The Quest for Identity and Status: Facets of the Desegregation Process in the Upper Midwest

An attempt to show that the majority group's desire to practice discrimination is a compulsion which, when applied in collective terms, serves to compensate for & ameliorate the tensions inherent in a fluid society by providing the members of the majority with an identity & a status whi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Phylon 1961-01, Vol.22 (4), p.329-339
Main Author: Tillman, James A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cities
Communities
Community power
Community/Communities/Communitarian
Desegregation
Desegregation/Desegregated
Discrimination
Discrimination in housing
Group/Groups/Grouping/Groupism
Hostility
Housing
Housing discrimination
Identity/Identities
Integration and segregation
Majority/Majorities
Neighborhood/Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods
Normativity
Process/Processes
Resistance
Retirement communities
United States/US
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:An attempt to show that the majority group's desire to practice discrimination is a compulsion which, when applied in collective terms, serves to compensate for & ameliorate the tensions inherent in a fluid society by providing the members of the majority with an identity & a status which they are not required to earn. This identity & status helps give their lives a stability. The hypothesis is demonstrated by discussing the substantive content & procedual life cycle of resistance to open neighborhoods in 12 upper midwest communities. Substantively, it is shown that the majority group members, by their own admission, resist the equality of status implicit in open neighborhoods because such neighborhoods, in effect, destroy race as their ultimate ground of being & identification. It also destroys their sense of SS which rested in their own minds, however vaguely, upon the knowledge that they were protected from complete fluidity by residential exclusivity. By recognizing the compulsion to practice residential exclusivity as a collective mental illness, it becomes possible to chart the life cycle of active resistance in a neighborhood after a minority fam moves in. It is then possible to treat this illness both individually & collectively. The technique used in the study of these neighborhoods was participant observation. The life cycle of resistance & eventual acceptance of the change connoted by the newly desegregated neighborhood was found to be (1) Incipient Resistance by Hostile, (2) Org of Resistance & Commitment, (3) Competition between Committed & Hostile, (4) Accommodation of Hostile to Change, & (5) Incipient Integration. AA.
ISSN:0031-8906
2325-7199
DOI:10.2307/273536