Social mobility and race
Social mobility refers to the ability of individuals or groups to move between different social strata, a process that can be significantly influenced by racial and ethnic factors. In societies with stratified systems of inequality, the extent of upward mobility serves as a key indicator of equal opportunity. Barriers to social mobility are multifaceted, arising from both economic disparities and sociocultural dynamics such as race, religion, and national origin. For minority groups, these barriers are often compounded by historical discrimination and ongoing marginalization, which can lead to psychological effects like learned helplessness and reduced aspirations.
The context of social mobility varies across different societies; for example, urban-industrial nations tend to facilitate greater mobility compared to agrarian societies. Political systems also play a role, with democratic societies generally promoting more equitable opportunities than authoritarian regimes. Patterns of mobility can differ widely, as seen in case studies from countries like Brazil and South Africa, where racial discrimination has historically constricted the upward movement of certain groups. In the United States, while some immigrant groups have experienced significant upward mobility, African Americans and some Hispanic communities face persistent challenges linked to systemic racism. Overall, the interplay of race and class remains a critical lens through which to understand social mobility and the broader struggle against inequality.
Social mobility and race
SIGNIFICANCE: One measure of equal opportunity within a society is the ability of its members to move from one social stratum to the next higher, a task complicated by the addition of racial or ethnic factors.
Social mobility is the movement of individuals and groups from one stratum to another in society. The processes of social mobility are rendered much more complex if those individuals are members of minority groups. If class is defined as a stratified system of structured inequality, where those in different strata have unequal access to wealth, power, and social prestige, then the degree of upward social mobility becomes the critical measure of a society’s approaching (or not approaching) the goal of equality of opportunity. It follows that barriers to upward mobility will depend not only on economic forces (class) but also on such sociocultural forces as color, religion, national origin, language, and regional subculture (race/ethnicity). Sociologists debate endlessly about how the two kinds of inequality bear mutually on each other.
Conditions Affecting Social Mobility
In economic terms, technologically more advanced urban-industrial and postindustrial societies provide a better platform for the reduction of inequality and for increasing mobility than preindustrial, agrarian-commercial societies, including developing nations. Politically, relatively democratic societies characterized by free elections and majority rule with minority rights are more likely to reduce inequality and stimulate the mobility of both class and race than authoritarian or totalitarian governmental systems. In any given society, it is expected that racial and ethnic mobility will occur within a class structure on a continuum from relatively open to relatively closed. However, the power of groups to dominate other groups on the basis of color or culture is so great that the overlay of race on class can be the decisive and most important problem confronting the entire society.
Psychological explanations for barriers to social mobility explain the limiting beliefs that manifest in individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds as a result of generational and experienced discrimination and marginalization. For example, learned helplessness occurs when individuals feel they have no power over their life circumstances to the extent that even their most valiant efforts will not result in upward mobility. Negative self-perception and low self-efficacy also limit individuals from marginalized groups. Experiencing continual negative social messages and limited opportunities compared to other groups causes individuals to lose faith in their own abilities. This may lead to lower educational or career aspirations and self-defeating behaviors.
Patterns of Mobility
An examination of a series of strategic case studies reveals the consistencies and contradictions in mobility patterns worldwide. In rapidly developing Brazil, for example, contrary to the myth of racial egalitarianism, there is considerable racial discrimination, but fundamentally, the striking pace of social mobility is driven by the economics of class. In South Africa, under racial apartheid, the entire economic-political system was for White people only. This produced a “separate and unequal” racial caste structure (caste model) with incredibly restricted class mobility for Black South Africans and only slightly less restricted mobility for mixed “coloreds.” With apartheid demolished, a Black-majority government came to power in the late 1990s. However, because of decades of oppression and segregation, Black mobility remained extremely limited through the first several decades of the twenty-first century. The White-Black “racial gap” in household income, education, and housing remained prevalent through the 2020s.
