essay on social groups

Social Groups: Definition, Types, Importance, Examples

Definition : A social group refers to two or more individuals who share a common social identification, and who perceive themselves to be members of the same social category Hence, the shared perception or understanding that the individual feels as though they belong to a group is instrumental in defining a social group. It is this shared perception that distinguishes social groups from aggregates, this shared perception is referred to as social identification . An aggregate is a group of people who are at the same place at the same time, for example, a number of individuals waiting together at a bus stop may share a common identification, but do not perceive themselves as belonging to a group, hence a collection of individuals waiting at a bus stop are an aggregate and not a social group. Another collection of individuals that needs to be distinguished from social groups are categories, categories consist of sets of people who share similar characteristics across time and space. A similar characteristic can be race or gender, again the feeling of belonging amongst the individuals involved is what distinguished individuals in a social group and individuals in a category.

Types of Social Groups

Social groups are of two kinds- primary and secondary groups . The former is small and tightly knit, bound by a very strong sense of belonging, family is a typical example of this kind of social group. In this type of group, the common interest shared amongst the individuals is the emotional attachment to the group in and of itself. Conversely, secondary groups are large impersonal groups, whose members are bound primarily by a shared goal or activity as opposed to emotional ties. For this reason, individuals typically join secondary groups later in life. Employees at a company would constitute as a secondary group. As individuals within a secondary group grow closer they might form a primary group, wherein the individuals are no longer goal-oriented but are instead a group based on emotional connection.

Lastly, reference groups refer to a group to which an individual or another group is compared. Sociologists call any group that individuals use as a standard for evaluating themselves and their own behaviour a reference group. The behaviours of individuals in groups are usually considered aspirational and therefore are grounds for comparison. From the existence of multiple groups, one can also make the distinction between in-groups and out-groups. This distinction is entirely relative to the individuals, hence reference groups are typically out-groups ie. groups that an individual is not a part of, though an individual may aspire to be a part of the reference group.

The acknowledgment of in-groups and out-groups is relevant to an individual’s perception and thus behaviour. Individuals are likely to experience a preference or affinity towards members of their groups,, this is referred to as in-group bias. This bias may result in groupthink, wherein a group believes that there is only one possible solution or mindset which will lead to a consensus. These poor decisions are not the result of individual incompetence when it comes to decision making but instead but instead due to the social rules and norms that exist in the group, such as the nature of leadership and the nature of homogeneity.

A byproduct of in-group bias is intergroup aggression- experience feelings of contempt and a desire to compete to the members of out-groups. This desire to ‘harm’ members of the out-group is a result of dehumanization wherein the members of the out-group are less they deserve the humane treatment. It is a combination of intergroup aggression and groupthink which often results in harmful prejudice. The dehumanization of out-groups is often used as a political agenda. A notable example from history is the way that the Jewish community (out group) were dehumanized by Nazis (in group), through means such as stereotyping. Hence, prejudice can be a result of extreme intergroup aggression.

Group Behaviour and Social Roles

Within a social group individuals typically display group behaviour, which is seen through the expression of cohesive social relationships. This group behaviour is likely the result of social or psychological interdependence for the satisfaction of needs, attainment of goals or consensual validation of attitudes or values. Hence, group behaviour which is expressed through cooperative social interaction hinges on interdependence. It is this group behaviour that yields the development of an organized role relationship. Social roles are the part people play as members of a social group. With each social role you adopt, your behaviour changes to fit the expectations both you and others have of that role. In addition to social roles, groups also create social norms- these are the unwritten rules of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours that are considered acceptable in a particular social group. The ability to develop roles and norms which are guided by a common interest is referred to as social cohesion.  The behaviour attached to the norms and roles fulfilled by individuals within a certain social group is usually not the same behaviours exhibited when that individual is not with their group ie. social interaction theory. For example, in a family (which is a social group) a mother is likely not to behave in the way she would in another social group such as at her place of work.

All social groups have an individual who fulfils the leadership role, a leader is an individual who influences the other members of a group, their position may or may not be explicitly stated.

Leadership function considers the intention by which the leader behaves on, either instrumental or expressive. An instrumental leader is focused on a group’s goals, giving orders and making plans in order to achieve those goals. An expressive leader, by contrast, is looking to increase harmony and minimize conflict within the group. In addition to leadership function, there are also three different leadership styles. Democratic leaders focus on encouraging group participation as obsessed with acting and speaking on behalf of the group. Secondly, laissez-faire leaders take a more hands-off approach by encouraging self-management. Lastly, authoritarian leaders are the most controlling by issuing roles to members and setting rules, usually, without input from the rest of the group.

In secondary groups, every member is has a definitive role, however as secondary groups are goal oriented the roles differ from group to group. It is also not uncommon within secondary groups for roles to change. For example, in a school research assignment, initially individuals may fulful roles such as writer, illustrator, researcher, etc in order to write a report. But in the second half which is focused on presenting the repot, members may take up new roles such as presenter, debator, etc, as the goals of the group shifts.

Norms can be simply defined as the expectations of behaviour from group members. These norms which dictate group behaviour can largely be attributed to the groups’ goals and leadership styles. However norms need not only be the result of in-group occurrences, reference groups oftentimes dictate what is and what is not acceptable behaviour. Typically there are norms that apply to the group as a whole known as general norms . Additionally,  there are also norms that are role-specific. For example consider a family (ie. a primary group) everyone in the family attends dinner at 8 pm, while the father cooks dinner and the child sets the table. Everyone attending dinner is a general norm while the act of cooking dinner and setting the table are role-specific to the father and child, respectively.

The Importance of Social Groups

Social groups, primary groups, such as family, close friends, and religious groups, in particular, are instrumental an individuals socialization process. Socialization is the process by which individuals learn how to behave in accordance with the group and ultimately societies norms and values. According to Cooley self-identity is developed through social interaction. Hence, from an identity perspective, primary social groups offer the means through which an individual can create and mold their identity. The development of identity is most rapid and crucial in childhood, hence the importance of family and friends, but the development of identity does continue throughout one’s life. Additionally, from a psychological perspective, primary groups are able to offer comfort and support. Secondary groups, such as members of a group assignment, tend to have less of an influence on identity, in part because individuals within these types of groups are older and hence have a self-identity as well as are familiar with the socialization process.

Natasha Dmello

Natasha D'Mello is currently a communications and sociology student at Flame University. Her interests include graphic design, poetry and media analysis.

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Social Groups

Learning objectives.

• Describe how a social group differs from a social category or social aggregate.
• Distinguish a primary group from a secondary group.
• Define a reference group and provide one example of such a group.
• Explain the importance of networks in a modern society.

Most of us feel comfortable using the word “group” without giving it much thought. In everyday use, it can be a generic term, although it carries important clinical and scientific meanings. Moreover, the concept of a group is central to much of how we think about society and human interaction. Often, we might mean different things by using that word. We might say that a group of kids all saw the dog, and it could mean 250 students in a lecture hall or four siblings playing on a front lawn. In everyday conversation, there isn’t a clear distinguishing use. So how can we hone the meaning more precisely for sociological purposes?

Defining a Group

The term  group   is an amorphous one and can refer to a wide variety of gatherings, from just two people (think about a “group project” in school when you partner with another student), a club, a regular gathering of friends, or people who work together or share a hobby. In short, the term refers to any collection of at least two people who interact with some frequency and who share a sense that their identity is somehow aligned with the group. Of course, every time people are gathered it is not necessarily a group. A rally is usually a one-time event, for instance, and belonging to a political party doesn’t imply interaction with others. People who exist in the same place at the same time but who do not interact or share a sense of identity—such as a bunch of people standing in line at Starbucks—are considered an  aggregate , or a crowd. Another example of a nongroup is people who share similar characteristics but are not tied to one another in any way. These people are considered a  category , and as an example all children born from approximately 1980–2000 are referred to as “Millennials.” Why are Millennials a category and not a group? Because while some of them may share a sense of identity, they do not, as a whole, interact frequently with each other.

Interestingly, people within an aggregate or category can become a group. During disasters, people in a neighborhood (an aggregate) who did not know each other might become friendly and depend on each other at the local shelter. After the disaster ends and the people go back to simply living near each other, the feeling of cohesiveness may last since they have all shared an experience. They might remain a group, practicing emergency readiness, coordinating supplies for next time, or taking turns caring for neighbors who need extra help. Similarly, there may be many groups within a single category. Consider teachers, for example. Within this category, groups may exist like teachers’ unions, teachers who coach, or staff members who are involved with the PTA.

Types of Groups

Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) suggested that groups can broadly be divided into two categories:  primary groups and  secondary groups  (Cooley 1909). According to Cooley, primary groups play the most critical role in our lives. The primary group is usually fairly small and is made up of individuals who generally engage face-to-face in long-term emotional ways. This group serves emotional needs:  expressive functions  rather than pragmatic ones. The primary group is usually made up of significant others, those individuals who have the most impact on our socialization. The best example of a primary group is the family.

Secondary groups are often larger and impersonal. They may also be task-focused and time-limited. These groups serve an  instrumental function  rather than an expressive one, meaning that their role is more goal- or task-oriented than emotional. A classroom or office can be an example of a secondary group. Neither primary nor secondary groups are bound by strict definitions or set limits. In fact, people can move from one group to another. A graduate seminar, for example, can start as a secondary group focused on the class at hand, but as the students work together throughout their program, they may find common interests and strong ties that transform them into a primary group.

SOCIOLOGY IN THE REAL WORLD

Best friends she’s never met.

Writer Allison Levy worked alone. While she liked the freedom and flexibility of working from home, she sometimes missed having a community of coworkers, both for the practical purpose of brainstorming and the more social “water cooler” aspect. Levy did what many do in the Internet age: she found a group of other writers online through a web forum. Over time, a group of approximately twenty writers, who all wrote for a similar audience, broke off from the larger forum and started a private invitation-only forum. While writers in general represent all genders, ages, and interests, it ended up being a collection of twenty- and thirty-something women who comprised the new forum; they all wrote fiction for children and young adults.

At first, the writers’ forum was clearly a secondary group united by the members’ professions and work situations. As Levy explained, “On the Internet, you can be present or absent as often as you want. No one is expecting you to show up.” It was a useful place to research information about different publishers and about who had recently sold what and to track industry trends. But as time passed, Levy found it served a different purpose. Since the group shared other characteristics beyond their writing (such as age and gender), the online conversation naturally turned to matters such as child-rearing, aging parents, health, and exercise. Levy found it was a sympathetic place to talk about any number of subjects, not just writing. Further, when people didn’t post for several days, others expressed concern, asking whether anyone had heard from the missing writers. It reached a point where most members would tell the group if they were traveling or needed to be offline for awhile.

The group continued to share. One member on the site who was going through a difficult family illness wrote, “I don’t know where I’d be without you women. It is so great to have a place to vent that I know isn’t hurting anyone.” Others shared similar sentiments.

So is this a primary group? Most of these people have never met each other. They live in Hawaii, Australia, Minnesota, and across the world. They may never meet. Levy wrote recently to the group, saying, “Most of my ‘real-life’ friends and even my husband don’t really get the writing thing. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Despite the distance and the lack of physical contact, the group clearly fills an expressive need.

In-Groups and Out-Groups

One of the ways that groups can be powerful is through inclusion, and its inverse, exclusion. The feeling that we belong in an elite or select group is a heady one, while the feeling of not being allowed in, or of being in competition with a group, can be motivating in a different way. Sociologist William Sumner (1840–1910) developed the concepts of in-group  and  out-group to explain this phenomenon (Sumner 1906). In short, an in-group is the group that an individual feels she belongs to, and she believes it to be an integral part of who she is. An out-group , conversely, is a group someone doesn’t belong to; often we may feel disdain or competition in relationship to an out-group. Sports teams, unions, and sororities are examples of in-groups and out-groups; people may belong to, or be an outsider to, any of these. Primary groups consist of both in-groups and out-groups, as do secondary groups.

While group affiliations can be neutral or even positive, such as the case of a team sport competition, the concept of in-groups and out-groups can also explain some negative human behavior, such as white supremacist movements like the Ku Klux Klan, or the bullying of gay or lesbian students. By defining others as “not like us” and inferior, in-groups can end up practicing ethnocentrism, racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism—manners of judging others negatively based on their culture, race, sex, age, or sexuality. Often, in-groups can form within a secondary group. For instance, a workplace can have cliques of people, from senior executives who play golf together, to engineers who write code together, to young singles who socialize after hours. While these in-groups might show favoritism and affinity for other in-group members, the overall organization may be unable or unwilling to acknowledge it. Therefore, it pays to be wary of the politics of in-groups, since members may exclude others as a form of gaining status within the group.

BIG PICTURE

Bullying and cyberbullying: how technology has changed the game.

Most of us know that the old rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is inaccurate. Words can hurt, and never is that more apparent than in instances of bullying. Bullying has always existed and has often reached extreme levels of cruelty in children and young adults. People at these stages of life are especially vulnerable to others’ opinions of them, and they’re deeply invested in their peer groups. Today, technology has ushered in a new era of this dynamic. Cyberbullying is the use of interactive media by one person to torment another, and it is on the rise. Cyberbullying can mean sending threatening texts, harassing someone in a public forum (such as Facebook), hacking someone’s account and pretending to be him or her, posting embarrassing images online, and so on. A study by the Cyberbullying Research Center found that 20 percent of middle school students admitted to “seriously thinking about committing suicide” as a result of online bullying (Hinduja and Patchin 2010). Whereas bullying face-to-face requires willingness to interact with your victim, cyberbullying allows bullies to harass others from the privacy of their homes without witnessing the damage firsthand. This form of bullying is particularly dangerous because it’s widely accessible and therefore easier to accomplish.

