Ascription and Human Society
Lucy Warner
April 3, 2016


The following NYT news article led me to look up the word ascription in this context. It's a common part of sociological theories. I had heard it in phrases like “society ascribes a lower IQ to many minority groups.” From definitions showing the broader range of its’ use, I went to a long analysis by Wikipedia which discusses certain bones of contention between Conservatives and Progressives, and specific theories of the relationship of such ascription as race and religion to causing a difficult stratification in the society. Whites now file suits on this basis, but in the past in such areas as the South especially, the Black or Hispanic person has been the brunt of the abuse until laws to prevent abuse of minorities were made in the 1950s to 70s.

School admissions policies have long been found, such as quotas in the admission of minority students, to be based not on academic achievement but on race or religion. Many minorities value these quotas because they often guarantee that AT LEAST that number of their group will be admitted; but since selection is OPENLY based partly on skin color, etc., that policy has been challenged in court by Whites. Asians often do better academically on the college level than Blacks, Whites and Hispanics, and yet a distinct minority are accepted into many colleges. Colleges argue that they aren’t merely following federal guidelines in order to save their access to federal funding, but are trying to achieve a greater racial balance to “enrich campus life.” In Catholic or other Christian colleges, religion may also be one of the characteristics that are considered in admission.

All of this has been happening ever since the Civil Rights law came into being. Before that, admission of minorities was a very small percentage of the overall student body, so the attention by Democrats to working with quotas is to me very understandable. What sounds unfair on the surface is merely a correction of the great unfairness of our society on these matters. A college can be sued for failing to admit an academically qualified Black or Hispanic person. Unfortunately, whites have also sued on the grounds that when that Black student was admitted on the ground of such a quota, they as an equally qualified White person was unfairly treated. In other words, they claim to have been bumped out of line due to the quota.

Some citizens – the ultraconservative ones especially – consider that to be what is called “reverse discrimination,” and they cry out for their fair share of access. The whole issue came up, of course, because except at the few all black colleges that are scattered around the country, most blacks couldn’t get admitted to any college due to the White Supremacy beliefs among a very large percentage of the US population, even in the 1970s when I graduated. Interestingly, in one article listed on Google today, it states that there is an actual cap on the admissions of Asian Americans, and in the 1920s of Jewish applicants in many colleges. The universities deny that it is intentional, or even that it exists, but graduation statistics have tended to prove it. Is it the fear that those groups’ generally higher academic achievement as compared to white Christians will embarrass the majority, that majority parents won’t send their kids there to mingle with “inferior” people, and, therefore, will cut down on the University’s income; or is it merely the same old overt dislike of having to associate with those groups? Most sororities and fraternities are not racially mixed. There are black organizations, of course.

Blacks were particularly the target of such overt discrimination, and until the 1960s it simply went unchallenged. It was accepted as either a good thing by some, or simply too dangerous and difficult to challenge by others. Martin Luther King was a very courageous man. The term “white right” describes the situation in those days. It should also be stated that poor whites (as in the phrase “poor white trash”), as well as blacks, have been treated badly enough to reduce their self-esteem to a point of almost certain failure, however. They have always had a slightly higher social status than poor blacks (or even all blacks), however, and thus the lack of notable achievements – living in a “good” neighborhood, having a college degree, making money in the Middle Class range – tend to make many of them resent the Blacks, who since the 1960s have had a higher status among American citizens purely due to their race. In other words, with the civil rights movement they have been stripped of that inherited, unearned special status.

Black people nowadays are being given a right to PROVE their intelligence, good character, etc. Black citizens are still more likely to be beaten by a white cop or shunned on a job situation, however, and the “White Supremacists” think that such things are right and good. That’s how things should be! By no means, are all whites in that group at all, thank goodness, and especially if they have a college education, a sufficient level of personal empathy for others, and an enlightenment orientation psychologically. I mean by the latter statement that too many people don’t WANT to think, learn, enlarge their viewpoint, or otherwise act like “Progressives.”

