Question

• Identify harmful stereotypes used to marginalize groups of people.
• Examine the impact of inequality among groups of people.
• Analyze historical and contemporary cultural texts related to "othering."

Answer 1

ANSWER1: Everywhere we look, we see differences in wealth, power, and status. Some groups have higher status and greater privilege than others. This inequality in the system is what we call social stratification. In this unequal social system, there is often unfair treatment directed against certain individuals or social groups. This is referred to as discrimination.

HARMFUL STEREOTYPES USED TO MARGINALIZE GROUP OF PEOPLE:

• many white southerners confessed that although they no longer feel prejudice toward black people in their minds, they still feel “squeamish” when asked to shake hands with a black person

• Discrimination in the workplace An example we notice in everyday life is salary differences! There are often obvious salary differences among across genders and race groups.

• An example of gender wage discrimination is when an employer pays a woman less than a man for the same work

• Whites earn more than Blacks and Hispanics regardless of gender

• On the other hand, minority groups are people who are singled out for unequal treatment and who see themselves as objects of collective discrimination. These minority groups are often marginalized. This means they are confined to an unimportant or powerless position within a society. Marginalized groups are socially excluded, disadvantaged, and often at the fringe of society.

• African American's lower life expectancy is also due to things like environmental pollution because minorities are more likely to live in areas closer to factories, etc

• They also have lower life expediencies due to statistically being more likely to work in more dangerous jobs, having lower access to healthy food and adequate healthcare, and due the the various life stressors many face from overt and microaggressions against them due to their race.

• Women are also discriminated against in the workforce when they are passed over for promotions due to their sex, and in healthcare where a lot of doctors do not take concerns seriously if they believe them to be "female issues."

• women tend to be seen as a homogeneous mass, everyone is the same, and everyone wants to be, should be, or has to be a family’s care-giver. This social expectation influences all women and many have to struggle much harder than their male counterparts to advance in the workplace

• Popular profiles of girls and women have been presented as young, thin, beautiful, passive, dependent, and often incompetent. At the same time, boys and men are portrayed as active, adventurous, powerful, sexually aggressive, and largely uninvolved in human relationships

ANSWER 2: IMPACT OF INEQUALITY AMONG THE GROUP OF PEOPLE:

• HEALTH Living in an unequal society causes stress and status anxiety, which may damage your health. In more equal societies people live longer, are less likely to be mentally ill or obese and there are lower rates of infant mortality.

• Trust, Participation, Attitudes and Happiness

  Inequality affects how you see those around you and your level of happiness. People in less equal societies are less likely to trust each other, less likely to engage in social or civic participation, and less likely to say they're happy.

• EDUCATION If children are less successful at school, they are less likely to become highly skilled workers. Their productive capacity, and therefore the productive capacity of the economy, is diminished

• ECONOMIC GROWTH : A more equal wage distribution encourages specialisation in higher value-adding industries, while low wage, low value-adding industries cannot compete.

• ECONOMIC INSTABILITY One mechanism by which this happens is that the rich consume a smaller proportion of their income than the poor. They save money which people on lower incomes would spend. This leads to a reduction in aggregate demand, which in turn leads to unemployment

• LOW SELF ESTEEM

• PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTURBANCES

• LOSS OF INTEREST IN LIFE

• FEELING OF WORTHLESSNESS

• INCREASE IN NUMBER OF HOMICIDE, SOCIAL VIOLENCE, IMPRISONMENT AND TEENAGE PREGNANCY.

ANSWER 3:  Othering is a concept used to define someone's own 'normal' identity by distancing oneself from the Other. In other words, Othering is defining the position of oneself, by stating what it ain't. The Other is defined in a negative way. Although first coined as a systematic theoretical concept by Spivak in 1985, the notion of othering draws on several philosophical and theoretical traditions.

De Beauvoir describes how men are regarded as the norm and women as the other. With reference to Hegel, de Beauvior universalizes a theory of self and others in relation to both gender and other hierarchical social differences.

A third stepping stone is the ideas of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Two important points can be derived from Lacan: Firstly, that language plays a central role in constituting identity. This understanding of identity later led Althusser to coin the notion of interpellation (1971), a notion grasping how individuals are hailed by ideology to occupy specific subject positions, thereby achieving identity. Secondly, Lacan stresses that identity is fundamentally gained in the gaze of the powerful

Throughout history, there have been many examples of othering

• Before end during the Second World War, Nazi Germany saw Jewish people as others. In America, black people have been discriminated on a large scale for a long time. Black people were seen as others
• This othering of black people is still going on in America, but on a smaller scale
• A third example are women. Women have for a long time been treated inferior to men. On a gender basis, women were seen as others.
• Violence erupted between the ethnically Burmese Buddhist majority and the Muslim ethnic minority Rohingyas in Myanmar in 2012
• In early April 2016, violence erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly ethnic Armenian enclave in southwestern Azerbaijan,The Armenian population is Christian in the predominantly Muslim country and favors secession and reuniting with bordering Armenia.
• Turkey waged military campaigns against Kurds in Syria and northern Iraq, and is afraid that Kurdish rebels are intent on carving out a Kurd nation-state out of the territory of all three states.