Cyberbullying, and bullying in general, made international headlines in 2010 when a fifteen-year-old girl, Phoebe Prince, in South Hadley, Massachusetts, committed suicide after being relentlessly bullied by girls at her school. In the aftermath of her death, the bullies were prosecuted in the legal system and the state passed anti-bullying legislation. This marked a significant change in how bullying, including cyberbullying, is viewed in the United States. Now there are numerous resources for schools, families, and communities to provide education and prevention on this issue. The White House hosted a Bullying Prevention summit in March 2011, and President and First Lady Obama have used Facebook and other social media sites to discuss the importance of the issue.

According to a report released in 2013 by the National Center for Educational Statistics, close to 1 in every 3 (27.8 percent) students report being bullied by their school peers. Seventeen percent of students reported being the victims of cyberbullying.

Will legislation change the behavior of would-be cyberbullies? That remains to be seen. But we can hope communities will work to protect victims before they feel they must resort to extreme measures.

Reference Groups

A  reference group is a group that people compare themselves to—it provides a standard of measurement. In U.S. society, peer groups are common reference groups. Kids and adults pay attention to what their peers wear, what music they like, what they do with their free time—and they compare themselves to what they see. Most people have more than one reference group, so a middle school boy might look not just at his classmates but also at his older brother’s friends and see a different set of norms. And he might observe the antics of his favorite athletes for yet another set of behaviors.

Some other examples of reference groups can be one’s cultural center, workplace, family gathering, and even parents. Often, reference groups convey competing messages. For instance, on television and in movies, young adults often have wonderful apartments and cars and lively social lives despite not holding a job. In music videos, young women might dance and sing in a sexually aggressive way that suggests experience beyond their years. At all ages, we use reference groups to help guide our behavior and show us social norms. So how important is it to surround yourself with positive reference groups? You may not recognize a reference group, but it still influences the way you act. Identifying your reference groups can help you understand the source of the social identities you aspire to or want to distance yourself from.

College: A World of In-Groups, Out-Groups, and Reference Groups

For a student entering college, the sociological study of groups takes on an immediate and practical meaning. After all, when we arrive someplace new, most of us glance around to see how well we fit in or stand out in the ways we want. This is a natural response to a reference group, and on a large campus, there can be many competing groups. Say you are a strong athlete who wants to play intramural sports, and your favorite musicians are a local punk band. You may find yourself engaged with two very different reference groups.

These reference groups can also become your in-groups or out-groups. For instance, different groups on campus might solicit you to join. Are there fraternities and sororities at your school? If so, chances are they will try to convince students—that is, students they deem worthy—to join them. And if you love playing soccer and want to play on a campus team, but you’re wearing shredded jeans, combat boots, and a local band T-shirt, you might have a hard time convincing the soccer team to give you a chance. While most campus groups refrain from insulting competing groups, there is a definite sense of an in-group versus an out-group. “Them?” a member might say. “They’re all right, but their parties are nowhere near as cool as ours.” Or, “Only serious engineering geeks join that group.” This immediate categorization into in-groups and out-groups means that students must choose carefully, since whatever group they associate with won’t just define their friends—it may also define their enemies.

Social Networks

These days in the job world we often hear of “networking,” or taking advantage of your connections with people who have connections to other people who can help you land a job. You do not necessarily know these “other people” who ultimately can help you, but you do know the people who know them. Your ties to the other people are weak or nonexistent, but your involvement in this network may nonetheless help you find a job.

Modern life is increasingly characterized by such social networks , or the totality of relationships that link us to other people and groups and through them to still other people and groups. Some of these relationships involve strong bonds, while other relationships involve weak bonds (Granovetter, 1983). Facebook and other Web sites have made possible networks of a size unimaginable just a decade ago. Social networks are important for many things, including getting advice, borrowing small amounts of money, and finding a job. When you need advice or want to borrow $5 or $10, to whom do you turn? The answer is undoubtedly certain members of your social networks—your friends, family, and so forth.

The indirect links you have to people through your social networks can help you find a job or even receive better medical care. For example, if you come down with a serious condition such as cancer, you would probably first talk with your primary care physician, who would refer you to one or more specialists whom you do not know and who have no connections to you through other people you know. That is, they are not part of your social network. Because the specialists do not know you and do not know anyone else who knows you, they are likely to treat you very professionally, which means, for better or worse, impersonally.

Gavin Llewellyn – My social networks – CC BY 2.0.

Now suppose you have some nearby friends or relatives who are physicians. Because of their connections with other nearby physicians, they can recommend certain specialists to you and perhaps even get you an earlier appointment than your primary physician could. Because these specialists realize you know physicians they know, they may treat you more personally than otherwise. In the long run, you may well get better medical care from your network through the physicians you know. People lucky enough to have such connections may thus be better off medically than people who do not.

But let’s look at this last sentence. What kinds of people have such connections? What kinds of people have friends or relatives who are physicians? All other things being equal, if you had two people standing before you, one employed as a vice president in a large corporation and the other working part time at a fast-food restaurant, which person do you think would be more likely to know a physician or two personally? Your answer is probably the corporate vice president. The point is that factors such as our social class and occupational status, our race and ethnicity, and our gender affect how likely we are to have social networks that can help us get jobs, good medical care, and other advantages. As just one example, a study of three working-class neighborhoods in New York City—one white, one African American, and one Latino—found that white youths were more involved through their parents and peers in job-referral networks than youths in the other two neighborhoods and thus were better able to find jobs, even if they had been arrested for delinquency (Sullivan, 1989). This study suggests that even if we look at people of different races and ethnicities in roughly the same social class, whites have an advantage over people of color in the employment world.

Gender also matters in the employment world. In many businesses, there still exists an “old boys’ network,” in which male executives with job openings hear about male applicants from male colleagues and friends. Male employees already on the job tend to spend more social time with their male bosses than do their female counterparts. These related processes make it more difficult for females than for males to be hired and promoted (Barreto, Ryan, & Schmitt, 2009). To counter these effects and to help support each other, some women form networks where they meet, talk about mutual problems, and discuss ways of dealing with these problems. An example of such a network is The Links, Inc., a community service group of 12,000 professional African American women whose name underscores the importance of networking ( http://www.linksinc.org/index.shtml ). Its members participate in 270 chapters in 42 states; Washington, DC; and the Bahamas. Every two years, more than 2,000 Links members convene for a national assembly at which they network, discuss the problems they face as professional women of color, and consider fund-raising strategies for the causes they support.

Key Takeaways

• Groups are a key building block of social life but can also have negative consequences.
• Primary groups are generally small and include intimate relationships, while secondary groups are larger and more impersonal.
• Reference groups provide a standard for guiding and evaluating our attitudes and behaviors.
• Social networks are increasingly important in modern life, and involvement in such networks may have favorable consequences for many aspects of one’s life.

Barreto, M., Ryan, M. K., & Schmitt, M. T. (Eds.). (2009). The glass ceiling in the 21st century: Understanding barriers to gender equality . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Elsesser, K., & Peplau L. A. (2006). The glass partition: Obstacles to cross-sex friendships at work. Human Relations, 59 , 1077–1100.

Gosselin, D. K. (2010). Heavy hands: An introduction to the crimes of family violence (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Granovetter, M. (1983). The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited. Sociological Theory, 1, 201–233.

Maimon, D., & Kuhl, D. C. (2008). Social control and youth suicidality: Situating Durkheim’s ideas in a multilevel framework. American Sociological Review, 73, 921–943.

Marks, S. R. (1994). Intimacy in the public realm: The case of co-workers. Social Forces, 72, 843–858.

Olzak, S. (1992). The dynamics of ethnic competition and conflict . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Stouffer, S. A., Suchman, E. A., DeVinney, L. C., Star, S. A., & Williams, R. M., Jr. (1949). The American soldier: Adjustment during army life (Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, Vol. 1). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sullivan, M. (1989). Getting paid: Youth crime and work in the inner city . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Introduction to Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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11.1 Understanding Social Groups

Learning objectives.

• Define the factors that create social groups.
• Define the concept of social identity, and explain how it applies to social groups.
• Review the stages of group development and dissolution.

We work together in social groups to help us perform tasks and make decisions.

Susan Sermoneta – small group work at FIT – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; Nic McPhee – Four heads are better than one – CC BY-SA 2.0; Hazel Owen – Group work – VPD Meeting – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Although it might seem that we could easily recognize a social group when we come across one, it is actually not that easy to define what makes a group of people a social group. Imagine, for instance, a half dozen people waiting in a checkout line at a supermarket. You would probably agree that this set of individuals should not be considered a social group because the people are not meaningfully related to each other. And the individuals watching a movie at a theater or those attending a large lecture class might also be considered simply as individuals who are in the same place at the same time but who are not connected as a social group.

Of course, a group of individuals who are currently in the same place may nevertheless easily turn into a social group if something happens that brings them “together.” For instance, if a man in the checkout line of the supermarket suddenly collapsed on the floor, it is likely that the others around him would quickly begin to work together to help him. Someone would call an ambulance, another might give CPR, and another might attempt to contact his family. Similarly, if the movie theater were to catch on fire, a group would quickly form as the individuals attempted to leave the theater. And even the class of students might come to feel like a group if the instructor continually praised it for being the best (or the worst) class that she has ever had. It has been a challenge to characterize what the “something” is that makes a group a group, but one term that has been used is entitativity (Campbell, 1958; Lickel et al., 2000). Entitativity refers to something like “groupiness”— the perception, either by the group members themselves or by others, that the people together are a group .

One determinant of entitativity is a cognitive one—the perception of similarity. A group can only be a group to the extent that its members have something in common; at minimum, they are similar because they all belong to the group. If a collection of people are interested in the same things, share the same opinions and beliefs, or work together on the same task, then it seems they should be considered—by both themselves and others—to be a group. However, if there are a lot of differences among the individuals, particularly in their values, beliefs, and behaviors, then they are not likely to be seen as a group.

People generally get together to form groups precisely because they are similar—they are all interested in playing poker, listening to rock and roll, or passing a chemistry test. And groups tend to fall apart because the group members become dissimilar and thus no longer have enough in common to keep them together (Crump, Hamilton, Sherman, Lickel, & Thakkar, 2010; Miles & Kivlighan, 2008).

Communication, Interdependence, and Group Structure

Although similarity is critical, it is not the only factor that creates a group. Groups have more entitativity when the group members have frequent interaction and communication with each other. Although communication can occur in groups that meet together in a single place, it can also occur among individuals who are at great distances from each other. The members of a research team who communicate regularly via Skype, for instance, might have frequent interactions and feel as if they are a group even though they never or rarely meet in person.

Interaction is particularly important when it is accompanied by interdependence —the extent to which the group members are mutually dependent upon each other to reach a goal. In some cases, and particularly in working groups, interdependence involves the need to work together to successfully accomplish a task. Individuals playing baseball are dependent upon each other to be able to play the game and also to play well. Each individual must do his or her job in order for the group to function. And we are also interdependent when we work together to write a research article or create a class project. When group members are interdependent, they report liking each other more, tend to cooperate and communicate with each other to a greater extent, and may be more productive (Deutsch, 1949).

Still another aspect of working groups whose members spend some time working together and that makes them seem “groupy” is that they develop group structure —the stable norms and roles that define the appropriate behaviors for the group as a whole and for each of the members. The relevant social norms for groups include customs, traditions, standards, and rules, as well as the general values of the group. These norms tell the group members what to do to be good group members and give the group more entitativity. Effective groups also develop and assign social roles (the expected behaviors) to group members. For instance, some groups may be structured such that they have a president, a secretary, and many different working committees.

Social Identity

Although cognitive factors such as perceived similarity, communication, interdependence, and structure are part of what we mean by being a group, they do not seem to be sufficient. Groups may be seen as groups even if they have little independence, communication, or structure. Partly because of this difficulty, an alternative approach to thinking about groups, and one that has been very important in social psychology, makes use of the affective feelings that we have toward the groups that we belong to. Social identity refers to the part of the self-concept that results from our membership in social groups (Hogg, 2003). Generally, because we prefer to remain in groups that we feel good about, the outcome of group membership is a positive social identity—our group memberships make us feel good about ourselves.

According to the social identity approach, a group is a group when the members experience social identity—when they define themselves in part by the group that they belong to and feel good about their group membership (Hogg, 2003, 2010). This identity might be seen as a tendency on the part of the individual to talk positively about the group to others, a general enjoyment of being part of the group, and a feeling of pride that comes from group membership. Because identity is such an important part of group membership, we may attempt to create it to make ourselves feel good, both about our group and about ourselves. Perhaps you know some people—maybe you are one—who wear the clothes of their crowd or school to highlight their identity with the group because they want to be part of, and accepted by, the other group members.

The Stages of Group Development

Although many groups are basically static, performing the same types of tasks day in and day out, other groups are more dynamic. In fact, in almost all groups there is at least some change; members come and go, and the goals of the group may change. And even groups that have remained relatively stable for long periods of time may suddenly make dramatic changes, for instance, when they face a crisis, such as a change in task goals or the loss of a leader. Groups may also lose their meaning and identity as they successfully meet the goals they initially set out to accomplish.

One way to understand group development is to consider the potential stages that groups generally go through. As you can see in Figure 11.1 “Stages of Group Development” , the stages involve forming, storming, norming and performing, and adjourning . The group formation stage occurs when the members of the group come together and begin their existence as a group. In some cases, when a new group, such as a courtroom jury, forms to accomplish a goal, the formation stage occurs relatively quickly and is appropriately considered the group’s first stage. In other cases, however, the process of group formation occurs continually over a long period of time, such as when factory workers leave their jobs and are replaced by new employees, or when a fraternity or sorority recruits new members every year to replace the old ones who leave at the end of the school year.

