Why Can’t We Live Together?
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Group discussion of Friday’s movie
Turn in group discussion sheet but keep
movie worksheets until our final exam.
Social Stratification and
Families
Social Stratification: structured inequality in
the things that count in a given society.
May be based on, social class, race,
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, or
whatever the mind of man can conceive.
What are the things that count most in
contemporary American society?
How do we differentiate race, ethnicity,
class?
Conflict theory
Almost everything we value is or could be
in short supply, including land, wealth,
jobs, safe neighborhoods, cultural and
religious freedoms, use of our native
language, education….
 Therefore the normal state of society
involves conflict and competition over both
material and ideal interests

Racial stratification
Race=group or category viewed as
genetically different by those with power
 Remember Thomas theorem: “What
people define as real is real in its
consequences.” Just think of all the
consequences that have followed from
racial beliefs and practices in the U.S.

Colonial period in the U.S.
Why was racial classification so central to
the early history of white colonization in
the United States?
 What about the anti-miscegenation laws?
 Notice: this was not a prohibition of sex
but of marriage(e.g. Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings)

20th century

Immigration Act of 1921
Quotas based on numbers of each nationality
in the country in 1890…. Severe limits on
Jews and Catholics from Southern and
Eastern Europe
 Immigration Act of 1965…. Immigration
allowed based on needed job skills or on
relatives already here as citizens

Civil Rights Movements
Black civil rights movement
 Chicano movement
 American Indian movement
 Asian American movement
 The struggle and the glory of the American
dream of equal rights… take my course,
Soc 3330: “The American Civil Rights
Movement”
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“Matters of Race: the Divide”
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Siler City, North Carolina…
What if we worshipped
together?
Michael Emerson: “Race, Religion, and
the Color Line (Or Is That a Color Wall?”
 “Religious congregations are ten times
less diverse than the neighborhoods in
which they reside and 20 times less
diverse than our nation’s public schools.”
 Yet “religious faith motivated the fight
against slavery and played an essential
role in the Civil Rights movement.”

Biases in Social Comparison
1. Our brains exaggerate the similarities of
ingroup members and their differences
from outgroup members.
 2. Outgroup members are identified by
their perceived differences
 3. Even when performing exactly the same
actions, ingroup members are evaluated
more favorably.

Ingroup/outgroup comparisons
4. We attribute positive behavior of ingroup
members to internal traits, e.g, intelligence.
5. We have better memories for negative
behaviors by outgroups.
6. A negative member of an outgroup
member is more likely generalized to the
group.
7. One we have stereotypes, we tend to
recall confirming information.
Moral people and immoral
society
350,000 congregations in the United
States are busy creating group identity
and forming moral persons.
 Because of segregation, that means we
help people of our own race. Members of
the group with the most share it with their
own group, and vice versa.

Can we find a solution?

Emerson and colleagues spent a number
of years studying the 7% of congregations
that they defined as integrated. He himself
spent seven years in a congregation that
transformed itself from all white to one that
no longer had a majority group.
What did they find?
1. Friendships across race
 2. 80% of those in mixed congregations
said their racially diverse friendships came
because of their involvement in their
racially mixed congregation.
 3. Strong patterns of positive change in
racial attitudes.

Economic effects
A great deal happened in and through
these congregations to improve the
economic of those least advantaged.
 “People were hired into jobs that they
otherwise might never have known about
or had a chance at.”
 Your instructor: And these changes have
major implications for the quality of family
life!
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