Integration benefits minorities most and marginalization harms them most

Evidence

Group members can be classiïŹed as “high” or “low” on each of these dimensions resulting in the strategies of “integration” (high on both), “assimilation” (low, high), “separation” (high, low), and “marginalization” (low, low). Thus, while incorporating the notion of “reference groups,” acculturation research goes beyond this concept by acknowledging the possibility of multiple group memberships, and that people can simultaneously have a positive orientation toward more than one group (integration), or toward neither the minority nor majority group (marginalization). Focusing on outcome variables like stress, self-esteem, and psychosomatic indices, there is now converging evidence that integration is usually the strategy with the most beneïŹcial outcomes for minority members, and marginalization has the worst outcomes (Berry, 1997; Liebkind, 2001). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of
, 456 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

I do not mean to suggest here that segregation is an innate and therefore inevitable human tendency. It is surely true that among lower-status persons segregation is more likely to be imposed than preferred. Nevertheless, as recent attempts at school and neighborhood racial integration in the United States have demonstrated, the higher-status group can make life so uncomfortable for the “integrator” that being with one’s own-however despised one’s own may be-becomes psychologically preferable. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in
, 1131 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Laura Levitt argues that “tolerance works to both regulate and maintain a deep ambivalence.” She states that acceptable Jewish difference has been defined as religious difference—that is, they simply go to a different “church” in order to be accepted as Jews in U.S. culture. As a result Jews have had to remake their Jewishness into a bastardized but comprehensible version of Christianity. Levitt claims that the remaking of Jewishness into an acceptable form demonstrates the failed promise of liberal inclusion. A similar process is taking place in these CAIR advertisements, which reveal (albeit unintentionally) the particular form in which Islam must be represented in order to fall under the umbrella of liberal multicultural inclusion and tolerance. Islam cannot be included in liberal multicultural society in just any form: it must take the form articulated in the PSAs—emphasizing likeness to and compatibility with a dominant, and conservative, American culture. Both versions of diversity patriotism—ambiguous assimilative patriotism and approximating sameness through the figure of the “good Muslim”—rely on diminishing difference in order to sell inclusion. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1244 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Segregation yields real psychological safety benefits that complicate any push to integrate — Miles Hewstone and Ed Cairns and Alberto Voci and Juergen Hamberger and Ulrike Niens, Intergroup Contact, Forgiveness, and
, 104; Environmental and minority rights are simultaneously invocable markers of universal marginalization — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism
, 315; Integration yields best minority outcomes and marginalization the worst — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of
, 456 (+9 more)

Broader Connections