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Chapter Overview
While society constructs social barriers around race and ethnicity, science has shown that we are more alike than we are different. Thus, race is a social construction. People create ethnic groups around shared living patterns and social interaction. Canada is proud to call itself multicultural and has instituted this value into concrete policies. In 1971, Canada passed the Multiculturalism Act. Multiculturalism exists in two forms: traditional multiculturalism (protecting the rights of minorities) and modern multiculturalism (survival of cultural groups). In Canada, the sociologist John Porter felt that despite claiming ethnic egalitarianism, Canada really is a vertical mosaic. English and French Canadians are at the top and ethnic minorities sit at the bottom. There are a few ways that immigrants can feel more at home in their new country. Through institutional completeness, ethnic communities can ensure that they have everything that they need to survive in their ethnic group. Diasporas, the dispersion of people away from their homeland, allow a global network of ethnic enclaves to form.
The different sociological analytical frameworks all take varying approaches to ethnicity and race. Structural functionalists believe that inequalities between ethnic groups create an important sense of competition for success in the marketplace. Conflict theorists link ethnic tensions to economic competition. Feminists explore the ways that different groups of females suffer more or less in society. Symbolic interactionists are interested in the social discourse involved in crafting ideas of race and ethnicity.
Many social problems exist around race and prejudice (an aversion to a person who belongs to a group, on the basis that they belong to that group). The UN classifies racial discrimination as the exclusion or preference of a person based on their race, color or descent. Racism takes on different forms: institutional racism exists within the social structure, individualism racism occurs when a person is assumed to act in a certain way because of the race or ethnicity they belong to, and internalized racism happens when someone comes to believe the stereotypes people have towards them. The result is greater unemployment, poverty, and health problems for those belonging to racial minorities.