Chapter 4: Racial and Ethnic Families: Strengths and Stresses

Summary

Chapter 4 talks about ethnic families, starting with explaining three different types of ways of relating to each other, as more and more immigrants enter the US. These immigrants can choose assimilation (conformity to American culture entirely), they can choose acculturation (adopting of many/much of American beliefs/culture), or they can choose something known as cultural pluralism (maintaining many aspects of their own culture). The US lets in roughly 1 million immigrants annually, and roughly 12 million immigrants (mostly Mexican) are illegal. The general consensus on whether immigrants are harmful or beneficial is that they are more beneficial, at least this is thought of by scholars. This chapter discusses the differences in race, people who share common physical characteristics, and ethnicity, people who identify with a common nation. It explains the differences between racism (set of beliefs that ones own racial group is superior to others), prejudice (attitude that prejudges people different than us), and discrimination (behavior that treats people unequally or unfairly).

The chapter discusses black families: how lately black children are more likely to grow up with one parent than other racial-ethnic groups is just one of the topics discussed. The chapter discusses American Indian families: they make up only 1.5% of the US population. More kids of this group of people live with both parents than do any other racial-ethnic group in America. The chapter discusses Latino families: Latinos (both American- and foreign-born) suffered as 18% of the general unemployment population in 2008. The Chapter talks about Asian American families: many of these families follow Confucianism, which endorses a patriarchal social structure allowing the man to be in charge of the woman. The Chapter also discusses Middle Eastern families. These families tend to be very religious, and the family tends to have a strong bond (parents and children). The Chapter finally talks about interracial and interethnic families, which talks about how laws against miscegenation were in place until 1961.

Interesting Topic

I found it interesting that only 3.2% of whites identify themselves with another race, even though we learned in a previous chapter that whites make up 60+% of the population in America. On the opposite end of the spectrum I find it interesting that more than half of the Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander identifies with more than one race.

I also found the topic of immigration incredibly interesting. The fact that America CAN do more about border control but doesn’t seems to be justified by the fact that the Government still makes a ton of money off of illegal immigrants but doesn’t have to give them any benefits.

Concern

My main concern is how do illegal immigrants manage to become legal without getting deported?

Steve Boser