Some of them simply are of a lower intelligence, and others are very emotionally bound up with their status issues. Not everyone is equally competitive in their basic nature. The Wikipedia article below on deeply entrenched social distinctions spoke in one of the theories discussed of the “Conflict” theory. I personally just don’t like all that conflict in life, so I don’t despise people over their race or religion or try to “keep up with the Jones.” I also have a very strong penchant for fairness in society. The ACLU and the Poverty Law Center are my favorite groups.

In the 1960s and 70s, minority advocacy groups began to pressurize Universities to stop “weeding” those less “desirable” people out of their populations, and insisted on numerical quotas. Government got behind it and those practices were made illegal. Colleges weren’t closed, but their access to the much desired federal funding was taken away and it would become a public scandal. Some colleges claim that minority students can’t pay the tuition and fees, but most public universities like UNC at Chapel Hill gave financial aid, work scholarships, and other means to fend off the student debt level. I personally want to see an economic step up for all poor students regardless of race, and some leeway on College Board scores since those who come from poorer homes and public high schools tend to score less well on that test. Prep schools are for the purpose of preparing students for that test and for the much more difficult college work in so many subject. They’re great, but unfortunately if they don’t offer lots of scholarships for the poor kids to pay their fees either.

Luckily, in the US as of 2016, we have much better access for all races/religions, etc. into public life in general, from college to jobs, and now in many cases to better neighborhoods. If kids don’t have to live in a poor and crime ridden neighborhood, they will usually do better in school. We mustn’t forget that emotional and mental health are degraded in such negative living environments, and they are very important in how well a child learns all the way up through school. Likewise, if family and friends speak a good quality of English and have a good vocabulary, they will find reading and learning to be easier.

Just because less than a desirable amount of progress has been made in the wide social and financial differences, that doesn’t mean that we should give up, call all dark colored people “inferior” and drop our quota system. The quotas are still necessary. The uprising of greater social pressure on minorities of all kinds in the last ten years or so proves that. The overall improvement of a whole group, and a large one at that, of the lower social/financial classes is a long trek up a steep hill, and one that has to be made by individuals banded together in groups. Pressure groups like the new Black Lives Matter do help create the progress up that hill, however, and I’m glad to see emerging again. When I was young it was Martin Luther King. I went on the Internet to the BLM website and read their policy and tenets, and it is absolutely not radical. It just isn’t submissive and fearful of Whites.

Letting Blacks and Hispanics into the university system doesn’t mean that they won’t have to work hard to stay there. In fact, the larger the social gap, the harder they will have to work. It can be achieved, however. The many Black college graduates with advanced degrees prove that it is possible. It has never been done without personal effort, however, and all we are guaranteeing disadvantaged groups is the proverbial “leg up.” To me, there is nothing unfair about that.

See the two interesting and informational articles below on ascription and the social divisions. We still need to work very hard on that to become the “city on a hill” that one conservative politician mentioned.



http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/opinion/how-did-the-democrats-become-favorites-of-the-rich.html?_r=0

The Opinion Pages | CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER
How Did the Democrats Become Favorites of the Rich?
Thomas B. Edsall
OCT. 7, 2015

Photograph -- An apartment served as the setting for a $28,500-per-couple fundraising event with Barack Obama in New York in 2008. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times


Voters on both the left and the right often claim that there is no difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties, and of course that isn’t true. There’s a big difference between Elena Kagan and Antonin Scalia, for one thing. But there may be more to this argument than you think.

Democrats now depend as much on affluent voters as on low-income voters. Democrats represent a majority of the richest congressional districts, and the party’s elected officials are more responsive to the policy agenda of the well-to-do than to average voters. The party and its candidates have come to rely on the elite 0.01 percent of the voting age population for a quarter of their financial backing and on large donors for another quarter.

The gulf between the two parties on socially fraught issues like abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage and voting rights remains vast. On economic issues, however, the Democratic Party has inched closer to the policy positions of conservatives, stepping back from championing the needs of working men and women, of the unemployed and of the so-called underclass.

