SOC 2390 Lecture Notes - White Southerners, Social Forces, Adolf Hitler

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 2390
• Professor: Michael A Dixon

Document Summary

Theories of prejudice: scapegoating theory argues that people who face prejudice are society"s victims. This theory suggests that people transfer the responsibility for a failure to some vulnerable group. For example, adolph hitler used the jews as the scapegoat for all german social and economic ills in the 1930s. Similarly, immigrants in the united states are often blamed by real americans for their failures to get jobs or secure desirable housing. A child with an authoritarian upbringing obeyed and then later treated others as he or she had been raised. Conflict theorists in particular stress the role of racial and ethnic hostility as a way for the dominant group to keep intact its position of status and power. Indeed, this approach maintains that even the less affluent white working class uses prejudice to minimize competition from upwardly mobile minorities: the exploitation theory of prejudice is persuasive.