Scotland Is A Multicultural Society Essay

Scotland – as all societies in the modern world – is a multi-ethnic society. Scotland’s Census (2011) showed that 96 per cent of the population in Scotland was represented by people whose ethnicity was reported as “White” (“White Scottish”, “White British”, “Irish”, “Polish” and “Other Whites”) and the remaining 4 per cent was represented by individuals from ethnic minority groups (“Asians”, “Africans”, “Caribbean”, “Mixed/multiple ethnicity” and “Other ethnicities”) , that is “groups that are singled out and treated unequally on the basis of their cultural or physical differences…” (Marger, 2008, p.291). Pilkington (2003) argued that as a result of Post War immigration (phenomenon that introduced multi-ethnicity into societies), immigrants, who are mostly from ethnic minority groups, are in a position of disadvantage in terms of employment and housing and they are often referred to as the cause of social problems; in other words, for decades, ethnic minority groups have been experiencing social and economic inequalities. Unfortunately, nowadays, this situation does not seem to change. …show more content…
As Ahmed and Craig (1993 and 1999, respectively) have argued, the state’s response to the needs of these groups is ambivalent: on one hand, the state has slightly improved the social integration of ethnic minorities through legislations that outlaw discrimination such as the 1965 and 1976 Race Relation Act and Race Relation (Amendment Act) 2000 but on the other hand, the state continues to exercise institutional racism, i.e. form of racism that has to do with the unintentional implementation of policies that put these minorities in an unfavourable position because of their cultural and ethnic differences (Sweeney et al., 2003) like restrictions on immigration that limit the access to state