International Action Against Racial Discrimination - Essay Example

Authors Name Institution Name Subject: Date How has awareness of discrimination changed since the 1960s? Discrimination means treating a person less satisfactorily than another person, in the similar circumstances. 2 Introduction 2 Women's Roles 4 Rights of the Accused 5 Why Hates the Poor 6 The Gap between Needs and Resources 8 Social Exploitation 9 Methods of Social Exploitation 10 Social Coercion (Force) 10 Social Exchange (Inducement) 11 Social Co-optation (Conviction or Belief) 12 Conclusion 12 References 14 Discrimination means treating a person less satisfactorily than another person, in the similar circumstances. Introduction International action against racial discrimination, as of international action against many other evils, is that of the struggle to extend the rule of law. It is a highly political struggle, because it is about cajoling states to give up a little of their sovereignty. They are reluctant to do this unless they can get something in exchange. By acceding to a convention they may be able to contribute to a cause they think important, to improve their image in the diplomatic world, or to put pressure on some other state of whose policies they disapprove. In democratic countries people are accustomed to seeing their governments criticized daily in many of the morning newspapers, but when a foreign official criticizes the same government, reactions are different. Equality and fair play have been hallmark. Despite having carved out numerous institutions to serve these ideals, groups such as Blacks, women, the disabled, and the elderly still suffer discrimination and isolation. Slavery was a mark against culture; its demise has not ended poor treatment of minorities. Rather, as slavery came to a close, discrimination began, and was legitimated by the Supreme Court's separate-butequal decision. It was not until almost the middle of this century, with the outlawing of restrictive covenants in property deeds, that some progress was made. Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces, and, in 1954, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education continued the struggle to achieve full equality. Then, in the 1960s, world wide society experienced the full force of the civil rights revolution, with those whose rights had been denied, abrogated, or curtailed coming forward. Along with their supporters, they used other rights legally granted by our political system to make their plight known and to demand redress. (Brackman Arnold C. 1987, 54) Overall society is riddled with "isms"--ageism, racism, sexism--in which people are judged not by their capabilities but by some other ascriptive features of their person not relevant to any pertinent judgment. Only through the constant vigilance of those who suffer discrimination is progress made, and even then it is slow. Even as Britishers believe that these people are entitled to the same rights as Americans, they also insist that those who want rights fulfilled must fight for them and earn them by their own efforts. Some help may be acceptable, but help from government sources is apparently legitimate only if it is matched with some effort by the aggrieved. In 1964, the National Election Study began a series of questions on Westerns's perception of the appropriate speed of the civil rights movement: "Do you think that civil rights leaders are trying to push too fast, are going too slowly, or are they moving about the right speed?" In this particular case, the question has remained the same throughout the administration of the item, so that there are no problems of question comparability. But problems do arise in trying to interpret the meaning of the responses (Brogan Patrick, 1989, 196). Between 1964 and 1976 (the question was not asked in 1978), the proportion of people who responded that the "civil rights people have been trying to push too fast" dropped from 63 to 39 percent. Correspondingly, the proportion of those who thought that the progress was "about right" increased from 25 to 47 percent in that period. The proportion of "don't know" remained essentially stable (Tropman 1987, 196). The 1960s not only brought advances in entitlements, but also forms of struggle that the public thought inappropriate: riots and some of the more militant episodes in the civil rights movement. Though the civil rights question may have been intended to focus on the rights of Blacks, the public is prone to associate a variety of protest activities with civil rights, so that the question may also in part have tapped public sentiment about the rights of draft resisters, Vietnam protesters, and other activists. This may explain why the public believed that the civil rights people were pushing too fast during the 1960s. As they have become accustomed to or more tolerant of these activities, or as these activities have decreased, their support for civil rights activities has increased. Women's Roles Beginning in 1972, a question was asked on attitudes toward women's rights. Respondents were asked to indicate whether they thought women should have equal roles with men, or whether "a woman's