Figure 11.1 Stages of Group Development

This figure represents a general model of the phases of group development, beginning with group formation and ending with adjournment. It should be kept in mind, however, that the stages are not necessarily sequential, nor do all groups necessarily pass through all stages.

The development stage is important for the new members as well as for the group itself. During this time, the group and the individual will exchange knowledge about appropriate norms, including the existing group structures, procedures, and routines. The individual will need to learn about the group and determine how he or she is going to fit in. And the group may be inspecting the individual’s characteristics and appropriateness as a group member. This initial investigation process may end up with the individual rejecting the group or the group rejecting the individual.

If the group formation stage can be compared to childhood, there is no doubt that the next stage— storming —can be compared to adolescence. As the group members begin to get to know each other, they may find that they don’t always agree on everything. In this stage, members may attempt to make their own views known, expressing their independence and attempting to persuade the group to accept their ideas. Storming may occur as the group first gets started, and it may recur at any point during the group’s development, particularly if the group experiences stress caused by a negative event, such as a setback in progress toward the group goal. In some cases, the conflict may be so strong that the group members decide that the group is not working at all and they disband. In fact, field studies of real working groups have shown that a large percentage of new groups never get past the forming and storming stages before breaking up (Kuypers, Davies, & Hazewinkel, 1986).

Although storming can be harmful to group functioning and thus groups must work to keep it from escalating, some conflict among group members may in fact be helpful to the group. Sometimes the most successful groups are those that have successfully passed through a storming stage, because conflict may increase the productivity of the group, unless the conflict becomes so extreme that the group disbands prematurely (Rispens & Jehn, 2011). Groups that experience no conflict at all may be unproductive because the members are bored, uninvolved, and unmotivated, and because they do not think creatively or openly about the topics of relevance to them. In order to progress, the group needs to develop new ideas and approaches, and this requires that the members discuss their different opinions about the decisions that the group needs to make.

Assuming that the storming does not escalate too far, the group will move into a stage in which the appropriate norms and roles for the group are developed, allowing the group to establish a routine and effectively work together. At this stage—the norming and performing stage —the individual group members may report great satisfaction and identification with the group, as well as strong group identity. Groups that have effectively reached this stage have the ability to meet goals and survive challenges. And at this point, the group becomes well tuned to its task and is able to perform the task efficiently.

In one interesting observational study of the group development process in real groups, Gersick (1988, 1989) observed a number of teams as they worked on different projects. The teams were selected such that they were all working within a specific time frame, but the time frame itself varied dramatically—from 8 to 25 meetings held over periods ranging from 11 days to 6 months. Despite this variability, Gersick found that each of the teams followed a very similar pattern of norming and performing. In each case, the team established well-defined norms regarding its method of attacking its task in its very first meeting. And each team stayed with this approach, with very little deviation, during the first half of the time it had been allotted. However, midway through the time it had been given to complete the project (and regardless of whether that was after 4 meetings or after 12), the group suddenly had a meeting in which it decided to change its approach. Then, each of the groups used this new method of performing the task during the rest of its allotted time. It was as if a sort of alarm clock went off at the halfway point, which led each group to rethink its approach.

Most groups eventually come to an end—the adjournment stage. In some cases, this is because the task for which the group was formed has been completed, whereas in other cases, it occurs because the group members have developed new interests outside the group. In any case, because people who have worked in a group have likely developed a strong identification with the group and the other group members, the adjournment phase is frequently stressful, and participants may resist the breakup. Faced with these situations, individuals frequently plan to get together again in the future, exchanging addresses and phone numbers, even though they may well know that it is unlikely they will actually do so. Sometimes it is useful for the group to work ahead of time to prepare members for the breakup.

Key Takeaways

• Social groups form the foundation of human society—without groups, there would be no human culture. Working together in groups, however, may lead to a variety of negative outcomes as well.
• Similarity, communication, interdependence, and group structure are variables that make a collection of individuals seem more like a group—the perception of group entitativity.
• Most groups that we belong to provide us with a positive social identity—the part of the self-concept that results from our membership in social groups.
• One way to understand group development is to consider the potential stages that groups generally go through. The normal stages are forming, storming, norming and performing, and adjourning.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Consider some of the social groups that you belong to. Which of the variables that we discussed in this section make them seem more like a group?
• Consider groups that provide a particularly strong social identity for their members. Why do you think social identity is so strong in these groups, and how does the experience of identity influence the group members’ behavior?

Campbell, D. T. (1958). Common fate, similarity and other indices of the status of aggregate persons as social entities. Behavioral Science, 3 , 14–25.

Crump, S. A., Hamilton, D. L., Sherman, S. J., Lickel, B., & Thakkar, V. (2010). Group entitativity and similarity: Their differing patterns in perceptions of groups. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40 (7), 1212–1230. doi: 10.1002/ejsp.716.

Deutsch, M. (1949). An experimental study of the effects of cooperation and competition upon group processes. Human Relations, 2 , 199–231.

Gersick, C. (1989). Marking time: Predictable transitions in task groups. Academy of Management Journal, 32 , 274–309.

Gersick, C. J. (1988). Time and transition in work teams: Toward a new model of group development. Academy of Management Journal, 31 (1), 9–41.

Hogg, M. A. (2003). Social identity. In M. R. Leary & J. P. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and identity (pp. 462–479). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Hogg, M. A. (2010). Human groups, social categories, and collective self: Social identity and the management of self-uncertainty. In R. M. Arkin, K. C. Oleson, & P. J. Carroll (Eds.), Handbook of the uncertain self (pp. 401–420). New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Kuypers, B. C., Davies, D., & Hazewinkel, A. (1986). Developmental patterns in self-analytic groups. Human Relations, 39 (9), 793–815.

Lickel, B., Hamilton, D. L., Wieczorkowska, G., Lewis, A., Sherman, S. J., & Uhles, A. N. (2000). Varieties of groups and the perception of group entitativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (2), 223–246.

Miles, J. R., & Kivlighan, D. M., Jr. (2008). Team cognition in group interventions: The relation between coleaders’ shared mental models and group climate. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 12 (3), 191–209. doi: 10.1037/1089–2699.12.3.191.

Rispens, S., & Jehn, K. A. (2011). Conflict in workgroups: Constructive, destructive, and asymmetric conflict. In D. De Cremer, R. van Dick, & J. K. Murnighan (Eds.), Social psychology and organizations (pp. 185–209). New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.

Principles of Social Psychology Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Outline The prescribed question for this written task is “How and why is a social group represented in a particular way?” and it explores the persuasive techniques being employed in Michelle Obama’s Convention Speech. The task refers to part 1 (language and power) of the course. In this task, the representation of different social groups mentioned in Obama’s speech and the effects achieved by representing the social groups in certain ways will be examined. The task will focus on exploring four key points: the first one is representation of US military men and women, which are the people being mentioned in Obama’s speech, referred as her inspirations. Then it is going to discuss the way American women are being represented in the speech through the recount of Obama’s grandmother’s experience, and the impact it has on female voters. Furthermore, the representation of American parents in the speech, mainly highlighting their selflessness toward their children. It must be noted that Ohm-la’s main purpose of representing these social groups in a positive light is to increase her popularity among the people and this consequently helps to increase Obama’s votes. The speech was given 2 months prior to the actual presidential election; one can therefore argue that it primarily aimed to attract votes and support for her husband’s campaign. Throughout the analysis, it will also identify the persuasive techniques being employed throughout the speech, such as anecdotes, pathos and more, but more importantly reviewing the effects they have on the speech’s persuasiveness. The language of the speech will be deconstructed to allow a thorough analysis of the text, and the reason for its success as a persuasive speech. 1. How and why is a social group represented in a particular way? Analysis of Michelle Obama’s Convention Speech 2012 Throughout the United States presidential election of 2012, one of the speeches that impressed the public greatly was one given by the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, at the Democratic National Convention. The speech received astonishing amount of positive feedback across social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, praising the way Michelle Obama tied personal history to political policy in a seamless and masterful way; along with her thoughtful portrayal towards these social groups in America: soldiers who came back from war wounded, women at workplace and parents who are of working class. The speech was given 2 months prior to the actual presidential election; one can therefore argue that these social groups are represented positively to attract votes for Obama’s campaign. In Obama’s speech, the US soldiers who came back from war is presented positively by the use of hyperbolic statements, repetition and parallelism to emphasise on their courage and selflessness. the loss of the soldiers are being emphasised using words that have connotations of sacrifice and selflessness, such as “wounded” and “blinded”. The physical losses of the soldiers are marked to highlight their altruistic behaviour of fighting for their county despite their own safety. Hyperbolic statements such as “I’d give my eyes a thousand times again” are used to convey a sense of selflessness by showing their willingness to contribute to the country explicitly with the use of exaggeration. Aside from that, Obama discloses how the wounded soldiers react to their losses and that they are her “inspiration”: “they’re not just going to walk again, they’re going to run, and they’re going to run marathons”. The use of parallel construction reinforces the soldiers’ perseverance and determination; since they are strong enough to go on and live their lives as energetic as before despite the disabilities they may have now. Furthermore, the word “inspirations” carries the connotations of motivation and enlightenment; it suggests that the soldiers are the people who influence Obama’s thoughts and actions. This contributes to her image as being down-to-earth since she communicates her admiration towards the ‘ordinary’ people in the country, moreover states that they are in fact her inspiration, regardless of her status as the First Lady of the country. This establishes the bond between her and the audience at the beginning of the speech, so that they are more likely to accept her words and empathise with her experiences as the speech proceeds. The reason for the US soldiers to be represented in a positively way is because by acknowledging the sacrifice made by the military, it is more likely to win votes from not only the soldiers, but also the retired military people and their families. Moreover, approximately 4% of the United States’ GDP is spent on military, it is evident that the role of military is significant; therefore, it is crucial to gain the support from one of the most powerful groups in the country. American women at workplace are another social group that is represented positively, by integrating anecdotes into the speech and evoking empathy, it shows the diligence and patience of women. Obama portrays women favourably by recounting his husband’s grandmother’s experience of hitting “the glass ceiling”, “like so many women”. By emphasising “so many women” hit the glass ceiling, Obama evokes empathy in the audience; and by acknowledges this issue publicly it also reassures the women experiencing the same problem that their voices have not gone unheard. Obama is tying an issue that is experienced by thousands of women to someone close to Obama, it again reminds the audience that although her family is living in the White House, they still face similar problems as everyone else. Obama also mentions the way her grandmother coped with the issue: she still kept on “waking up at dawn to catch the bus”, “arriving at work before anyone else”, and “giving her best without complaint or regret.” 2In this particular anecdote, women are portrayed as persistent and tough instead of resentful toward the inequalities. This allows women out there who are experiencing this problem to resonate, as well as feeling that their effort is recognised. Moreover, by constantly linking the anecdotes to bigger issues in the society, it assures the public that these issues are just as personal to the Obama family as they are to every other family in the United States, therefore they will not disappoint them when they are creating policies to help. These impacts on the audience ultimately achieve the purpose of urging them to vote for Obama. Lastly, parents who are working to support their children is another social group being represented positively throughout Michelle Obama’s speech by the use of personal anecdotes and anaphora. Many personal anecdotes are featured to portray this social group; for example, Obama reveals that she was worried about her daughters if her husband becomes the president, she questioned “How would we keep them grounded under the glare of the national spotlight?”, “How would they feel being uprooted from their school, their friends, and the only home they’d ever known?” Anaphora is used to emphasise her role as a mother who prioritise her Children before anything else; although she is the First Lady, but just like all the other mothers, she is constantly worrying about their children; this allows all the parents to resonate with her. Obama also narrates how her father “hardly ever missed a day of work” despite the pain he was in due to Multiple Sclerosis, so that he could support Obama and her brother to go to college, because for him, “that’s what it meant to be a man”. The reason for parents to be represented favourably is because it can remind them of their parents’ unconditional love for them, or their devotion toward their children; and by evoking an emotion that is shared by so many people, it allows them to connect to her and vote for Obama, because people are more likely to prefer and vote for someone they can resonate with. In conclusion, Michelle Obama’s Convention speech is able to win popularity due to her skilfulness in representing several social groups positively while maintains a sense of sincerity through integrating anecdotes and the depictions of her own life in the speech. It also ensures the audience who are of those social groups to empathise and resonate with the speech. This consequently allows bond to be established between Obama and the audience, thus leaving a strong impression in the audiences’ mind and possibly, gaining more votes for her husband’s campaign. Word Count: 999

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Stereotypes in Social Groups Essay

Introduction, background information, pro-con argument, my position, works cited.

Stereotypes are virtually present in any social group because they form part of the social identities that people assign each other basing on beliefs, norms, traditions, and physical features.

Fundamentally, stereotypes are attributes that people assign to specific groups of people depending on their social, cultural, traditional, and physical attributes. In essence, stereotypes are erroneous attributes that people have assigned unto others for purposes of identification. Stereotypes can be positive or negative depending on the attributes that they assign on to the people.

Positive stereotypes assign good attributes while negative stereotypes assign bad attributes. According to McGarty, Yzerbyt, and Spears, perception of positive and negative stereotypes is subjective because negative attributes of the majority tend to be negative, whereas positive attributes of the minority tend to be positive (12).

The existence of positive stereotypes benefits members of a given group because they identify good attributes and provide social recognition. Moreover, positive stereotypes are beneficial because they motivate group members to perform well by nurturing their positive attributes.

