are over socialized so they accept only the norms …show more content…
Through this theory, prejudice was seen as their defense mechanism against having to question their own heritage. In order to deal with this issue, many thought people needed to be brought together to see and understand different people. This concept leads into Allport’s Theory of Contact. Gordon W. Allport, one of the world’s most distinguished sociological psychologists, in the 1940’s-1950’s, came up with a theory in order to understand and eliminate prejudice. His theory stated that prejudice will decrease if two groups with equal status have contact, but prejudice will increase or remain if the contact occurs under conditions of status inequality, in which one group is dominant and the other is subordinate. This theory explains the extreme prejudice and discrimination in the past because the majority of contact was in a situation such as a white merchant with an African American customer, or a white child and their African American slave. When the two groups differ in some cultural or physical characteristics, the differences may dominate their original perceptions, causing magnification on any flaws, attributing that flaw to their entire group. That form of contact reinforced the white
Race is a human group having some common, observable, features that set it off from other human groups. Although it is simply a biological concept, people attach cultural meaning to the differences. With different races, there is intergroup conflict, which is a conflict between groups who are racially or culturally different. Social scientists used to think that intergroup conflict caused prejudice, but through research a theory came out to explain. The theory of the authoritarian personality explains the development of prejudice. Some people are over socialized so they accept only the norms …show more content…
Through this theory, prejudice was seen as their defense mechanism against having to question their own heritage. In order to deal with this issue, many thought people needed to be brought together to see and understand different people. This concept leads into Allport’s Theory of Contact. Gordon W. Allport, one of the world’s most distinguished sociological psychologists, in the 1940’s-1950’s, came up with a theory in order to understand and eliminate prejudice. His theory stated that prejudice will decrease if two groups with equal status have contact, but prejudice will increase or remain if the contact occurs under conditions of status inequality, in which one group is dominant and the other is subordinate. This theory explains the extreme prejudice and discrimination in the past because the majority of contact was in a situation such as a white merchant with an African American customer, or a white child and their African American slave. When the two groups differ in some cultural or physical characteristics, the differences may dominate their original perceptions, causing magnification on any flaws, attributing that flaw to their entire group. That form of contact reinforced the white