In this respect, the Democratic Party and its elected officials have come to resemble their Republican counterparts far more than the public focus on polarization would lead you to expect. The current popularity of Bernie Sanders and his presidential candidacy notwithstanding, the mainstream of the Democratic Party supports centrist positions ranging from expanded free trade to stricter control of the government budget to time limits on welfare for the poor.

“Both Republicans and many Democrats have experienced an ideological shift toward acceptance of a form of free market capitalism which, among other characteristics, offers less support for government provision of transfers, lower marginal tax rates for those with high incomes, and deregulation of a number of industries,” the political scientists Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal write in a 2014 essay titled “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?”

The authors, from Stanford, Princeton, the University of Georgia and N.Y.U., respectively, go on to note that the Democratic agenda has shifted away from general social welfare to policies that target ascriptive * identities of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.

The structural forces changing the character of the Democratic Party appear in voting patterns and in the altered partisan allegiance of the professional classes and of the very rich.

Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the changing pattern of campaign contributions. In September, Bonica and Rosenthal completed an additional study, “The Wealth Elasticity of Political Contributions by the Forbes 400,” that demonstrates a substantial increase in campaign donations from the very wealthy to Democrats.

Between 1982 and 2012, the Republican share of contributions from the Forbes 400 has been steadily falling, to 59 percent from 68 percent. As membership in the Forbes 400 changes, this trend will accelerate because new members are more likely to direct their money to Democrats than the old members are, Rosenthal wrote me in an email: “Larry Page and Sergey Brin — co-founders of Google — are quintessential new money Democrats.”

In their 2014 paper, Bonica, McCarty, Rosenthal and Poole tracked the sources of money flowing to Democratic candidates and parties from 1980 to 2012. As the accompanying charts show, they found that the share of contributions to Democrats from the top 0.01 percent of adults — a much larger share of the population than the Forbes 400 list — has grown from about 7 percent of total campaign contributions in 1980 to more than 25 percent of contributions in 2012. The same pattern is visible among Republicans, where the growth of fundraising dependence on the superrich has been moving along the same trajectory.

The kinds of congressional districts Democrats are now winning also tilt toward the well-to-do. Data on the median household income of congressional districts provided by ProximityOne, a company that specializes in the analysis of geographic, demographic and economic data, shows the following:

In 2014, the median income of households in Democratic districts was higher than in Republican districts, $53,358 to $51,834. Democrats represent seven of the 10 most affluent districts, measured by household income (four in California, two in Virginia and one in New York). Democrats also represent a majority of the 100 most affluent districts, 54-46.

Different Parties, Same Trend

In 1980, political giving by the superrich and large donors made up less than one-quarter of all contributions to both parties’ candidates. Now these are the majority of contributions. (See graphs: ““Superdonors” are the top individual donors in each election cycle, accounting for just 1 in 10,000 voters. In 2012 they each gave $25,000 or more, up from $5,616 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation). “Large donors” are individuals who gave more than $1,500 (in 2012 dollars) but less than each cycle’s superdonors.
Sources: Adam Bonica, Stanford University; Nolan McCarty, Princeton University; Keith T. Poole, University of Georgia; Howard Rosenthal, New York University
By The New York Times”)

Democratic victories in wealthy districts reflect the gains the party is making among high-income voters generally.

In 1988, support for the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis fell as income rose. Those making less than $12,500-a-year backed him 63-37, while those making more than $100,000 voted against him 67-33.

In 2012, by contrast, Obama won low-income voters, those making less than $30,000, decisively, 63-35, but also did far better than Dukakis among those making more than $100,000, winning 44 percent of their votes. Four years earlier, in 2008, Obama won among voters with the highest incomes, above $200,000, 52-46, and nearly tied among those making $100,000 to $200,000, 48-50.

Because high-income voters turn out in higher percentages than low income voters, even in presidential years when turnout rises generally, exit poll data underestimates the importance of high end support for Democratic presidential candidates. Because of this higher turnout, the top two income quintiles of the electorate contributed the same number of votes to Obama’s victory in 2012 as the bottom two income quintiles, according to American National Election Studies data provided to me by Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory.