place is in the home". Within the recent past, the overall distribution of responses has been quite consistent. About 50 percent of the respondents have felt that women should have an equal role (though it does increase to 57% in 1978). The proportion of persons who thought that women should remain in the home dropped from 29 percent in 1972 to 21 percent in 1978. A substantial proportion of respondents were neutral, about 16 percent. The distribution of responses on this question aptly illustrates the conflicting attitudes of the British populace. In a land where "all men are created equal," and after more than a decade of vigorous effort to bring to the attention of the public the problems of women, only about 50 percent of the population was willing to accord them an equal role to men. Because the age group effect is so striking, it is essential to take a generational perspective on the results here. Younger cohorts, those under thirty, have been in favor of an equal role for women to the tune of 55 to 67 percent. The middle-age group is sharply below that percentage, and the oldest age group is slightly lower still. Only slightly more than one-third of those sixty five and over support an equal role for women, despite the fact that there are 130 women for every 100 men sixty-five and older, and the gap widens with increasing age. The oldest age group also shows a larger proportion of "no opinion" and "don't know" responses (Lemarchand René, and Martin David 1974, 61). Clearly, there is a generational thrust apparent in the responses of the elderly, but it is one heavily mixed with ambivalence. Rights of the Accused The question asks whether we should do "everything possible" to protect the legal rights of the accused, or is it "more important to stop criminal activity even at the risk of reducing the rights of the accused?” The overall proportions of responses are arresting. About 29 percent of the respondents felt that the rights of the accused should be protected. A higher proportion, in the vicinity of 40 to 46 percent (except for 1974), felt that crime should be stopped even at the expense of reducing those rights. Elderly respondents tended to distribute themselves into the "stop crime" and the "don't know" categories, particularly the "stop crime" category. An average of 47 percent of the elderly felt that crime should be stopped even at the risk of reducing the rights of the accused. It is important to emphasize the high proportion of the "don't know" responses here (for everyone, but higher for elderly). Whether these responses are a way of remaining neutral or whether they represent more complex feelings is hard to determine. Many elderly are vulnerable and powerless in the face of crime. If one is concerned about crime, even if one has never been a victim personally, the issue becomes the feeling of powerlessness and the anxiety that a person might become a victim or that an accused lawbreaker might seek retribution even while his or her rights are being protected. Often the elderly cannot relocate; they do not have the resources to secure protection from private police and the picture is not one that contains many options. Work, family life, and religion are thought by many to encompass some of most traditional values. Yet they are widely commented upon today as being subject to great strain. Not nearly as many measures of these values were available as we would have liked, but those we found can provide some general hypotheses of what is happening to these traditional values within the culture. Reported church attendance was used to assess religious orientation, preferences concerning reduction of the hours in the work week to assess work orientation, and attitudes toward the ideal number of children in the family to assess family orientation. Why Hates the Poor Hate of the poor, like anti-Semitism, seems to be a deep undercurrent. The poor--the underclass or status poor and the life cycle poor--are hated because they are threatening. British society has always reached out to help others. Communal barn raising and mutual assistance in rural communities have become legendary. Town neighbors have always been ready to lend "a cup of sugar" if you were a bit low. The tendency for neighbor to help neighbor in the daily tasks of living is a historical part of the British experience. Generous foreign aid is one case in point. And though the British also like United States moved into the welfare state era (providing the use of state power and state resources to those in need) later than other developed countries, for all practical purposes, it is now a welfare state in that it makes substantial public expenditures at federal and state levels for programs like social security, unemployment compensation, and child welfare. Much help is also provided through private charity. Billions are given in voluntary contributions for those in need--an average of $649 for each of our 93.5 million households in 1991 (Hodgkinson and Weitzman 1992, 1). Nor do gifts of money tell the whole story. Millions of people devote untold hours in volunteer work--20.5 billion hours in 1991. For example, in a program called Choice, "recent college graduates work . . . 