Dominant groups shift from paternalistic affection to reasoned persuasion once segregation breaks intimacy
Evidence
The ideological mold of paternalism holds a shimmering allure for dominant groups because of its unparalleled effectiveness in using positive beliefs and feelings to coerce subordinates. However, when the system of expropriation dictates a shift to spatial segregation and a more aggregated pattern of interaction across group lines, the paternalistic system of conditional love loses its coercive potency because subordinates are afforded more opportunity to develop their own systems of social support, freed from the overbearing presence of dominants. Under these conditions, subordinates begin to dissociate emotionally from the dominant group and to formulate challenges to the expropriative arrangements that have cost them so dearly. … Dominants are goaded to try to mitigate, divert, and diffuse the potentially disruptive challenge that subordinates have begun to introduce. With the failure of love, dominants gravitate to reason to blunt subordinate discontent. Variants of the reasoned persuasion ideological strategy (which emphasizes individual rights at the expense of group equality) developed in twentieth-century American class relations and in urbanized American race relations in the post-Jim Crow era, as group differentiation depended increasingly on spatial segregation. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 672
Categorization
- QUESTION: Holds that spatial segregation paradoxically liberates subordinates emotionally (enabling dissociated challenge) — worth tracing whether Allport’s theory anticipates or contradicts this segregation-as-freedom direction.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 672
- XREF: connects to: Compensation plus courtship persuaded expellees to integrate despite lingering inequality — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 186; Social cohesion rests partly on libidinal ties between classes