It’s a combination of things. I can see
that sometimes they use a scapegoat. They blame their social condition
on others, white people, the gov’t, businesses, and educational
institutions. People often unfairly blame their troubles on another or a
scapegoat. Frustrated, people strike out and look for someone to blame.
Our society is full of authoritarian people who believe that things are either right or wrong and ambiguity disturbs them. They get disturbed when they see norms and values that are different from their own. The authoritarian views people who are different as inferior and this assures them that their own position is right. I think this is what happened to the Native Americans when Europeans settled in their land. They saw the Native Americans as being different and couldn’t understand it, so they viewed the Native Americans as inferior. That’s how the prejudice started and it didn’t stop there, they killed them and ran them off their land.
In another theory functionalist’s show, “Prejudice becomes practically irresistible when state machinery is used to advance the cause of hatred. To produce prejudice, the Nazis harnessed government agencies, the schools, police, courts, and mass media. The results were devastating.” We can see how functional it was for our gov’t, who wanted the land and resources from the Native Americans, to use its power to advance hatred toward the Native people. I think the Pine Ridge Sioux are in the social condition they’re in, because of the campaign waged against them years ago by the federal gov’t. Conflict theorists focus on how groups compete for scarce resources and in the case of the Native Americans I believe it was the land, gold in the Black Hills and buffalo. At that time Europeans, French, and others saw themselves as able to make gains only at the expense of the Native Americans. They still haven’t recovered from the devastation.
When we label a group it affects the way we see people. Labels cause selective perception as it states in our textbook. Long ago people started labeling the Native Americans and using horrible words such as savages, dirty, and lazy. That really affected how people perceived them and even though it’s better today, it’s taken a long time to correct those awful labels. I think the Lakota Sioux are still feeling the repercussions of those labels. In the video it shows how some businesses still today don’t want to hire Native Americans. Also, it shows how difficult it is for them to start a business. As the textbook states, “If we apply a label to a group, we tend to perceive its members as all alike.”
Finally, I think some of it may be contributed to labeling and self-fulfilling stereotypes. The Native Americans were labeled as lazy a long time ago, and not deserving good jobs. Being denied good jobs they got what they could and it wasn’t the best of things. People see the social condition they’re in and then the cycle starts all over again. The discrimination that created the “laziness” in the first place passes unnoticed (Henslin, 2011). The Pine Ridge Sioux aren’t in the social condition they’re in because they want to be, it’s because of a lot of different factors. It’ll take some time and some good people like the children we saw in the video to change things.
Our society is full of authoritarian people who believe that things are either right or wrong and ambiguity disturbs them. They get disturbed when they see norms and values that are different from their own. The authoritarian views people who are different as inferior and this assures them that their own position is right. I think this is what happened to the Native Americans when Europeans settled in their land. They saw the Native Americans as being different and couldn’t understand it, so they viewed the Native Americans as inferior. That’s how the prejudice started and it didn’t stop there, they killed them and ran them off their land.
In another theory functionalist’s show, “Prejudice becomes practically irresistible when state machinery is used to advance the cause of hatred. To produce prejudice, the Nazis harnessed government agencies, the schools, police, courts, and mass media. The results were devastating.” We can see how functional it was for our gov’t, who wanted the land and resources from the Native Americans, to use its power to advance hatred toward the Native people. I think the Pine Ridge Sioux are in the social condition they’re in, because of the campaign waged against them years ago by the federal gov’t. Conflict theorists focus on how groups compete for scarce resources and in the case of the Native Americans I believe it was the land, gold in the Black Hills and buffalo. At that time Europeans, French, and others saw themselves as able to make gains only at the expense of the Native Americans. They still haven’t recovered from the devastation.
When we label a group it affects the way we see people. Labels cause selective perception as it states in our textbook. Long ago people started labeling the Native Americans and using horrible words such as savages, dirty, and lazy. That really affected how people perceived them and even though it’s better today, it’s taken a long time to correct those awful labels. I think the Lakota Sioux are still feeling the repercussions of those labels. In the video it shows how some businesses still today don’t want to hire Native Americans. Also, it shows how difficult it is for them to start a business. As the textbook states, “If we apply a label to a group, we tend to perceive its members as all alike.”
Finally, I think some of it may be contributed to labeling and self-fulfilling stereotypes. The Native Americans were labeled as lazy a long time ago, and not deserving good jobs. Being denied good jobs they got what they could and it wasn’t the best of things. People see the social condition they’re in and then the cycle starts all over again. The discrimination that created the “laziness” in the first place passes unnoticed (Henslin, 2011). The Pine Ridge Sioux aren’t in the social condition they’re in because they want to be, it’s because of a lot of different factors. It’ll take some time and some good people like the children we saw in the video to change things.
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