However, positive attributes hurt members of a group because they distort reality and alienate people in the society. In this view, positive stereotypes are not only beneficial, but also hurtful depending on how a given group takes them. Therefore, this begs a question: Are positive stereotypes beneficial?

In my life, I have encountered a number of stereotypes, which people have made against the Chinese. When I attended class with diverse students from various racial backgrounds, they took me as a great mathematician, yet I was poor in mathematics. As I was not good in mathematics, the stereotype motivated me to be a mathematician, so that I could fit into their perceptions.

With great struggle in class, I had to prove my identity to be a Chinese with great mathematical skills. During my high school education, we were many Chinese in the school, and thus people had difficulties recognizing us because they had stereotyped that all Chinese are alike. Other students claimed that we shared common features like skin color, walking styles, weight, and hair color.

Basing on these features, people have stereotyped that the Chinese are related because they look alike. In the film industry, artists have portrayed Chinese as martial artists (Zinzius 266). In this view, people perceive walking styles and weights of the Chinese as appropriate for martial arts. Therefore, I have experienced aforementioned stereotypes in the course of my life, which associate me with my racial background of Chinese.

Positive stereotypes are beneficial to members of social groups because they enhance their pride and confidence in their respective cultures. Given that diverse cultures exist in the society, some cultures appear to have more privileges than others. Cultures with positive stereotypes have good attributes, which make people from other cultures to emulate the positive attributes.

For example, the stereotype that the Chinese are better than the Americans in mathematics gives the Chinese an impetuous to perform well because they have confidence in their culture. In age-related stereotypes, Boduroglu et al. state that old Chinese can perform memory tasks better than old Americans.

Such positive stereotypes of Chinese are beneficial because they portray Chinese as people with intelligent brains, as they are not only good in mathematics, but also have sharp brains in their old age. In his experience, Steele insinuates that restrictions imposed on them regarding when they were to swim in the pool reduced their confidence as African Americans, while the White Americans were very confident because they did not have any restrictions (2).

In essence, positive stereotypes indicate the extent of social privileges that people enjoy in a diverse society. Thus, the privileged groups have more confidence than unprivileged groups.

Positive stereotypes are also beneficial to members of a social group because they identify positive attributes and thus aid in recognition of people and their respective cultures. Since diverse cultures across the world exist, they have different norms and traditions that define how people behave in society.

Cultural diversity is an important aspect of modern society because people from diverse cultural backgrounds interact in workplaces, schools, markets, cities, and social places. The existence of the majority and the minority groups in the society means that the attributes of the majority are more dominant than the attributes of the minority groups.

McGarty, Yzerbyt, and Spears argue that positive stereotypes are important among the minority groups because they enable the majority groups to identify and recognize their good attributes, and consequently their presence in the diverse society (12). The minority groups always experience a challenge when shaping their identity in a society that the majority dominates.

For example, the Whites can recognize African Americans when they perform extraordinary tasks. The experience of Brent Staples depicts how positive stereotypes, as portrayed in the whistled Vivaldi, changed perceptions of the Whites from perceiving him as an African American man, who is uneducated, unrefined, and violent (Steele 6).

As a mere African American man in the Street, the Whites could not have bothered to identify and recognize, but the stereotype of whistling Vivaldi reversed their perceptions.

Although it is beneficial, positive stereotypes are hurtful because they distort reality by holding on baseless claims. Positive stereotypes depend on false perceptions, which give a person a false sense of importance, which distort the reality. The reality is that people virtually have similar capacities to perform certain tasks provided the conditions are the same.

However, stereotypes give a false impression that one certain group performs better than another certain group, without any scientific basis to back up the assertion. For instance, the stereotype that the Chinese are good mathematicians does not mean all Chinese are good mathematicians whine non-Chinese are poor mathematicians.

According to McGarty, Yzerbyt, and Spears, positive stereotypes are hurtful since “distortions are self-enhancing because they reflect self-serving biases” (7). Fundamentally, positive stereotypes assign unrealistic attributes to individuals in a certain social group.

According to Steele, the White students who knew that the golf task aimed at measuring their natural athletic ability performed poorer than students who knew nothing (7). This implies that positive stereotypes distorted their perceptions and consequently their abilities.

Additionally, positive stereotypes are hurtful because they use personal experiences in setting an example. Blum argues that positive stereotypes emanates from personal beliefs and experiences, which are very subjective and biased (253).

For instance, A White American meets an African American drug addict and concludes that all African Americans are drug addicts. Another example is that an African American encounters a rich White American and infers that all White Americans are rich. Such experiences create positive stereotypes, which are hurtful in the sense that they demean good attributes that others hold and uplift non-existent attributes.

The personal experiences and beliefs, which form the basis of positive stereotypes, alienate people from the mainstream society as they perceive themselves as a special group with unique attributes. Steele notes that positive stereotypes create social problems because they disintegrate society into gender, social, and racial classes. Therefore, positive stereotypes are hurtful to the individuals and society.

Positive stereotypes are beneficial to members of social groups because they enhance confidence that people have in their culture and promote the identification and recognition of other cultures. As aforementioned, positive stereotypes make people to gain confidence in their respective cultures in that they are proud about the unique attributes that they uphold and cherish.

Moreover, stereotypes are beneficial as they make people identify and recognize good attributes that other social groups hold. Comparatively, it is evident that positive stereotypes distort reality by creating false impressions about attributes of people in a certain social group. The personal experiences and beliefs, which form the basis of positive of positive stereotypes, create diverse social groups, and thus cause some forms inequality in society.

Despite the negative impacts, positive stereotypes have overwhelming benefits to members of various social groups. Therefore, people should avoid negative stereotypes and create positive stereotypes since they make people feel confident of their culture and gain recognition in the diverse society, which comprises of the minority and the majority groups.

The stereotypes are relevant in the society because they shape how humans interact and behave. Since the society comprises of diverse races, cultures, and traditions, the nature of stereotypes depicts virtues and values that the society uphold.

In this case, the argument that positive stereotypes are beneficial is relevant because it supports the formation of stereotypes in the society and their application in transforming cultural norms and values. Thus, social groups should embrace positive stereotypes and shun negative stereotypes.

Blum, Lawrence. “Stereotypes and stereotyping: A moral analysis.” Philosophical Papers 33.3 (2004): 251-289. Print.

Boduroglu, Aysecan, Carolyn Yoon, Ting Luo, and Denise Park. “Age-related Stereotypes: A Comparison of American and Chinese Cultures.” Gerontology 52.1 (2006): 324-333. Print.

McGarty, Craig, Vincent Yzerbyt, and Russell Spears. Stereotypes as Explanations. London: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.

Steele, Claude. “An Introduction: At the root Cause of Identity.” Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. Ed. Claude Steele. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. Print.

Zinzius, Birgit. Chinese America: Stereotype and Reality: History, Present, and Future of the Chinese Americans. London: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.

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5.3 Agents of Socialization

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Evaluate the roles of families and peer groups in socialization
• Describe how people are socialized through institutions like schools, workplaces, and the government

Socialization helps people learn to function successfully in their social worlds. How does the process of socialization occur? How do we learn to use the objects of our society’s material culture? How do we come to adopt the beliefs, values, and norms that represent its nonmaterial culture? This learning takes place through interaction with various agents of socialization, like peer groups and families, plus both formal and informal social institutions.

Social Group Agents

Social groups often provide the first experiences of socialization. Families, and later peer groups, communicate expectations and reinforce norms. People first learn to use the tangible objects of material culture in these settings, as well as being introduced to the beliefs and values of society.

Family is the first agent of socialization. Mothers and fathers, siblings and grandparents, plus members of an extended family, all teach a child what he or she needs to know. For example, they show the child how to use objects (such as clothes, computers, eating utensils, books, bikes); how to relate to others (some as “family,” others as “friends,” still others as “strangers” or “teachers” or “neighbors”); and how the world works (what is “real” and what is “imagined”). As you are aware, either from your own experience as a child or from your role in helping to raise one, socialization includes teaching and learning about an unending array of objects and ideas.

Keep in mind, however, that families do not socialize children in a vacuum. Many social factors affect the way a family raises its children. For example, we can use sociological imagination to recognize that individual behaviors are affected by the historical period in which they take place. Sixty years ago, it would not have been considered especially strict for a father to hit his son with a wooden spoon or a belt if he misbehaved, but today that same action might be considered child abuse.

Sociologists recognize that race, social class, religion, and other societal factors play an important role in socialization. For example, poor families usually emphasize obedience and conformity when raising their children, while wealthy families emphasize judgment and creativity (National Opinion Research Center 2008). This may occur because working-class parents have less education and more repetitive-task jobs for which it is helpful to be able to follow rules and conform. Wealthy parents tend to have better educations and often work in managerial positions or careers that require creative problem solving, so they teach their children behaviors that are beneficial in these positions. This means children are effectively socialized and raised to take the types of jobs their parents already have, thus reproducing the class system (Kohn 1977). Likewise, children are socialized to abide by gender norms, perceptions of race, and class-related behaviors.

In Sweden, for instance, stay-at-home fathers are an accepted part of the social landscape. A government policy provides subsidized time off work—480 days for families with newborns—with the option of the paid leave being shared between mothers and fathers. As one stay-at-home dad says, being home to take care of his baby son “is a real fatherly thing to do. I think that’s very masculine” (Associated Press 2011). Close to 90 percent of Swedish fathers use their paternity leave (about 340,000 dads); on average they take seven weeks per birth (The Economist, 2014). How do U.S. policies—and our society’s expected gender roles—compare? How will Swedish children raised this way be socialized to parental gender norms? How might that be different from parental gender norms in the United States?

Peer Groups

A peer group is made up of people who are similar in age and social status and who share interests. Peer group socialization begins in the earliest years, such as when kids on a playground teach younger children the norms about taking turns, the rules of a game, or how to shoot a basket. As children grow into teenagers, this process continues. Peer groups are important to adolescents in a new way, as they begin to develop an identity separate from their parents and exert independence. Additionally, peer groups provide their own opportunities for socialization since kids usually engage in different types of activities with their peers than they do with their families. Peer groups provide adolescents’ first major socialization experience outside the realm of their families. Interestingly, studies have shown that although friendships rank high in adolescents’ priorities, this is balanced by parental influence.

Institutional Agents

The social institutions of our culture also inform our socialization. Formal institutions—like schools, workplaces, and the government—teach people how to behave in and navigate these systems. Other institutions, like the media, contribute to socialization by inundating us with messages about norms and expectations.

Most U.S. children spend about seven hours a day, 180 days a year, in school, which makes it hard to deny the importance school has on their socialization (U.S. Department of Education 2004). Students are not in school only to study math, reading, science, and other subjects—the manifest function of this system. Schools also serve a latent function in society by socializing children into behaviors like practicing teamwork, following a schedule, and using textbooks.

School and classroom rituals, led by teachers serving as role models and leaders, regularly reinforce what society expects from children. Sociologists describe this aspect of schools as the hidden curriculum , the informal teaching done by schools.

For example, in the United States, schools have built a sense of competition into the way grades are awarded and the way teachers evaluate students (Bowles and Gintis 1976). When children participate in a relay race or a math contest, they learn there are winners and losers in society. When children are required to work together on a project, they practice teamwork with other people in cooperative situations. The hidden curriculum prepares children for the adult world. Children learn how to deal with bureaucracy, rules, expectations, waiting their turn, and sitting still for hours during the day. Schools in different cultures socialize children differently in order to prepare them to function well in those cultures. The latent functions of teamwork and dealing with bureaucracy are features of U.S. culture.

Schools also socialize children by teaching them about citizenship and national pride. In the United States, children are taught to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Most districts require classes about U.S. history and geography. As academic understanding of history evolves, textbooks in the United States have been scrutinized and revised to update attitudes toward other cultures as well as perspectives on historical events; thus, children are socialized to a different national or world history than earlier textbooks may have done. For example, information about the mistreatment of African Americans and Native American Indians more accurately reflects those events than in textbooks of the past.

Big Picture

Controversial textbooks.

On August 13, 2001, twenty South Korean men gathered in Seoul. Each chopped off one of his own fingers because of textbooks. These men took drastic measures to protest eight middle school textbooks approved by Tokyo for use in Japanese middle schools. According to the Korean government (and other East Asian nations), the textbooks glossed over negative events in Japan’s history at the expense of other Asian countries.

In the early 1900s, Japan was one of Asia’s more aggressive nations. For instance, it held Korea as a colony between 1910 and 1945. Today, Koreans argue that the Japanese are whitewashing that colonial history through these textbooks. One major criticism is that they do not mention that, during World War II, the Japanese forced Korean women into sexual slavery. The textbooks describe the women as having been “drafted” to work, a euphemism that downplays the brutality of what actually occurred. Some Japanese textbooks dismiss an important Korean independence demonstration in 1919 as a “riot.” In reality, Japanese soldiers attacked peaceful demonstrators, leaving roughly 6,000 dead and 15,000 wounded (Crampton 2002).

The protest affirms that textbooks are a significant tool of socialization in state-run education systems.

The Workplace

Just as children spend much of their day at school, many U.S. adults at some point invest a significant amount of time at a place of employment. Although socialized into their culture since birth, workers require new socialization into a workplace, in terms of both material culture (such as how to operate the copy machine) and nonmaterial culture (such as whether it’s okay to speak directly to the boss or how to share the refrigerator). In the chapter introduction, Noel did not fully embrace the culture of their new company. Importantly, the obligation of such socialization is not simply on the worker: Organizational behavior and other business experts place responsibility on companies; organizations must have strong onboarding and socialization programs in order to build satisfaction, productivity, and workplace retention (Cebollero 2019).