70-hour weeks for a year for a pittance." They are assigned a small number of juvenile delinquents, the "cream of the crap," and seek to help them (Klein 1994b, 28). But there is another, careful side to our society's generosity. "Help" often is first thought of as "self-help." As in Small Town in Mass Society (1968), when neighbors provided that cup of sugar, they remembered it and had an expectation that the borrower would repay it. The help was not a gift but a loan. Moreover, as open as the British is overall, in smaller groups, its citizens have favored exclusion rather than inclusion of "others." The recent development of the PLUs (people like us) group is not new but rather represents an extension of the historical American approaches of isolationism and nativism. "People like us" depicts those who select residences in tight enclave communities, usually with a guard at the community entrance. Communities ("plantations") on Hilton Head Island, for example, have been this way for many years. The guards are a formal and public expression of a deeper set of policies, practices, and values designed to keep people of similar social and ethnic status within an enclave. Sometimes the enclave concept gets pushed right into the home. Modern cocooning, a withdrawal into one's own house with everything one needs to do organized around that dwelling: One shop by phone, has food delivered, goes to the movies by watching videos, and so on. Cocooning is "the impulse to get inside when everything outside gets too scary". (Lerner Natan 1980) The Gap between Needs and Resources People in all societies have needs and wants. These needs and wants will exceed available resources at any point in time--in both an absolute and a relative sense--and the gap between them will be maintained. This gap exists in an absolute sense because it is present in every society, developed or underdeveloped, large or small. It is also present in subunits within the society: formal organizations, governments, families, or individuals. One way or another, we all fights the battle of the budget, an attempt to match available resources to needs and wants. The gap exists in a relative sense because of the concept of "relative deprivation." It is not the amount of actual deprivation an individual has to endure that causes resentment, but rather the amount of deprivation relative to those in a similar position. Hence, in a wealthy society those who are not quite as wealthy may feel relatively deprived compared to those who are wealthy, even though their status may greatly exceed that of the wealthy in another society. To look at it from the other end of the spectrum, it is often pointed out that the poor in Western industrialized countries are better off than the poor in lesser developed countries. This observation seems to mainly comfort academics, since the poor in well-to-do societies feel poor. Social Exploitation Given the gap between needs and wants and resources, societies, as well as organizations, families, and individuals, are faced with the constantly pressing need to increase resources. One way to increase resources is to secure labor contributions inexpensively. If work effort can be secured at below market rates, then the production needs of society will come closer to the consumption needs. Social exploitation refers specifically to the attempts on the part of society to capture these labor contributions. Important as it is, social exploitation is not the only form of exploitation societies use to secure resources. Environmental exploitation, involving not only animals but also land, plants, and water, is another time-honored location for and form of exploitative behavior. The over harvesting of certain species and the maltreatment of domestic animals are two examples familiar to us all. They represent cheap sources of supply for either sales (furs, buffalo skins, etc.) or labor (horses, oxen, etc.). The ravishment of public land without reclamation and the dumping of materials into rivers and streams are also exploitative in that they allow perpetrators to pay less than the full cost of their product. Social exploitation refers particularly to the use of people and an attempt, through human labor, for exploitative perpetrators to reduce the cost of the need and want fulfilling services which they are providing. Methods of Social Exploitation There are three major methodologies through which socially exploitative activities are carried out in societies: force, inducement, and conviction (or belief). In the case of force, an individual is coerced into giving his or her services. It is often called slavery. In the case of inducement, there is an exchange in return for services or products, but it is an unfair exchange. The market value test cannot be met, and the victim is, in effect, "ripped off." In the case of conviction, an individual is convinced to give his or her services free of charge. Social Coercion (Force) Social coercion is perhaps the most familiar form of social exploitation. Known as slavery, it has a long record in human societies and in this context is a historically important mechanism