Ethnic Groups

and Minorities
An ethnic minority is a group of
people who differ in race or color
or in national, religious, or cultural
origin from the dominant group,
often the majority population, of
the country in which they live.
The different identity of an ethnic
minority may be displayed in any number
of ways, ranging from distinctive
customs, lifestyles, language or accent,
dress, and food preferences to particular
attitudes, moral values, and economic or
political beliefs espoused by members of
the group.
Characteristically the minority is recognized,
but it is not necessarily accepted by the larger
society in which its members live. The nature of
the relationship of the ethnic minority to the
larger society will tend to determine whether
the minority group will move in the direction of
assimilation in the larger society or toward self-
segregation.
Ethnicity and the Melting Pot
Different countries have different
combinations of minorities within their
borders. Some countries are relatively
homogeneous, and the defining
characteristics of nationality in their
populations appear to apply to almost all
members.
Patterns of Settlement
Shifting political and religious lines,
altered economic conditions, and natural
disasters have created more immigrants
than have the sum total of human
wanderlust and fortune hunting.
Minority Identity and Assimilation
The most positive factor affecting change
and acceptance is the degree of similarity,
especially of language and religion, of the
dominant and minority cultures. Moreover,
if the immigrant group has economic
resources or the means, including
education, to obtain them, its acceptance
will be correspondingly easier.
Minority Education
In the 1960s and thereafter gradually
deemphasized its traditional stress on
acculturation and assimilation of ethnic minorities
and took up the idea of multiculturalism. In its
more traditional rendition, the concept of cultural
pluralism connotes simply "unity within diversity,"
while its more radical rendition encourages ethnic
minorities to avoid absorption into the dominant
culture by insisting on their uniqueness and
separateness.
Initially, this conceptual shift spurred an
undertaking in the public schools to respect
ethnic diversity by providing bilingual education
to immigrant children, as required by the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 (USA). In many cases
ordered by the courts, sought to instruct their
diverse ethnic populations in many different
languages.
Multiculturalism and National Identity
By the 1990s, opinion on ethnicity, although
still deeply divided, was moving back toward
the idea of the melting pot, of acculturation
and assimilation, although still within the
frame of multiculturalism.