Different jobs require different types of socialization. In the past, many people worked a single job until retirement. Today, the trend is to switch jobs at least once a decade. Between the ages of eighteen and forty-six, the average Baby Boomer of the younger set held 11.3 different jobs (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). This means that people must become socialized to, and socialized by, a variety of work environments.

While some religions are informal institutions, here we focus on practices followed by formal institutions. Religion is an important avenue of socialization for many people. The United States is full of synagogues, temples, churches, mosques, and similar religious communities where people gather to worship and learn. Like other institutions, these places teach participants how to interact with the religion’s material culture (like a mezuzah, a prayer rug, or a communion wafer). For some people, important ceremonies related to family structure—like marriage and birth—are connected to religious celebrations. Many religious institutions also uphold gender norms and contribute to their enforcement through socialization. From ceremonial rites of passage that reinforce the family unit to power dynamics that reinforce gender roles, organized religion fosters a shared set of socialized values that are passed on through society.

Although we do not think about it, many of the rites of passage people go through today are based on age norms established by the government. To be defined as an “adult” usually means being eighteen years old, the age at which a person becomes legally responsible for him- or herself. And sixty-five years old is the start of “old age” since most people become eligible for senior benefits at that point.

Each time we embark on one of these new categories—senior, adult, taxpayer—we must be socialized into our new role. Seniors must learn the ropes of Medicare, Social Security benefits, and senior shopping discounts. When U.S. males turn eighteen, they must register with the Selective Service System within thirty days to be entered into a database for possible military service. These government dictates mark the points at which we require socialization into a new category.

Mass media distribute impersonal information to a wide audience, via television, newspapers, radio, and the Internet. With the average person spending over four hours a day in front of the television (and children averaging even more screen time), media greatly influences social norms (Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout 2005). People learn about objects of material culture (like new technology and transportation options), as well as nonmaterial culture—what is true (beliefs), what is important (values), and what is expected (norms).

Sociology in the Real World

Girls and movies.

Movies aimed at young people have featured a host of girls and women leads. Snow White , Cinderella , and Sleeping Beauty gave way to The Little Mermaid , Beauty and the Beast, and Mulan . In many of those cases, if the character is not a princess to begin with, she typically ends the movie by marrying a prince or, in the case of Mulan, a military general. Although not all “princesses” in Disney movies play a passive role in their lives, they typically find themselves needing to be rescued by a man, and the happy ending they all search for includes marriage.

Alongside this prevalence of princesses, many parents are expressing concern about the culture of princesses that Disney has created. Peggy Orenstein addresses this problem in her popular book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter . Orenstein wonders why every little girl is expected to be a “princess” and why pink has become an all-consuming obsession for many young girls. Another mother wondered what she did wrong when her three-year-old daughter refused to do “nonprincessy” things, including running and jumping. The effects of this princess culture can have negative consequences for girls throughout life. An early emphasis on beauty can lead to reduced interest in math and science among girls, as well as avoiding educational scenarios that are "typically feminine" (Coyne 2016).

Others acknowledge these issues, but find princess movies and "princess culture" less alarming. Some remind concerned parents that children have an array of media and activities around them, and the children may be happy wearing their princess outfit while digging for worms or going to hockey practice, which run counter to feminine stereotypes (Wagner 2019). Others indicate that rather than disallowing princess movies and merchandise, engaging with the children as they enjoy them might be more effective. And many people acknowledge that girls and women are often currently portrayed differently than they were in years past.

Disney seems to have gotten the message about the concerns. Its 2009 Tiana and the Frog was specifically billed as "a princess movie for people who don't like princess movies," and features a talented chef and business owner—who didn't need a man to rescue her—as its main character. Brave 's Merida and the title character in Moana seem to go out of their way to separate themselves from traditional princesses, and undertake great acts of bravery to help others. Frozen focuses on sisterly love rather than romantic love. And though she was never meant to be a princess, Star Wars ' Rey was the go-to girls Halloween costume for years after she was introduced in the movies.

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Essay on Social Groups

In the modern society individuals during lifetime, voluntarily or involuntarily, are bound to numerous social groups that affect their lives in various ways. At birth and for some time after they only belong to their family, but then they face a variety of opportunities of social belonging.

As a little boy, I was greatly influenced by my family members, who constructed the primary social group that affected and is still changing my life. If one should consider a family concerning a social entity – namely a social organization – mine was the basis for my understanding of basic principles of life, human relations and psychological peculiarities of communication between individuals. My family’s influence was a cornerstone of my mental and social growth. It had also made an enormous impact on my attitudes, relationships with other individuals and groups of individuals and different social behavior.

Read more about custom essay writing about Social Groups here!

For millions of people, religion, in any form or trend, is an essential social group that significantly affects their everyday life, personality, behavior, attitudes, and many other aspects of life. The church my family goes to, the community in there, and the religion we share in my family is an essential secondary social group that has elements of the primitive society because as a kid I used to have numerous face-to-face discussions and lessons on religious aspects held by the local church priest. Religious institutions are among the most influential social groups worldwide because they provide a social basis for communication and understanding between the individuals nationwide. The churches and other religious organizations also perform functions of problem-solution and communication centers for numerous followers. They are the “last hope” institutions and serve as a supportive force for people in need.

The second most influential social group was the youth sports organization I had participated ever since childhood. It served as a primary source of friends and life experience for more than eight years, and I consider it to be one of the most influential social groups in my life. First of all, because sport and team playing develop communication and interpersonal skills, which are being very useful in socialization and future growth. I also believe my instructors, co-players formed my views and outlook and the development programs introduced along the course of numerous sports and entertainment events with took part in. My love for games, team spirit, and understanding of hard work, efforts and persistence helped in personal and professional life.

Although it is a formal institution, I treat my youth sports organization as a primary social group, because the participation in it provided a lot of face-to-face interaction and kin-based relationships with my friends and coaches.

The most influential secondary group in my life is the university I am planning to graduate from with a BA in Aviation Management. The school is, to some extent a bureaucratic institution, because it has a mission given by law, it has a strict hierarchical authority, prescribed roles, and routines, a lot of paperwork, professional codes of conduct and a focus of Loyalty. The bureaucracy in the educational institutions is a valuable source of order and high levels of performance.

Another secondary social group I benefited from was my job. My first job was connected with the IT Company that had several characteristics of ideal bureaucracy stated by Max Weber. The company I worked for had quite a rigid hierarchical authority system and distinct prescribed roles and routines. The positive side of such bureaucratic approach was that every employee had a certain set of responsibilities and a predefined authority and always knew what and when to do.

The negative consequence we have experienced several times was that if some specialist was out of office due to some reasons the work process was slowing down, and numerous problems increased. The same situation occurred when new issues, not assigned to anyone before, were raised. The job I had influenced my life and professionalism in numerous ways. It improved my understanding of general business performance, communication principles within and outside the organizational institution, gave views and public knowledge of my future performance and improved communication and professional skills.

These were the most influential social groups I belonged to for the last 28 years of my life.

Primary social groups like my family and sport club friends had more impact on forming of my attitudes and perceptions, as well as future behaviors. The secondary was less influential in the global context, but they all affected me in a different way and to a different extent and changed my social belonging, world perception and outlook. Free essay samples and research paper examples available online are plagiarized. They cannot be used as your own paper, even a part of it. You can order a high-quality custom essay on your topic from expert writers:

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50 Social Groups Examples

A social group is a collection of individuals who share aims and routines, a sense of unity, and a common identity (Tischler, 2011, p. 121).

In a social group, people regularly interact with one another on the basis of shared aims and identity. A social group can be a family, colleagues in a company, people living in a city district, a nation, and other similar collections. A shared sense of belonging is an important feature of social groups.

Social Groups Definition

When two or more people interact with one another, share similar characteristics, and collectively have a sense of unity, they form a social group. Social groups have very different sizes and varieties.

Sociologists differentiate between two categories of social groups:

• Primary Groups , and
• Secondary Groups

Primary Groups describe a small, set of tight, long-lasting, direct, and intimate relationships. They are bound by a strong sense of belonging, such as those within a family or group of close friends.

The group does not have any other purpose than being together. They provide emotional warmth and comfort, with a sense of loyalty and belonging.

Secondary groups gather to achieve a specific and shared goal or to have a common interest and a sense of belonging.

Yet, they have a limited sense of belonging and last for a shorter period of time.

The relationships are impersonal, and interaction and emotional bonding are weaker.

People in your college class are examples of secondary groups. Other examples include relationships among people in businesses, governments, religious institutions, and civic associations.

Social Groups Examples

• A sociology class at a university
• Family  
• A yoga club
• A music band
• Colleagues in a corporate company
• An athletic team
• Association of business people
• Close friends
• Patron circles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

More Examples

• animal rights organizations
• anime clubs
• artist cooperatives
• bridge clubs
• chess clubs
• co-curricular social clubs at university
• community organizations
• community theater organizations
• cooking clubs
• dance clubs
• Dungeons and Dragons groups
• environmental activism organizations
• film enthusiast clubs
• fitness clubs
• fraternities or sororities
• genealogy and family history groups
• health and wellness groups
• labor unions
• LAN gaming clubs
• language learning and exchange meetups
• LGBTQ+ support organizations
• military teams, batallions, etc.
• musical bands
• online hobby forums
• outdoor adventure groups
• parenting groups
• philanthropic organizations
• philosophy discussion forums
• poker clubs
• political parties
• professional organizations
• racial or ethnic communities
• religious congregations
• role-playing and cosplay groups
• seniors groups
• social clubs
• sports teams
• support groups
• tabletop gaming groups
• trade guilds
• travel clubs
• urban gardening establishments
• veteran organizations
• volunteer and community support networks
• women’s groups
• workplace cooperatives
• writers’ co-ops
• youth groups

Key Social Groups Explained

Type: Primary Group

A family is a group of one or more parents and their children living together as a social and emotional unit.

Family is one of the important social groups. It is an example of a primary group in which family members are emotionally invested in one another and are well acquainted with one another.

Support, love, and caring are among the major features of families. The members are intimately familiar with and emotionally invested in one another.

Family communication is based on the entirety of members’ personalities rather than just their social identities or positions as community leaders, students, or athletes.

2.  A sociology class at a university

Type: secondary group

Students attend classes in colleges and form a social group with fellow students in those particular classes.

Students coming together at a sociology class do so only for a specific academic semester and with the purpose of learning about society through a sociological prism.

Social groups have their own set of standards and norms, which may or may not be the same as those of the broader community.

Sociology students may also share some norms such as the willingness to express their own emotions or ideas, interrupting or even challenging the professor, avoiding conflict in the classroom, discussing the paper topics, and the length and frequency of their contributions.

These are all related to the group dynamics and when the standards are broken, sanctions are applied and these may take the form of remarks, disapproving stares, or avoiding the offender. (Tischler, 2011, p.121)

3.  Yoga Club

Type: Secondary group

A yoga club is an association that provides or teaches yoga-related practices such as physical activity, mindfulness and stress management exercises, and healthy eating suggestions.

A yoga club is of the secondary groups. There are several types of yoga practices. Members of a particular yoga style have a specific purpose.

The yoga groups can be Asthanga, Vinyasa, Hatha, Yin Yoga, Kundalini. A particular yoga group can differentiate itself from the rest of the groups as they each have a different set of practices, core values,  and goals.

Thus the group members communicate through and follow certain predetermined rules, as well as established statuses and duties.

4. An athletic team

An athletic team is a group of people, mostly representing sports organizations. The team may play baseball, basketball, football, and volleyball.

The athletic team is also one of the secondary groups. It is mainly big and permanent, and the members of the team and its fans can identify with the group’s core values and goals and can view the out-groups with hostile emotions.

These groups can be dispersed and might have methods for enlisting new members and have a specific set of objectives and purposes.

Less intimacy characterizes these groups. However, they might have strong emotional bonds as they associate themselves with the team’s core values.

5. A music band

A music band is an ensemble of musicians that performs music. It can be defined as a primary group since it has a common purpose, sense of belonging, common identity, and direct and intimate relationships.

It is usually composed of a small group of people who gather together regularly, and the members of the group interact with one another, sharing feelings and ideas.

Music bands follow different genres, such Jazz, Rock, Funk etc. and each band can differentiate itself from others through the genre and its standards.

A social group is made up of two or more people who interact with one another within a set of patterns. Its members have a sense of belonging and a common purpose.

Social groups can be of various types.

A primary group is typically a small gathering. It exhibits intense social engagement and long-lasting emotional bonds. Group members care for one another and passionately identify with the group. Strong emotional bonds are an important feature of this category.

Secondary groups are larger but exhibit less intimate relationships, and play a more significant role in our lives. They enable people to gather for brief periods in order to accomplish a specific objective.

Members of secondary groups do not feel as closely connected to a group as do members of primary groups. Moreover, their emotional bonds with one another are weaker. Secondary organizations are necessary for society to function but unable to provide their members with the potential emotional benefits that primary groups can.

Cooley, C. H., & Rieff, P. (2017). Social organization: A study of the larger mind . London: Routledge.

Elliot, D. L. (2017). Primary groups. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology . Los Angeles: Blackwell. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/97814 05165518.wbeosp092.pub2

Lee, S. C. (1964). The primary group as Cooley defines it. The Sociological Quarterly , 5 (1), 23-34.

Litwak, E., & Szelenyi, I. (1969). Primary group structures and their functions: Kin, neighbors, and friends. American Sociological Review , 465-481.