In other words, upscale voters were just as important to the Obama coalition as downscale voters. One consequence of the increased importance of the affluent to Democrats, according to Bonica and the three co-authors on the inequality paper, is that the Democratic Party has in many respects become the party of deregulated markets.

“The Democratic Party pushed through the financial regulation of the 1930s, while the Democratic party of the 1990s undid much of this regulation in its embrace of unregulated financial capitalism,” the four authors write.

Continue reading the main story

They cite the crucial role of congressional Democrats in enacting the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, which eliminated past restrictions on interstate banking; the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act separating commercial banking from other financial services; and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which restricted government oversight of most over-the-counter derivative contracts, including credit default swaps — all of which played a role in the financial crisis of 2007-2009.

The critique of the increased Democratic dependency on the rich by Bonica and his co-authors is modest in comparison to that of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern. In a 2014 essay, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” they analyze congressional voting patterns and conclude that

The majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.

“These findings may be disappointing to those who look to the Democratic Party as the ally of the disadvantaged,” Gilens wrote in a 2012 essay published by the Boston Review:

In some respects Democrats have in fact served this function in the social welfare domain. But in other domains, policies adopted under Democratic control are no more consistent with the preferences of the less well off than are those adopted during periods dominated by the Republican Party.

Gilens, in a forthcoming paper in Perspectives on Politics, is critical of both Democrats and Republicans:

On important aspects of tax policy, trade policy, and government regulation, both political parties have embraced an agenda over the past few decades that coincides far more with the economically regressive, free trade, and deregulatory orientations of the affluent than with the preferences of the middle class.

Gilens notes that policies popular with the middle class but not with the affluent rarely win enactment:

The majority are redistributive policies including raising the minimum wage or indexing it to inflation, increasing income taxes on high earners or corporations, or cutting payroll taxes on lower income Americans.

Conversely, policies opposed by the middle-class but backed by the affluent include “tax cuts for upper-income individuals, spending cuts in Medicare, and roll-backs of federal retirement programs” – policies that have been adopted.

All these findings raise questions for those who would like to see the Democratic Party return to its more populist roots. Such a development faces two major obstacles.

Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

The first is exemplified by the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent-socialist senator seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders is running on an explicitly left-populist platform. It includes taxation of overseas corporate profits, a progressive estate tax, an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020, the investment of $1 trillion in infrastructure, withdrawal from Nafta and other trade agreements, free tuition at public colleges, a single-payer health care system, and more.

The problem is that the core of Sanders’s support, according to an October 2 Pew Research Center survey, is more concentrated among the college-educated than among those without degrees, and stronger among middle-class and affluent Democrats than among low-income Democrats. For now his messages appear to have caught on primarily among ideologically liberal voters, although there is an argument that it will resonate with others as they learn more about it.

Most important, in recent years, the Democratic Party has become the political home for those whose most passionate cause is cultural, as opposed to economic, liberalism: decriminalization of drug possession; women’s rights; the rights of criminal defendants; and rights associated with the sexual revolution, including transgender rights, the right to contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage.

Democrats in recent years have done well in presidential years with an agenda focused on “values conflicts” and cultural liberalism. But the party, if its aim is to mobilize those on the bottom rungs of the ladder, whites as well as blacks and Hispanics, will face some bitter conflicts, because these target voters are often the most hostile to the left-leaning social rights agenda.

The largest educational differences occur on attitudes toward homosexuality. The college-educated are much less likely than those voters with high school or less to say that homosexual sex is always wrong, and much more likely to approve of gay marriage.

College graduates were 22.9 percentage points more liberal on homosexuality than those without high school degrees, and 24.8 percentage points more liberal in their views on gay marriage.

The same class differences have been found in views on abortion, school prayer and the survey question: should women should be the equal of men.

The Republican Party helps maintain minority loyalty to Democrats with policies opposed by blacks and Hispanics and with incendiary, biased rhetoric.

For many black and Hispanic voters who hold conservative views on social issues, the Democratic Party’s commitment on civil rights, immigration reform and the safety net trumps any hesitation about voting for Democratic candidates who hold alien cultural and moral views.

