3.7: Ethnicity and the Economy

Ethnicity and the Economy

Your ethnicity may also guide (not determine!) how you navigate many life choices and obstacles. Students on multi-ethnic campuses see this process unfolding across the university campus. Certain ethnicities are easier to find in engineering and business buildings. Some ethnicities are particularly rare in majors like Anthropology or Agriculture. Gender biases compound these tendencies further. Students chose majors in part because of the values placed on certain career paths by their family and/or community. These biases play out in many areas in the economy.

Figure : A graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Note the significant differences in occupation by gender and ethnicity. Source: Bureau Labor Statistics

Differences in the choice of major or career are partially a result of variations in values among various ethnic groups. Some groups seem to value high-paying careers. Other groups seem to value prestigious occupations. Still others value occupations that have intrinsic rewards or those with specific fringe benefits, like ample vacation time, or good health care packages. Some folks just hate to have a boss, and so chose to be self-employed. In the US, About 13% of white males are self-employed. Black males are about half as likely to be self-employed. Men from Israel or Korea are mostly like to be self-employed at around 30% of the time. Immigrants come to America sometimes pre-equipped with specific skills – especially if they are coming from a distant land. Because it can be expensive to get into the US, groups including Koreans and Israelis often have some business experience before arriving in the US. Other migrant groups, especially those from nearby countries like Mexico or Honduras, generally have a shorter, less costly journey to America, allowing them to arrive in the US with fewer skills. Again, location factors into a robust understanding of why things are the way they are.

Figure : Prague, Czech Republic. In Europe, many Asian immigrants are self-employed as they are in the US. Migrants from more distant regions tend to bring more skills than migrants from neighboring countries.

Other elements of occupational choice are a bit more mundane. You may get a job in a field because some relatives helped you get started. Particularly in big cities, where robust ethnic employment niches develop, you’ll find specific job categories or businesses dominated by a single ethnicity. A great example is the motel or hospitality industry where South Asian-Americans operate about half of all US motels. Interestingly, most of these South Asians are Gujaratis, a linguistic ethnic group spread across the India-Pakistan border. So strong are family connections in this process that a single name dominates this area of the hospitality industry, lending itself to the catchphrase used to describe these lodgings: “Patel Motels.” It appears that a single Gujarati man, who opened a sort of youth hostel in the US during the 1940s, may have started a snowballing process. He was able to demonstrate that a farmer from India could succeed in this industry, inspiring others from the same region. Many of the others that tried, and succeeded in running a motel, invited friends and relatives to work for them; and naturally, after a few years, those employees ventured out and started running a motel for themselves. The hospitality industry has built-in advantages for impoverished immigrants seeking a better life for their family, including built-in housing, and an opportunity for women to stay-at-home with children.

Other sectors of the economy may have a less random origin. For example, Korean-Americans own almost all stores that sell hair-care products designed for the African-American market. It is a somewhat bizarre reality, but it can be traced to a few international trade policies adopted by the US and South Korea decades ago that made Korean wig manufacturers and distributors more competitive than those from other countries. Korean-Americans came to dominate the industry, and the web of familial and linguistic ties (and barriers) has made it difficult for non-Koreans (including African-Americans) to break into a business that largely caters to African-Americans.

Relevance of Race & Ethnicity in Other Places

Although the social implications of race or ethnicity in the United States have eroded over time, this does not mean that that is no longer relevant. It also does not mean that ethnicity is not relevant anywhere else. In many places, it is still very important. In much the same way as race defined the early United States, it defined South Africa, Brazil and other settler colonies. There were important differences between these places. Whereas white people who made up the racial majority ruled the United States, South Africa was ruled by a white racial minority. In order to preserve power for themselves, South African whites developed a system known as apartheid, which divided the population into a number of legally-defined categories. Similar to the U.S. development of Indian reservations, the South African state also developed ethnically-based “Homelands” which were used as a means of denying citizenship to black South Africans.

Sustaining such a system required the use of a police state that eventually became unsustainable. In 1994, full and open elections were held, and the black majority gained political power. The state policy of separating people ended, but this did not immediately transform South Africa into a new kind of state. It has continued to negotiate the relationship between the outside world and internal political and economic struggles between differing factions in the country.

Brazilian society was far more racially mixed from the beginning. This simply changed the social equation from a binary black/white relationship to a society stratified by skin tone and migration status. As was the case in many colonies, people born in the colonizing state (in this case, Portugal) continued to enjoy elevated social standing well after the colonial era ended. In the same manner of the United States and South Africa, social standing was related to being part of the charter group.

In other places, purely ethnic differences have had violent consequences. In the 1990s in Rwanda and in Yugoslavia, ethnic tensions flared into open warfare and genocidal massacres. A new term was coined—ethnic cleansing—which denoted an attempt to completely expunge traces of another population from a place. In both of these places, it would have been difficult for an outsider, and sometimes even a local, to tell the differences between the two groups. Remember that ethnic differences can be based on historical groups that may now be very similar.

It should be noted that the massacre of opposing ethnicities and the appropriation of their territories was not a product of the twentieth century. The colonial phase of world history was largely defined by the massacre and marginalization of indigenous people around the world by people of European descent.