McCormack, M., Anderson, E., Jamie, K., & David, M. (2021).  Discovering sociology . New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Ritzer, G. (2015).  Essentials of sociology . London: Sage Publications.

Tischler, Henry L. (2011). Introduction to Sociology. Wadsworth, California.

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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1 thought on “50 Social Groups Examples”

When studying social groups, it can be helpful to take a holistic approach. This means considering the group’s history, values, and norms. It can also be useful to observe the group in action and take note of any patterns or behaviors. Remember to approach your research with an open mind and avoid making assumptions. Good luck with your studies!

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Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out

Too much aloneness is creating a crisis of social fitness.

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In its earliest decades, the United States was celebrated for its citizens’ extroversion. Americans weren’t just setting out to build new churches and new cities. Their associations were, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “of a thousand different types … religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.” Americans seemed adept at forming social groups: political associations, labor unions, local memberships. It was as if the continent itself had imbued its residents with a vibrant social metabolism—a verve for getting out and hanging out. “Nothing, in my view,” de Tocqueville wrote, “deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.”

Something’s changed in the past few decades. After the 1970s, American dynamism declined . Americans moved less from place to place. They stopped showing up at their churches and temples. In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert Putnam recognized that America’s social metabolism was slowing down. In the book Bowling Alone , he gathered reams of statistical evidence to prove that America’s penchant for starting and joining associations appeared to be in free fall. Book clubs and bowling leagues were going bust.

If Putnam felt the first raindrops of an antisocial revolution in America, the downpour is fully here, and we’re all getting washed away in the flood. From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 reduced their weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week. In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.

And so what? one might reasonably ask. Aloneness is not loneliness. Not only that, one might point out, the texture of aloneness has changed. Solitude is less solitary than ever. With all the calling, texting, emailing, work chatting, DMing, and posting, we are producing unprecedented terabytes of interpersonal communication. If Americans were happy—about themselves, about their friends, about their country—then whining about parties of one would feel silly.

But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year . The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted . Americans have been so depressed about the state of the nation for so many consecutive years that by 2023, NBC pollsters said , “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”

I don’t think hanging out more will solve every problem. But I do think every social crisis in the U.S. could be helped somewhat if people spent a little more time with other people and a little less time gazing into digital content that’s designed to make us anxious and despondent about the world. This young century, Americans have collectively submitted to a national experiment to deprive ourselves of camaraderie in the world of flesh and steel, choosing instead to grow (and grow and grow) the time we spend by ourselves, gazing into screens, wherein actors and influencers often engage in the very acts of physical proximity that we deny ourselves. It’s been a weird experiment. And the results haven’t been pretty.

To get a crystal-clear picture of how hanging out has dissipated in America, I spent the past week spelunking inside the American Time Use Survey, an annual government poll of how people in the U.S. spend their days. Economists at ATUS carefully track time spent socializing—meaning face-to-face interaction—for more than a dozen demographics.

Broadly, real-world socializing has declined for both men and women, for all ages, for all ethnicities, and for all levels of income and education. Although COVID-19 clearly increased time alone, these trends predate the pandemic. The steepest declines have been among young people, poor people, and Black Americans. Women and 20-somethings enjoy the most social time in a given week, and low-income, middle-aged, unmarried men seem to get together the least. For most groups, the decline was staggered before accelerating after 2015. Beyond in-person hanging, several other forms of socialization have declined by about a third in the past 20 years, including the share of Americans who volunteer and the share of Americans who attend religious services over the weekend.

One of the more curious trends to jump out of the data is that many Americans have traded people for pets in our social time. The average time that Americans spend with their pets has roughly doubled in the past 20 years—both because more people have adopted pets and because they spend more time with them. In 2003, the typical female pet owner spent much more time socializing with humans than playing with her cat or dog. By 2022, this flipped, and the average woman with a pet now spends more time “actively engaged” with her pet than she spends hanging out face-to-face with fellow humans on any given day.

The hang-out depression is particularly bad for teenagers. According to the ATUS, teens and young adults saw by far the largest dip in socializing, especially since 2010. In fact, it is genuinely difficult to find any category of play that isn’t experiencing some kind of Mayday! Mayday! descent among this group. Teens are dating less , playing fewer youth sports , spending less time with their friends , and making fewer friends to begin with . In the late 1970s, more than half of 12th graders got together with their buddies almost every day. By 2017, only 28 percent did . “There’s very clearly been a striking decline in in-person socializing among teens and young adults, whether it’s going to parties, driving around in cars, going to the mall, or just about anything that has to do with getting together in person,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.

I asked Twenge if she could identify large differences by gender or ethnicity among teenagers. She pulled data from the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future, a decades-old survey of teens, which we’ve used to make the following charts. The first shows the share of 12th-grade boys and girls who say they go out with friends two or more times a week. From 1976 to 2022, the number of socializers fell by a similar figure—about 30 percent. Hangouts declined a bit more among Black teens than white teens.

What are the root causes of the great American introversion?

The first explanation is so obvious that it scarcely needs mentioning; in fact, I’ve already mentioned it. Americans are spending less time with other people because they’re spending more time with their screens—televisions and phones. The evidence that young people have replaced friend time with phone time is strong. As Twenge wrote in her book Generations , it’s not just that teens overall seem to have funneled their social lives into their smartphones. Even more telling, the groups with the largest increase in phone use, such as liberal 12th-grade girls, also saw the largest declines in hanging out with friends, strongly suggesting a direct relationship. For those who don’t accept that correlative evidence, we also have a 2019 randomized experiment from NYU and Stanford researchers who found that paying people to deactivate Facebook increased the time they spent socializing with friends. (It also increased the time they watch TV.)

The second explanation is that people are hanging out less because we’re all so damn busy. As The New York Times ’ Jessica Grose notes , people in their 30s and 40s have less leisure time than they did two decades ago. As Anne Helen Petersen has said , Americans have a tendency to spread out, and the built environment of the U.S. housing market forces many people to move away from friends and family, which means they ultimately buy a bit of loneliness with their money.

It’s a compelling argument, and as a new father, I can appreciate how the demands of child care and work might squeeze out the last drops of social time. But the data say this can’t be the whole story. Research by the Philadelphia Fed has found that time alone has increased most for low-income, nonwhite individuals, for whom hours worked haven’t increased much in the past 20 years. This would complicate the idea that loneliness is the price of overscheduled busyness. Twenge told me she’s also unconvinced by the argument about congested schedules, at least as it applies to teenagers. “Sometimes I’ll hear the case that teens are spending so much more time on homework, but the evidence suggests it’s just not true,” she said. “In fact, homework time has gone down in the past few years. The share of teens who have jobs has gone down. Despite some parents jam-packing their kids’ schedules, overall extracurricular time looks pretty stable in surveys. If anything, teens today have more leisure time than they used to. They just choose to spend it on their phones.”

A third explanation for America’s cascading social mojo is the Putnam theory described in Bowling Alone : The rise of aloneness is a part of the erosion of America’s social infrastructure. Someone once told me that the best definition of community is “where people keep showing up.” Well, where is that now, exactly? Certainly not church; each successive generation is attending less than their parents’. Not community centers, or youth sports fields. Even the dubious community-building power of the office, arguably the last community standing for many, is weakening with the popularity of hybrid and remote work. America is suffering a kind of ritual recession, with fewer community-based routines and more entertainment for, and empowerment of, individuals and the aloneness that they choose.

When you put these three stories together, you get something like this: Face-to-face rituals and customs are pulling on our time less, and face-to-screen technologies are pulling on our attention more. The inevitable result is a hang-out depression.

And for young people, all this seems to clearly correlate with actual depression. Teen loneliness has surged in the past decade, alongside teen hopelessness , depression , and suicidal thinking. According to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, the share of teenage girls who say they experience “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased from 36 to 57 percent, and the share of girls who said they’ve contemplated suicide increased 50 percent in the same decade. Neither the decline in socializing nor the surge in mental distress has any precedent on record.

The rise in teen depression coincides with the proliferation of smartphones and social media. “It’s very suspicious that teen anxiety and depression really started to take off around 2012, because that’s when 50 percent of Americans owned a smartphone, when social media went from optional to virtually mandatory, and when smartphones got front-facing cameras,” Twenge told me. Academics including Twenge and the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt have repeatedly argued that phones have driven an anxiety crisis among America’s youth, in part by reducing the presence of physical-world relationships that are necessary for healthy adolescent development. Swapping touches for screen taps, America’s kids are experiencing a more solitary, and melancholy, childhood than we’ve ever seen.

During my time picking through ATUS data, I was reminded of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is the oldest longitudinal study on happiness and well-being ever conducted. Last year, its directors said that the “simple and profound conclusion” of their work was that good relationships are the key to happiness. Just as many people are familiar with the concept of physical fitness, they said, we should be equally open to the concept of social fitness . We should care for our relationships as we’d care for our body.

Public-health experts are comfortable talking about the way several modern phenomena—such as caloric density and a built environment that discourages walking—have contributed to the surge in obesity. One interpretation of the rise in diet-related diseases is that humans are “dysevolved” for a modern food system so rich with carbs, sugars, and manufactured tastiness. Engineered to confront caloric scarcity, we’ve come up in a world of caloric abundance. The result of this mismatch is an obesity crisis and other calamities in physical fitness.

One can imagine a similar framework to explain the deterioration of America’s social fitness. We come into this world craving the presence of others. But a few modern trends—a sprawling built environment, the decline of church, social mobility that moves people away from friends and family—spread us out as adults in a way that invites disconnection. Meanwhile, as an evolutionary hangover from a more dangerous world, we are exquisitely engineered to pay attention to spectacle and catastrophe. But screens have replaced a chunk of our physical-world experience with a digital simulacrum that has enough spectacle and catastrophe to capture hours of our greedy attention. These devices so absorb us that it’s very difficult to engage with them and be present with other people.

The sum result of these trends is that we are both pushed and pulled toward a level of aloneness for which we are dysevolved and emotionally unprepared. Sartre said hell is other people. Perhaps. But the alternative is worse.

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The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap

How a civil rights ideal got hijacked.

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The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked

The fall of affirmative action is part of a 50-year campaign to roll back racial progress.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at the magazine and is the creator of The 1619 Project. She also teaches race and journalism at Howard University.

Anthony K. Wutoh, the provost of Howard University, was sitting at his desk last July when his phone rang. It was the new dean of the College of Medicine, and she was worried. She had received a letter from a conservative law group called the Liberty Justice Center. The letter warned that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, the school “must cease” any practices or policies that included a “racial component” and said it was notifying medical schools across the country that they must eliminate “racial discrimination” in their admissions. If Howard refused to comply, the letter threatened, the organization would sue.

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Wutoh told the dean to send him the letter and not to respond until she heard back from him. Hanging up, he sat there for a moment, still. Then he picked up the phone and called the university’s counsel: This could be a problem.

Like most university officials, Wutoh was not shocked in June when the most conservative Supreme Court in nearly a century cut affirmative action’s final thin thread. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the court invalidated race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Universities across the nation had been preparing for the ruling, trying both to assess potential liabilities and determine the best response.

But Howard is no ordinary university. Chartered by the federal government two years after the Civil War, Howard is one of about 100 historically Black colleges and universities, known as H.B.C.U.s. H.B.C.U. is an official government designation for institutions of higher learning founded from the time of slavery through the end of legal apartheid in the 1960s, mostly in the South. H.B.C.U.s were charged with educating the formerly enslaved and their descendants, who for most of this nation’s history were excluded from nearly all of its public and private colleges.

Though Howard has been open to students of all races since its founding in 1867, nearly all of its students have been Black. And so after the affirmative-action ruling, while elite, predominantly white universities fretted about how to keep their Black enrollments from shrinking, Howard (where I am a professor) and other H.B.C.U.s were planning for a potential influx of students who either could no longer get into these mostly white colleges or no longer wanted to try.

Wutoh thought it astounding that Howard — a university whose official government designation and mandate, whose entire reason for existing, is to serve a people who had been systematically excluded from higher education — could be threatened with a lawsuit if it did not ignore race when admitting students. “The fact that we have to even think about and consider what does this mean and how do we continue to fulfill our mission and fulfill the reason why we were founded as an institution and still be consistent with the ruling — I have to acknowledge that we have struggled with this,” he told me. “My broader concern is this is a concerted effort, part of an orchestrated plan to roll back many of the advances of the ’50s and ’60s. I am alarmed. It is absolutely regressive.”

Wutoh has reason to be alarmed. Conservative groups have spent the nine months since the affirmative-action ruling launching an assault on programs designed to explicitly address racial inequality across American life. They have filed a flurry of legal challenges and threatened lawsuits against race-conscious programs outside the realm of education, including diversity fellowships at law firms, a federal program to aid disadvantaged small businesses and a program to keep Black women from dying in childbirth. These conservative groups — whose names often evoke fairness and freedom and rights — are using civil rights law to claim that the Constitution requires “colorblindness” and that efforts targeted at ameliorating the suffering of descendants of slavery illegally discriminate against white people. They have co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.

During the civil rights era, this country passed a series of hard-fought laws to dismantle the system of racial apartheid and to create policies and programs aimed at repairing its harms. Today this is often celebrated as the period when the nation finally triumphed over its original sin of slavery. But what this narrative obscures is that the gains of the civil rights movement were immediately met with a backlash that sought to subvert first the language and then the aims of the movement. Over the last 50 years, we have experienced a slow-moving, near-complete unwinding of the idea that this country owes anything to Black Americans for 350 years of legalized slavery and racism. But we have also undergone something far more dangerous: the dismantling of the constitutional tools for undoing racial caste in the United States.