The same is not true for noncollege whites. Many of these voters hold liberal economic views, as evidenced by the passage by large margins of minimum wage referendums in four solidly red states last year. In the case of these white voters, however, animosity to Democratic cultural and moral liberalism trumps Democratic economic liberalism, as demonstrated by the near unanimous Republican-majority midterm and presidential voting in the poorest white counties of Appalachia.

The practical reality is that the Democratic Party is now structurally disengaged from class-based populism, especially a form of economically redistributive populism that low-to-moderate-income whites would find inviting.

It may be that voter discontent will topple one of the parties and something new will emerge — an improbable development. As it stands, schisms that pit advocates of the lunch pail tradition against those better-off voters who are vested in social and cultural issues will continue to constrict Democratic success, particularly at the state and local level, where Republicans have now achieved substantial retrenchment of the liberal state.



On Ascription and Static Social Classes


http://www.yourdictionary.com/ascriptive

The definition of ascriptive is a group in which status is based on a factor other than achievement.
A group that only has members of a certain race or sex is an example of an ascriptive group. (Read more at http://www.yourdictionary.com/ascriptive#5BeAgCTEsujYOGqL.99)


Ascriptive adj. designating or of a society, group, etc. in which status is based on a predetermined factor, as age, sex, or race, and not on individual achievement
Origin of ascriptive
Classical Latin ascriptivus ; from ascriptus, past participle of ascribere, ascribe
Webster's New World College Dictionary Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Read more at http://www.yourdictionary.com/ascriptive#5BeAgCTEsujYOGqL.99



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascriptive_inequality,
Ascriptive inequality, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia --

Ascription occurs when social class or stratum placement is primarily hereditary. In other words, people are placed in positions in a stratification system because of qualities beyond their control. Race, sex, age, class at birth, religion, ethnicity, species, and residence are all good examples of these qualities. Ascription is one way sociologists explain why stratification occurs.[1]

History

Ralph Linton[edit]

This idea was first introduced into Sociology by anthropologist Ralph Linton in 1936 when he described it in his work The Study of Man. His coined terms of role and ascribed status and achieved status are the three terms that gained him the most sociological acceptance. Although role has become bothersome, “ascription and achievement have such strong face validity that they are rarely challenged or examined”.

According to Linton, the conventional view of ascription provides three different explanations for the practice of ascription: (1) It facilitates socialization for positions in the division of labor. (2) it is inevitable, given the usual cohesion of the relationship unit and its communication with the occupational system. (3) It prevails and persists because it is an efficient and inexpensive way to solve certain problems of “functional subsystems” in society. Linton viewed ascription of status as a means by which society could begin to prepare the individual from birth for his or her future functions on the assumption that the earlier training for a class can begin, the more successful it is likely to be. He also proposed that in all societies the actual ascription of statuses to the individual is controlled by a series of reference points. Together, these reference points serve to restrict the domain of his future participation in the life of the group. These points of reference include age, sex, family relationships, and caste or class.

Kingsley Davis[edit]

In 1950 sociologist Kingsley Davis proposed that status is ascribed to an infant as a consequence of the position of the socializing agents (usually the parents). Because of such subjective connection of the infant with people who already have a status in the social structure, it immediately gives the child membership in the society and a specific place in the system of social status. Statuses of the agent that can define the infant include kinship, race, citizenship, religious affiliation, community membership, and legitimacy. However, age and sex are two of the most prominent criteria of ascription and they are applicable to the child without being based on the statues [sic] of the socializing agent. Therefore, one ascriptive reference point can originate from the inherent characteristics of the child regardless of the socializing agent while the other can originate from the agent’s status.