Much depends on societal receptivity to sociocultural change—even in the short term—such that the dominant group in power is compelled to yield to pressure to develop a more open society in terms of both class and race. Historically, Great Britain has been a virtually homogeneous urban-industrial democratic society with quite tight class stratification; class was all, mobility limited. In the years after World War II, Britain became more heterogeneous in race and ethnicity as a result of the immigration of thousands of Indians, Pakistanis, and Africans with Caribbean heritage. Their rate of mobility was impeded by considerable racial discrimination, and subsequently, immigration was curtailed. However, Asian communities were able to solidify their position in the lower-middle and middle class, with African individuals with Caribbean heritage following the same route, though more slowly, from a largely working-class base.
The United States
In the United States, surveying the great historical immigration saga of White European immigrants—from the arrival of the Irish Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century to the entry of millions of newcomers from eastern and southern Europe, including large numbers of Jews—successive generations of immigrants have, on the whole, achieved a significant degree of upward social mobility. For the newer immigrants, primarily from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, the variation by group in rate of mobility is greater, in particular where the racial overlay on immigrant status is at play.
All these groups, except Japanese Americans and Jewish Americans, remained heavily working class in the late twentith and early twenty-first centuries, and many still had higher than average proportions living below the poverty line. Generally, however, they appeared to be making their way into the middle class, though they will be underrepresented there for some time. The mobility is taking place in a climate more receptive to pluralism and retention of ethnic subcultures in a multicultural society than it was during the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.
People of Color
However, for African Americans and some Hispanic groups, especially Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans (who are not immigrants but migrants from the Commonwealth), and above all, for Indigenous Americans, the White European ethnic-generational-mobility pattern does not hold.
In a sense, the enlarged and vigorous Black middle class represents a successful racial version of the Jews’ ethnic mobility transition, but this view neglects, or at least minimizes, what in the African American case constitutes the force of the color overlay on class. Social mobility for Black Americans has increased, with consequent narrowing of the racial gap in family income, education, and housing. However, the rate of change has slowed and, at times, has become static. In the central cities, among the near impoverished and the low-income, termed the “Black underclass” by sociologist William Julius Wilson, the path of social mobility is blocked. Theirs is a static condition rooted in historic and enduring racism but increasingly the consequence of structural changes in an industrial and postindustrial system that drastically constricts job opportunities for Black people in a changing market economy.
Within any single society, racial and ethnic discrimination constitutes a basic blockage to social mobility. Minorities are singled out for differential and unequal treatment, their status based on a categorical definition of “inferiority” or “the wrong color.” If they are already overrepresented in the lower reaches of the class structure, color reinforces class. In the Deep South in the United States, for example, “poor Whites” were higher than “poor Blacks” in the status hierarchy. Even when minority status is built into a more solidly anchored lower-middle-class and middle-class position, the buffer of class protection can erode under pressure of bigotry, emanating from both above and below, suddenly increasing in intensity in times of economic and political crisis. The ethnic Chinese in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia are made more vulnerable during times of crisis. Similarly, when economic stress occurs, the Korean American merchant communities in Los Angeles and New York become the targets of racism by members of the Black working-class neighborhood.
Beyond psychological explanations for these barriers to social mobility—such as stereotyping, prejudice, racial/ethnic hatred—the essential theoretical key to the nearly universal racial/ethnic constrictions on social mobility lies in the imbalance of power that enables the dominant group to define, subordinate, and exploit the racial/ethnic minorities at the institutional level. Researcher Norbert Elias framed this concept of power imbalance as a relation between “the established” and “the outsiders” and applied the framework to British class structure, the survival of caste in India, and the position of the Japanese Burakumin, a group physically indistinguishable from other Japanese but marginalized and discriminated against because of their historical role and position in society.
In societies ranging from agrarian to postindustrial, from democratic to authoritarian and totalitarian, from those with relatively open to those with relatively closed class structures, an overarching challenge is that of the struggle against inequality whose central index is the degree of social mobility across the lines of both class and race/ethnicity.
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