Beginning in the 1970s, the Supreme Court began to vacillate on remedies for descendants of slavery. And for the last 30 years, the court has almost exclusively ruled in favor of white people in so-called reverse-discrimination cases while severely narrowing the possibility for racial redress for Black Americans. Often, in these decisions, the court has used colorblindness as a rationale that dismisses both the particular history of racial disadvantage and its continuing disparities.

This thinking has reached its legal apotheosis on the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Starting with the 2007 case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the court found that it wasn’t the segregation of Black and Latino children that was constitutionally repugnant, but the voluntary integration plans that used race to try to remedy it. Six years later, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Shelby v. Holder, gutting the Voting Rights Act, which had ensured that jurisdictions could no longer prevent Black Americans from voting because of their race. The act was considered one of the most successful civil rights laws in American history, but Roberts declared that its key provision was no longer needed, saying that “things have changed dramatically.” But a new study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that since the ruling, jurisdictions that were once covered by the Voting Rights Act because of their history of discrimination saw the gap in turnout between Black and white voters grow nearly twice as quickly as in other jurisdictions with similar socioeconomic profiles.

These decisions of the Roberts court laid the legal and philosophical groundwork for the recent affirmative-action case. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard involved two of the country’s oldest public and private universities, both of which were financed to a significant degree with the labor of the enslaved and excluded slavery’s descendants for most of their histories. In finding that affirmative action was unconstitutional, Roberts used the reasoning of Brown v. Board of Education to make the case that because “the Constitution is colorblind” and “should not permit any distinctions of law based on race or color,” race cannot be used even to help a marginalized group. Quoting the Brown ruling, Roberts argued that “the mere act of ‘separating children’” because of their race generated “ ‘a feeling of inferiority’” among students.

But in citing Brown, Roberts spoke generically of race, rarely mentioning Black people and ignoring the fact that this earlier ruling struck down segregation because race had been used to subordinate them. When Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote those words in 1954, he was not arguing that the use of race harmed Black and white children equally. The use of race in assigning students to schools, Warren wrote, referring to an earlier lower-court decision, had “a detrimental effect upon colored children” specifically, because it was “interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group.”

Roberts quickly recited in just a few paragraphs the centuries-long legacy of legal discrimination against Black Americans. Then, as if flicking so many crumbs from the table, he used the circular logic of conservative colorblindness to dispatch that past with a pithy line: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

By erasing the context, Roberts turned colorblindness on its head, reinterpreting a concept meant to eradicate racial caste to one that works against racial justice.

Roberts did not invent this subversion of colorblindness, but his court is constitutionalizing it. While we seem to understand now how the long game of the anti-abortion movement resulted in a historically conservative Supreme Court that last year struck down Roe v. Wade, taking away what had been a constitutional right, Americans have largely failed to see that a parallel, decades-long antidemocratic racial strategy was occurring at the same time. The ramifications of the recent affirmative-action decision are clear — and they are not something so inconsequential as the complexion of elite colleges and the number of students of color who attend them: We are in the midst of a radical abandonment of a compact that the civil rights movement forged, a shared understanding that racial inequality is harmful to democracy.

The End of Slavery, and the Instant Backlash

When this country finally eliminated first slavery and then racial apartheid, it was left with a fundamental question: How does a white-majority nation, which for nearly its entire history wielded race-conscious policies and laws that oppressed and excluded Black Americans, create a society in which race no longer matters? Do we ignore race in order to eliminate its power, or do we consciously use race to undo its harms?

Our nation has never been able to resolve this tension. Race, we now believe, should not be used to harm or to advantage people, whether they are Black or white. But the belief in colorblindness in a society constructed on the codification of racial difference has always been aspirational. And so achieving it requires what can seem like a paradoxical approach: a demand that our nation pay attention to race in order, at some future point, to attain a just society. As Justice Thurgood Marshall said in a 1987 speech, “The ultimate goal is the creation of a colorblind society,” but “given the position from which America began, we still have a very long way to go.”

Racial progress in the United States has resulted from rare moments of national clarity, often following violent upheavals like the Civil War and the civil rights movement. At those times, enough white people in power embraced the idea that racial subordination is antidemocratic and so the United States must counter its legacy of racial caste not with a mandated racial neutrality or colorblindness but with sweeping race-specific laws and policies to help bring about Black equality. Yet any attempt to manufacture equality by the same means that this society manufactured inequality has faced fierce and powerful resistance.

This resistance began as soon as slavery ended. After generations of chattel slavery, four million human beings were suddenly being emancipated into a society in which they had no recognized rights or citizenship, and no land, money, education, shelter or jobs. To address this crisis, some in Congress saw in the aftermath of this nation’s deadliest war the opportunity — but also the necessity — for a second founding that would eliminate the system of racial slavery that had been its cause. These men, known as Radical Republicans, believed that making Black Americans full citizens required color-consciousness in policy — an intentional reversal of the way race had been used against Black Americans. They wanted to create a new agency called the Freedmen’s Bureau to serve “persons of African descent” or “such persons as once had been slaves” by providing educational, food and legal assistance, as well as allotments of land taken from the white-owned properties where formerly enslaved people were forced to work.

Understanding that “race” was created to force people of African descent into slavery, their arguments in Congress in favor of the Freedmen’s Bureau were not based on Black Americans’ “skin color” but rather on their condition. Standing on the Senate floor in June 1864, Senator Charles Sumner quoted from a congressional commission’s report on the conditions of freed people, saying, “We need a Freedmen’s Bureau not because these people are Negroes but because they are men who have been for generations despoiled of their rights.” Senator Lyman Trumbull, an author of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, declared: “The policy of the states where slavery has existed has been to legislate in its interest. … Now, when slavery no longer exists, the policy of the government must be to legislate in the interest of freedom.” In a speech to Congress, Trumbull compelled “the people of the rebellious states” to be “as zealous and active in the passage of laws and the inauguration of measures to elevate, develop and improve the Negro as they have hitherto been to enslave and degrade him.”

But there were also the first stirrings of an argument we still hear today: that specifically aiding those who, because they were of African descent, had been treated as property for 250 years was giving them preferential treatment. Two Northern congressmen, Martin Kalbfleish, a Dutch immigrant and former Brooklyn mayor, and Anthony L. Knapp, a representative from Illinois, declared that no one would give “serious consideration” to a “bureau of Irishmen’s affairs, a bureau of Dutchmen’s affairs or one for the affairs of those of Caucasian descent generally.” So they questioned why the freedmen should “become these marked objects of special legislation, to the detriment of the unfortunate whites.” Representative Nelson Taylor bemoaned the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, which he accused of making a “distinction on account of color between two races.” He argued, “This, sir, is what I call class legislation — legislation for a particular class of the Blacks to the exclusion of all whites.”

Ultimately, the Freedmen’s Bureau bills passed, but only after language was added to provide assistance for poor white people as well. Already, at the very moment of racial slavery’s demise, we see the poison pill, the early formulation of the now-familiar arguments that helping a people who had been enslaved was somehow unfair to those who had not, that the same Constitution that permitted and protected bondage based on race now required colorblindness to undo its harms.

This logic helped preserve the status quo and infused the responses to other Reconstruction-era efforts that tried to ensure justice and equality for newly freed people. President Andrew Johnson, in vetoing the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which sought to grant automatic citizenship to four million Black people whose families for generations had been born in the United States, argued that it “proposes a discrimination against large numbers of intelligent, worthy and patriotic foreigners,” who would still be subjected to a naturalization process “in favor of the Negro.” Congress overrode Johnson’s veto, but this idea that unique efforts to address the extraordinary conditions of people who were enslaved or descended from slavery were unfair to another group who had chosen to immigrate to this country foreshadowed the arguments about Asian immigrants and their children that would be echoed 150 years later in Students for Fair Admissions.

As would become the pattern, the collective determination to redress the wrongs of slavery evaporated under opposition. Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872. And just 12 years after the Civil War, white supremacists and their accommodationists brought Reconstruction to a violent end. The nation’s first experiment with race-based redress and multiracial democracy was over. In its place, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 ushered in the period of official racial apartheid when it determined that “the enforced separation of the races … neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man … nor denies him the equal protection of the laws.” Over the next six decades, the court condoned an entire code of race law and policies designed to segregate, marginalize, exclude and subjugate descendants of slavery across every realm of American life. The last of these laws would stand until 1968, less than a decade before I was born.

Thurgood Marshall’s Path to Desegregation

In 1930, a young man named Thurgood Marshall, a native son of Baltimore, could not attend the University of Maryland’s law school, located in the city and state where his parents were taxpaying citizens. The 22-year-old should have been a shoo-in for admission. An academically gifted student, Marshall had become enamored with the Constitution after his high school principal punished him for a prank by making him read the founding document. Marshall memorized key parts of the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. After enrolling at Lincoln University, a prestigious Black institution, he joined the debate team and graduated with honors.

But none of that mattered. Only one thing did: Marshall was a descendant of slavery, and Black people, no matter their intellect, ambition or academic record, were barred by law from attending the University of Maryland. Marshall enrolled instead at Howard University Law School, where he studied under the brilliant Charles Hamilton Houston, whose belief that “a lawyer is either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society” had turned the law school into the “West Point of civil rights.”

It was there that Marshall began to see the Constitution as a living document that must adapt to and address the times. He joined with Houston in crafting the strategy that would dismantle legal apartheid. After graduating as valedictorian, in one of his first cases, Marshall sued the University of Maryland. He argued that the school was violating the 14th Amendment, which granted the formerly enslaved citizenship and ensured Black Americans “equal protection under the law,” by denying Black students admission solely because of their race without providing an alternative law school for Black students. Miraculously, he won.

Nearly two decades later, Marshall stood before the Supreme Court on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Brown v. Board of Education, arguing that the equal-protection clause enshrined in the 14th Amendment did not abide the use of racial classifications to segregate Black students. Marshall was not merely advancing a generic argument that the Constitution commands blindness to color or race. The essential issue, the reason the 14th Amendment existed, he argued, was not just because race had served as a means of classifying people, but because race had been used to create a system to oppress descendants of slavery — people who had been categorized as Black. Marshall explained that racial classification was being used to enforce an “inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible.” The court, he said, “should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for.” He sought the elimination of laws requiring segregation, but also the segregation those laws had created.

The Supreme Court, in unanimously striking down school segregation in its Brown decision, did not specifically mention the word “colorblind,” but its ruling echoed the thinking about the 14th Amendment in John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. “There is no caste here,” Harlan declared. “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” But he also made it clear that colorblindness was intended to eliminate the subordination of those who had been enslaved, writing, “In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” He continued, “The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race … is a badge of servitude.”

The court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was not merely a moral statement but a political one. Racial segregation and the violent suppression of democracy among its Black citizens had become a liability for the United States during the Cold War, as the nation sought to stymie Communism’s attraction in non-European nations. Attorney General James P. McGranery submitted a brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Truman administration supporting a ruling against school segregation, writing: “It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed. The United States is trying to prove to the people of the world of every nationality, race and color that a free democracy is the most civilized and most secure form of government yet devised by man. … Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.”

Civil rights activists were finally seeing their decades-long struggle paying off. But the architects and maintenance crew of racial caste understood a fundamental truth about the society they had built: Systems constructed and enforced over centuries to subjugate enslaved people and their descendants based on race no longer needed race-based laws to sustain them. Racial caste was so entrenched, so intertwined with American institutions, that without race-based counteraction , it would inevitably self-replicate.

One can see this in the effort to desegregate schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Across the country, North and South, white officials eliminated laws and policies mandating segregation but also did nothing to integrate schools. They maintained unofficial policies of assigning students to schools based on race, adopting so-called race-neutral admissions requirements designed to eliminate most Black applicants from white schools, and they drew school attendance zones snugly around racially segregated neighborhoods. Nearly a decade after Brown v. Board, educational colorblindness stood as the law of the land, and yet no substantial school integration had occurred. In fact, at the start of 1963, in Alabama and Mississippi, two of the nation’s most heavily Black states, not a single Black child attended school with white children.

By the mid-1960s, the Supreme Court grew weary of the ploys. It began issuing rulings trying to enforce actual desegregation of schools. And in 1968, in Green v. New Kent County, the court unanimously decided against a Virginia school district’s “freedom-of-choice plan” that on its face adhered to the colorblind mandate of Brown but in reality led to almost no integration in the district. “The fact that in 1965 the Board opened the doors of the former ‘white’ school to Negro children and of the ‘Negro’ school to white children merely begins, not ends, our inquiry whether the Board has taken steps adequate to abolish its dual, segregated system,” the court determined.

The court ordered schools to use race to assign students, faculty and staff members to schools to achieve integration. Complying with Brown, the court determined, meant the color-conscious conversion of an apartheid system into one without a “ ‘white’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools.” In other words, the reality of racial caste could not be constitutionally subordinated to the ideal of colorblindness. Colorblindness was the goal, color-consciousness the remedy.

Using Race to End Racial Inequality

Hobart Taylor Jr., a successful lawyer who lived in Detroit, was mingling at a party in the nation’s capital in January 1961 to celebrate the inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson as vice president of the United States. Taylor had not had any intention of going to the inauguration, but like Johnson, Taylor was a native son of Texas, and his politically active family were early supporters of Johnson. And so at a personal request from the vice president, Taylor reluctantly found himself amid the din of clinking cocktail glasses when Johnson stopped and asked him to come see him in a few days.

Taylor did not immediately go see Johnson. After a second request came in, in February, Taylor found himself in Johnson’s office. The vice president slid into Taylor’s hands a draft of a new executive order to establish the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which Johnson would lead. This was to be one of President John F. Kennedy’s first steps toward establishing civil rights for Black people.

