Close intergroup contact can sustain inequality through paternalistic affection rather than reduce it

Evidence

In long-term expropriative relations structured with frequent one-onone contact across group lines (as in contemporary gender relations, and in race relations in America in the antebellum South and Jim Crow South), social distance mechanisms prevail and dominant group members exploit their close access to subordinates’ daily lives to establish a paternalistic regime ( Jackman, 1994). Dominants define the needs and interests of subordinates in relation to their position in the status hierarchy and division of labor, and then claim to supply those needs. Subordinates are praised and rewarded for manifesting the attributes that have been categorically assigned to them, and punished for lapsing into behaviors deemed inappropriate. The rewards and punishments are primarily social: compliant subordinates are rewarded with social inclusion, admiration, friendship, affection, or even love, while subordinates who flaunt the rules face social exclusion, ridicule, humiliation, or stigmatization. Human self-interest, sociability, and rationality ensure that most subordinates comply readily with expectations. The costs of noncompliance are bitter, while compliance offers individuals their best prospects for social success. Under these crushing constraints, the vast majority of subordinates take it upon themselves to meet or exceed the demands made by dominants, even competing with each other to excel in their designated duties and attributes. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 671

Categorization

• XREF: Directly unsettles the core contact-theory claim in the vault that intergroup contact reduces prejudice — this passage shows frequent contact under expropriation producing social-distance paternalism instead. — connects to: Low interethnic contact sustains rejection of collective guilt; Compensation plus courtship persuaded expellees to integrate despite lingering inequality — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 186; Social harmony and redressing historical injustice can coexist through equal-power intergroup contact. — Nurit Shnabel and Johannes Ullrich, Identity Needs in Intergroup Relations:…, 111 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Could feed the prejudice reassessment thread alongside Allport’s original conditions for optimal contact; contact only works when status differences are not structured hierarchically.
• DEEPTHINKING: Describes a full mechanism by which intimacy across group lines maintains rather than dissolves hierarchy — positive affect weaponized as social control.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 671