Davis also thought that it was important to note that ascribed statues [sic] limit the achievement of achieved statuses meaning that a person may not be exposed to the tools necessary to achieve their full potential simply because of their ascribed status. Davis believed that ascriptive inequality led to stratification; however, he also believed that stratification was a functioning mechanism to motivate people to do better. He thought that there were certain individuals who were designed for a task, but that others could use competition as motivation to move up the social hierarchy based on their achievements. Ascription is a barrier to this Social Mobility. Although the training for a person’s ascribed status begins theoretically from birth, it is much more than simply training for a person’s occupation. It is training for a life of justifiable status, whether it be greater or lesser, and hence perpetuates ascriptive inequality; inequality based on non-performance grounds.[2]

Talcott Parsons[edit]

Talcott Parsons said in 1951 that ascription defined patterns of differential treatment within a role. He concluded that points of ascription are either primary or secondary and then can further be broken down into classificatory or relational aspects. An example of primary-classificatory organization would be sex and then race. An example of primary-relational organization would be age and kinship. Kinship is the social class position is ascriptively determined for the child by the link between the father’s family role and his work role. Parsons also claims that “ascription is a crucial point of convergence and marks the intergenerational transformation of power into status”.[3]

Why does ascriptive inequality occur?[edit]

Sociologist Barbara Reskin has done extensive research to try to explain why and how ascriptive inequality occurs. Most commonly, it is thought to occur because of a person’s motives, such as personal taste for example. When examining ascriptive inequality using the Conflict theory, it appears as though dominant groups use their control over resources to uphold their privileges and therefore exemplify motive-based explanations. “Theories that attempt to explain why inequality occurs often say it is the result of separate individuals acting to advance their own interests”.

Because employers “tastes” can explain why they are willing to pay higher wages to for one group as opposed to another, many acts of discrimination that lead to inequality occur frequently. For example, until the 1980s only males held managerial positions and most often they were white. When asked why this was, many responded saying that hey preferred “ease of communication and hence social certainty over the strains of dealing with persons who are “different””. This is conflict theory in action. When minority groups become large enough to threaten whites, whites respond by demoting minorities to worse jobs and thus perpetuate the problems of ascriptive inequality because these men are simply being judged by their race and not by their performance.

However, it is hard to actually prove why ascriptive inequality occurs because motive based theories cannot be empirically tested because people’s motives cannot be observed. Motive based theories attribute these motives as across-the-board explanations to all members of an ascriptive group, and thus excludes analyses that take advantage of the explanatory power of deviation among allocators.

How does ascriptive inequality happen?[edit]

Ascriptive inequality is acted out through mechanisms. Mechanisms are an account of what brings about change in some variable. The four types of mechanisms responsible for ascriptive inequality are intrapsychic, interpersonal, societal, and organizational. Intrapsychic mechanisms uses psychological theories such as social cognition and self-fulfilling to generate ascriptive inequality because these theories use the stereotypes of minorities to justify that they deserve unequal compensation. Interpersonal mechanisms use the interactions between members of different ascriptive groups to determine the result. Often, the minority groups gets worse treatment as the majority member may be more rude to the minority member in an interview for example. Social mechanisms are social measures that link ascriptive group membership to opportunities and rewards. Because people associate certain stereotypes with members of an ascriptive group, such as race, in groups and out groups are formed. Members of a minority group, or out group, are particularly visible to a majority group, and because society has already shaped the majority’s perception and distorted it, it leads them to behave in ways that disadvantage minority group members. For example, Title 7 and its amendments bar employment discrimination based on race, national origin, religion, sex, pregnancy, age, and disability and it therefore indirectly affects ascriptive inequality because it impacts what employers do. Lastly, organizational mechanisms can cause various levels of ascriptive inequality by requiring, permitting, or preventing differential treatment through organizational practices such as dress codes.[4]

Conclusion[edit]

Although ascriptive inequality may not be obvious at first, a closer examination of our society will reveal that inequalities are all around us. Every day women go to work and on average earn 40 cents less than men because of their sex.[5] Working-class students may be denied the chance to go to college because they grew up in a school system that did not have the resources to adequately prepare them. An African American man may not be able to buy a house in a white neighborhood because a realtor is afraid his family will make the property value go down. These inequalities are more common than they should be and are based on factors that people have been dealing with from birth and may not be able to change. New laws and government regulations have helped combat some of these issues but our society is nowhere as equal as it could be.