The Sociology of Social Change.

The final type is that of the “Cultural theory of prejudice” where prejudice is embedded in culture and a person can see themselves as socially distanced and depending on how close or distant they feel towards a member of an ethnic or racial group.  It has been seen that in American culture a core value of social superiority has been instilled into society therefore becoming the norm, with English, Scottish and Canadian being the most accepted and African and Asians being the least accepted.

Discrimination can be seen as the “actual behaviour towards another group or individual”  Discrimination can be seen in many forms for example when a black person with equal merits to a white person is refused a job due to his race.  Prejudice is generally the basis of discrimination but the two may also be present separately, someone may have prejudice thoughts about another race but never act on them and likely take discriminative action unwittingly, for example a couple not buying a house in an area with a majority race not of their own, because of worries of not fitting in.

This type of behaviour can be seen to come from the psychological means on an individual level but what of racism on a sociological level such as ethnocentrism which can be described as “a suspicion of outsiders combined with the tendency to evaluate the culture of others in terms of one’s own culture”.  This type of social action can be seen to go hand in hand with stereotypical thought as outsiders are thought of as aliens, barbarians or morally and mentally inferior.  This type of racism was seen in a greater concentration in the past where most civilisations seen smaller cultures in this way.

Group closure can also be seen in the formation of ghettos in most major cities where people of the same ethnic background live together in the same community.  This can be seen as a defence mechanism and can show individual and group fear of the different.  This could also be seen in some American states where cross race marriages and social interaction were outlawed.  Closure can be combined with resource allocation where groups of equal power with mutually enforced lines of closure do not interact with each other.  The more common stance is that of one group having more power, social status and economic wealth over the other which in turn causes the strongest conflicts.  Power and social status are scarce resources and when a group with the majority of these privileges becomes threatened they may become violent with the same on the side of the less privileged communities who may resort to violence and other methods to gain a larger share.

Migration of different cultures into Britain can be seen to date back to before colonial times when in 1066 “William the Conqueror, invited Jews to settle in England to help develop commerce, finance and trade”6.  During the middle ages few black faces were seen in Britain apart from a few entertainers in royal entourages.  It wasn’t until the discovery of the new world that Black workers were required for cheap labour to work the plantations, and were bought from the already established slave trade in Africa.  The Spanish and Portuguese regularly bought slaves from Arab and African slave merchants.  Then “in 1562, John Hawkyns made England's first foray into the trade when he sold 300 West African men to planters in Haiti”.  This quickly expanded when the rich plantation owners sent their children to Britain for an education they started to send their slaves there to serve the rich.  

Through out the eighteenth century the number of black residents in the UK rose to 14,000 and there was talk of abolishing slavery but the only conclusion the judge could make was that a slave could not be forcibly transported to England, this made little actual difference.  In 1807, Parliament banned the trade - but not slavery itself, all this meant was that if the illegal trade was found the captives were thrown over board.  Eventually in 1833, Parliament finally banned all slavery across the British Empire.  After this slavery did eventually die down and the influx of Blacks into the UK came to a halt.  

After the Second World War there was a great shortage of labour in Britain and therefore there was an active search for immigrant workers “157,000 Poles”6 were the first to be allowed to settle in the UK followed by many other nationalities.  “On 22 June 1948, the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in London, delivering hundreds of men from the West Indies”6 this was seen as a turning point in British life with the arrival of many different cultures.  Yet this seemed to increase the prejudice and discrimination in the UK.  After the 1981 riots in Brixton, the Afro-Caribbean British spiritual home, police targeted more black male Britton’s in a misunderstood belief that it would curb crime in Britain.  Through out the years this was seen to decrease but after the way the police handled the Death of Stephen Laurence in 1993 there was a big push for the anti-discrimination act of 2000.  Dr Robert Beckford states that “we can't talk about the "end of empire" without acknowledging how the empire lives on in a variety of benign and malignant forms.” Therefore it can be seen that there is still a big racial problem in the UK.

There is also a huge stigma attached to the police force in the UK with approximately half of Blacks and Asians in the UK stating that they believe this to be true.  Examples such as the Stephen Laurence Case (1993) prompted the McPherson report stating that the Metropolitan police were institutionally racist and the recent BBC secret policeman documentary which caused six officers to resign and two to be suspended.  The documentary showed a welsh officer in a Ku Klux Klan mask.  Yet this publicity is forgetting that it is the minority of police officers who hold this view and a lot of members of the force have not experienced such racism.  Jason Calder a black special officer for over five years states that “I have encountered almost no racism as an officer, but am not naive enough to believe it doesn't exist”.

Half of the British people questioned by BBC News online still believe that the UK is racist and 44% believing that immigration has damaged Britain over the last 50 years.  Therefore it can be seen that racism could be culturally intergral to UK society.  Even though such a large percentage of the population believes that the UK is racist it is amazing to find that in the same report a greater majority think that Britain is more racially tolerant than ten years ago, with 58% of black and 55% of the total population believing this.

Bibliography

Books

• Giddens, A. Sociology 4th Edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001)
• Macionis and Plummer. Sociology: A global introduction (Essex: Pearson Education Ltd, 2002)
• Abercrombie and Ward et al. Contemporary British Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003)

Websites

www.un.org/WCAR/e-kit/backgrounder1.htm

www.humphreys.co.uk

www.news.bbc.co.uk

www.observer.guardian.co.uk

Journals

• Modernism/Modernity 4.1 (1997) 157-169, Review Essay On Modernism and Race Carla Kaplan
• Annual Review of Anthropology, Oct 1999, Vol. 28, pp. 175-199, R. Wodak and M. Reisigl, DISCOURSE AND RACISM: European Perspectives 

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