for securing free labor from subjugated victims by dominant perpetrators. Slaves can be of different races or color, from villages or societies defeated in war, or from other sources. They provide free or very inexpensive labor--one of the most important pressures generating an institution like slavery (however, under certain conditions, paying wages might well be cheaper than keeping slaves). Another example of social coercion is child labor: the abusive employment of younger workers. Child labor laws in developed countries have been set up precisely to prevent or at least temper this kind of activity. The use of conscription or "draft" mechanisms to secure young men and women for military service is a third example of social coercion. Social Exchange (Inducement) In a social exchange, individuals are not forced to give their services for free, but they are not getting fair market value either. Wage discrimination by sex, race, or religion is a classic example of exploitation through social exchange. Individuals are paid less than current market rates for the work they are doing, thus lowering the cost of the product or service to the exploitative perpetrator. The social ramifications of this behavior should not be overlooked. The structure motivation for "workaholism" certainly does not spring totally from within the individual but represents a socially structured set of inducements. Workaholism, a general term used here to indicate contributions to an organization over and above that for which the individual is being compensated, represents a tremendous source of organizational wealth. It is no accident that organizations are always looking for highly motivated workers. A second form of socially exploitative exchange might be called "guilty contributions." Here, employees are made to feel they should over invest in their workplace. This mechanism is often used in social agencies, and is an important vehicle for cost tamping. Social Co-optation (Conviction or Belief) Social co-optation is a method of social exploitation, in which individuals give their services, inexpensively or for free, rather than being forced or bargained with. A classic example is "voluntarism." (Amnesty International 1992a, 99). Here, individuals donate their time, energy, and effort to "good" causes. They do not feel exploited, they feel inspirited and uplifted. The socially structured set of norms and values in which such individuals grew up sets the stage for this feeling. Just to give one example of the magnitude involved, one study for the United States in 1983 suggested that $40 billion was an appropriate estimated amount of the worth of voluntary contributions in the nonprofit sector for that year. That is truly a staggering sum and one which gives some sense of the amounts involved: It is 200 thousand person years of work. Job or role diminishment is another socially co-optative mechanism. For example, sexism, ageism, racism, any "ism" which creates a diminished sense of self and self-worth. While such diminishment may not necessarily result in exploitation, it frequently does, and it sets the stage for social coercion or social exchange. Conclusion Thus after sixties, world society awareness has changed toward discrimination. Though, as we struggle to make ends meet, to achieve some harmony between needs and wants and resources, we need to find extra resources; usually those which belong to or should belong to others to fill the gap. Direct theft is one possible approach. Another is social exploitation. Social exploitation is the attempt to secure labor for free or cheap. It is an attempt to force, induce, or convince individuals to contribute their work effort to society at no or low cost. Social surplus identifies those resources which result from social exploitation. Social surplus is frequently sequestered in organizations, individuals, and families throughout the society and is not available for general use. References Brackman Arnold C. (1987), The Other Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. London: Collins. Brogan Patrick (1989), World Conflicts: Why and Where they are Happening. London: Bloomsbury Books. Lemarchand René and Martin David (1974), Selective Genocide in Burundi. London: Minority Rights Group. Lerner Natan (1980), The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. 2nd edn. Alphen an den Rijn: Sijthoff & Nordhoff. McKean Warwick (1983), Equality and Discrimination under International Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mahalic Drew, and Mahalic Joan Gambee (1987), "'The Limitation Provisions of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination'", Human Rights Quarterly, 9: 74-101. Amnesty International (1992a), Burundi: Appeals for an Inquiry into Army and Gendarmerie Killings and Other Recent Human Rights Violations. London: International Secretariat. Hodgkinson V., and M. Weitzman. ( 1992). Giving and volunteering in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector. Klein J. ( 1994). "The politics of promiscuity". Newsweek, 16-20. Tropman J. E. ( 1987). Public policy opinion and the elderly. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Read More