Taylor’s grandfather had been born into slavery, and yet he and Taylor’s father became highly successful and influential entrepreneurs and landowners despite Texas’ strict color line.

The apartheid society Taylor grew up in was changing, and the vice president of the United States had tapped him to help draft its new rules. How could he say no? Taylor had planned on traveling back to Detroit that night, but instead he checked into the Willard Hotel, where he worked so intently on the draft of the executive order that not only did he forget to eat dinner but also he forgot to tell his wife that he wasn’t coming home. The next day, Taylor worked and reworked the draft for what would become Executive Order 10925, enacted in March 1961.

A few years later, in an interview for the John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, Taylor would recall what he considered his most significant contribution. The draft he received said employers had to “take action” to ensure that job applicants and employees would not be discriminated against because of their race, creed, color or national origin. Taylor thought the wording needed a propellant, and so inserted the word “affirmative” in front of action. “I was torn between ‘positive’ and ‘affirmative,’ and I decided ‘affirmative’ on the basis of alliteration,” he said. “And that has, apparently, meant a great deal historically in the way in which people have approached this whole thing.”

Taylor added the word to the order, but it would be the other Texan — a man with a fondness for using the N-word in private — who would most forcefully describe the moral rationale, the societal mandate, for affirmative action. Johnson would push through Congress the 1964, 1965 and 1968 civil rights laws — the greatest civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

But a deeply divided Congress did not pass this legislation simply because it realized a century after the Civil War that descendants of slavery deserved equal rights. Black Americans had been engaged in a struggle to obtain those rights and had endured political assassinations, racist murders, bombings and other violence. Segregated and impoverished Black communities across the nation took part in dozens of rebellions, and tanks rolled through American streets. The violent suppression of the democratic rights of its Black citizens threatened to destabilize the country and had once again become an international liability as the United States waged war in Vietnam.

But as this nation’s racist laws began to fall, conservatives started to realize that the language of colorblindness could be used to their advantage. In the fall of 1964, Barry Goldwater, a Republican who was running against President Johnson, gave his first major national speech on civil rights. Civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins had lambasted Goldwater’s presidential nomination, with King saying his philosophy gave “aid and comfort to racists.” But at a carefully chosen venue — the Conrad Hilton in Chicago — in front of a well-heeled white audience unlikely to spout racist rhetoric, Goldwater savvily evoked the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to undermine civil rights. “It has been well said that the Constitution is colorblind,” he said. “And so it is just as wrong to compel children to attend certain schools for the sake of so-called integration as for the sake of segregation. … Our aim, as I understand it, is not to establish a segregated society or an integrated society. It is to preserve a free society.”

The argument laid out in this speech was written with the help of William H. Rehnquist. As a clerk for Justice Robert Jackson during the Brown v. Board of Education case, Rehnquist pushed for the court to uphold segregation. But in the decade that passed, it became less socially acceptable to publicly denounce equal rights for Black Americans, and Rehnquist began to deploy the language of colorblindness in a way that cemented racial disadvantage.

White Americans who liked the idea of equality but did not want descendants of slavery moving next door to them, competing for their jobs or sitting near their children in school were exceptionally primed for this repositioning. As Rick Perlstein wrote in his book “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus,” when it came to race, Goldwater believed that white Americans “didn’t have the words to say the truth they knew in their hearts to be right, in a manner proper to the kind of men they wanted to see when they looked in the mirror. Goldwater was determined to give them the words.”

In the end, Johnson beat Goldwater in a landslide. Then, in June 1965, a few months after Black civil rights marchers were barbarically beaten on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and two months before he would sign the historic Voting Rights Act into law, Johnson, now president of a deeply and violently polarized nation, gave the commencement address at Howard University. At that moment, Johnson stood at the pinnacle of white American power, and he used his platform to make the case that the country owed descendants of slavery more than just their rights and freedom.

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair,” Johnson said. “This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

For a brief moment, it seemed as if a grander, more just vision of America had taken hold. But while Goldwater did not win the election, 14 years later a case went before the Supreme Court that would signal the ultimate victory of Goldwater’s strategy.

Claiming Reverse Discrimination

Allan Bakke was enjoying a successful career at NASA when he decided he wanted to become a physician. Bakke grew up in a white middle-class family — his father worked for the Post Office, and his mother taught school. Bakke went to the University of Minnesota, where he studied engineering and joined the R.O.T.C. to help pay for college, and then served four years as a Marine, including seven months in Vietnam. It was there that Bakke became enamored with the medical profession. While still working at NASA, he enrolled in night courses to obtain a pre-med degree. In 1972, while he was in his 30s, Bakke applied to 11 medical schools, including at his alma mater, and was rejected by all 11.

One of the schools that Bakke, who was living in California at the time, applied to was the University of California at Davis. The school received 2,664 applications for 100 spots, and by the time he completed his application, most of the seats had already been filled. Some students with lower scores were admitted before he applied, and Bakke protested to the school, claiming that “quotas, open or covert, for racial minorities” had kept him out. His admission file, however, would show that it was his age that was probably a significant strike against him and not his race.

Bakke applied again the next year, and U.C. Davis rejected him again. A friend described Bakke as developing an “almost religious zeal” to fight what he felt was a system that discriminated against white people in favor of so-called minorities. Bakke decided to sue, claiming he had been a victim of “reverse” discrimination.

The year was 1974, less than a decade after Johnson’s speech on affirmative action and a few years after the policy had begun to make its way onto college campuses. The U.C. Davis medical school put its affirmative-action plan in place in 1970. At the time, its first-year medical-school class of 100 students did not include a single Black, Latino or Native student. In response, the faculty designed a special program to boost enrollment of “disadvantaged” students by reserving 16 of the 100 seats for students who would go through a separate admissions process that admitted applicants with lower academic ratings than the general admissions program.

From 1971 to 1974, 21 Black students, 30 Mexican American students and 12 Asian American students enrolled through the special program, while one Black student, six Mexican Americans and 37 Asian American students were admitted through the regular program. Bakke claimed that his right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been violated. Though these laws were adopted to protect descendants of slavery from racial discrimination and subordination, Bakke was deploying them to claim that he had been illegally discriminated against because he was white. The case became the first affirmative-action challenge decided by the Supreme Court and revealed just how successful the rhetorical exploitation of colorblindness could be.

Justice Lewis Powell, writing for a fractured court in 1978, determined that although the 14th Amendment was written primarily to bridge “the vast distance between members of the Negro race and the white ‘majority,’” the passage of time and the changing demographics of the nation meant the amendment must now be applied universally. In an argument echoing the debates over the Freedmen’s Bureau, Powell said that the United States had grown more diverse, becoming a “nation of minorities,” where “the white ‘majority’ itself is composed of various minority groups, most of which can lay claim to a history of prior discrimination at the hands of the State and private individuals.”

“The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color,” Powell wrote. “If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal.” Powell declared that the medical school could not justify helping certain “perceived” victims if it disadvantaged white people who “bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the special admissions program are thought to have suffered.”

But who or what, then, did bear the responsibility?

Bakke was raised in Coral Gables, a wealthy, white suburb of Miami whose segregationist founder proposed a plan to remove all Black people from Miami while serving on the Dade County Planning Board, and where the white elementary school did not desegregate until after it was ordered by a federal court to do so in 1970, the same year U.C. Davis began its affirmative-action program. The court did not contemplate how this racially exclusive access to top neighborhoods and top schools probably helped Bakke to achieve the test scores that most Black students, largely relegated because of their racial designation to resource-deprived segregated neighborhoods and educational facilities, did not. It did not mean Bakke didn’t work hard, but it did mean that he had systemic advantages over equally hard-working and talented Black people.

For centuries, men like Powell and Bakke had benefited from a near-100 percent quota system, one that reserved nearly all the seats at this nation’s best-funded public and private schools and most-exclusive public and private colleges, all the homes in the best neighborhoods and all the top, well-paying jobs in private companies and public agencies for white Americans. Men like Bakke did not acknowledge the systemic advantages they had accrued because of their racial category, nor all the ways their race had unfairly benefited them. More critical, neither did the Supreme Court. As members of the majority atop the caste system, racial advantage transmitted invisibly to them. They took notice of their race only when confronted with a new system that sought to redistribute some of that advantage to people who had never had it.

Thus, the first time the court took up the issue of affirmative action, it took away the policy’s power. The court determined that affirmative action could not be used to redress the legacy of racial discrimination that Black Americans experienced, or the current systemic inequality that they were still experiencing. Instead, it allowed that some consideration of a student’s racial background could stand for one reason only: to achieve desired “diversity” of the student body. Powell referred to Harvard’s affirmative-action program, which he said had expanded to include students from other disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those from low-income families. He quoted an example from the plan, which said: “The race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor, just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a Black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

But, of course, a (white) farm boy from Idaho did not descend from people who were enslaved, because they were farmers from Idaho. There were not two centuries of case law arguing over the inherent humanity and rights of farm boys from Idaho. There was no sector of the law, no constitutional provision, that enshrined farm boys from Idaho as property who could be bought and sold. Farm boys from Idaho had no need to engage in a decades-long movement to gain basic rights of citizenship, including the fundamental right to vote. Farm boys from Idaho had not, until just a decade earlier, been denied housing, jobs, the ability to sit on juries and access to the ballot. Farm boys from Idaho had not been forced to sue for the right to attend public schools and universities.

In Bakke, the court was legally — and ideologically — severing the link between race and condition. Race became nothing more than ancestry and a collection of superficial physical traits. The 14th Amendment was no longer about alleviating the extraordinary repercussions of slavery but about treating everyone the same regardless of their “skin color,” history or present condition. With a few strokes of his pen, Powell wiped this context away, and just like that, the experience of 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow was relegated to one thing: another box to check.

Yet at the same time Powell was drafting this ruling, cases of recalcitrant school districts still refusing to integrate Black children were making their way to the Supreme Court. Just 15 years earlier, the federal government called up National Guardsmen to ensure that handfuls of Black students could enroll in white schools.

Indeed, Powell wrote this opinion while sitting on the same court as Thurgood Marshall, who in 1967 became the first Black justice in the Supreme Court’s 178-year history. In Brown, Marshall helped break the back of legalized segregation. Now, as the court deliberated the Bakke case, a frustrated Marshall sent around a two-and-a-half-page typed memo to the other justices. “I repeat, for next to the last time: The decision in this case depends on whether you consider the action of the regents as admitting certain students or as excluding certain other students,” he wrote. “If you view the program as admitting qualified students who, because of this Nation’s sorry history of racial discrimination, have academic records that prevent them from effectively competing for medical school, then this is affirmative action to remove the vestiges of slavery and state imposed segregation by ‘root and branch.’ If you view the program as excluding students, it is a program of ‘quotas’ which violates the principle that the ‘Constitution is color-blind.’”

When Marshall’s arguments did not persuade enough justices, he joined with three others in a dissent from a decision that he saw as actively reversing, and indeed perverting, his legacy. They issued a scathing rebuke to the all-white majority, accusing them of letting “colorblindness become myopia, which masks the reality that many ‘created equal’ have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.”

Marshall also wrote his own dissent, where he ticked off statistic after statistic that revealed the glaring disparities between descendants of slavery and white Americans in areas like infant and maternal mortality, unemployment, income and life expectancy. He argued that while collegiate diversity was indeed a compelling state interest, bringing Black Americans into the mainstream of American life was much more urgent, and that failing to do so would ensure that “America will forever remain a divided society.”

Marshall called out the court’s hypocrisy. “For it must be remembered that, during most of the past 200 years, the Constitution, as interpreted by this court, did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro,” he wrote. “Now, when a state acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier.”

At the end of his lengthy dissent, Marshall pointed out what had become the court’s historic pattern. “After the Civil War, our government started ‘affirmative action’ programs. This court … destroyed the movement toward complete equality,” he wrote. As he said, “I fear that we have come full circle.”

The Reagan Rollback

In 1980, having just secured the Republican nomination for the presidency, Ronald Reagan traveled to Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair to give an address. It was there in that county, a mere 16 years earlier, that three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by Klansmen, among the most notorious killings of the civil rights era.

Standing in front of a roaring crowd of about 10,000 white Mississippians, Reagan began his general-election campaign. He did not mention race. He did not need to. Instead he spoke of states’ rights, replicating the language of Confederates and segregationists, to signal his vision for America.

Despite the Bakke ruling, affirmative action continued to gain ground in the 1970s, with a deeply divided Supreme Court upholding limited affirmative action in hiring and other areas, and the Jimmy Carter administration embracing race-conscious policies. But Reagan understood the political power of white resistance to these policies, which if allowed to continue and succeed would redistribute opportunity in America.

Once in office, Reagan aggressively advanced the idea that racial-justice efforts had run amok, that Black Americans were getting undeserved racial advantages across society and that white Americans constituted the primary victims of discrimination.

A 1985 New York Times article noted that the Reagan administration was “intensifying its legal attack on affirmative action” across American life, saying the administration “has altered the government’s definition of racial discrimination.” As early as the 1970s, Reagan began using the phrase “reverse discrimination” — what the political scientist Philip L. Fetzer called a “covert political term” that undermined racial redress programs by redefining them as anti-white. Reagan’s administration claimed that race-conscious remedies were illegal and that hiring goals for Black Americans were “a form of racism” and as abhorrent as the “separate but equal” doctrine struck down by Brown v. Board.

Reagan, who had secretly called Black people monkeys and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Yet in the first commemoration of that holiday in 1986, he trotted out King’s words to condemn racial-justice policy. “We’re committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas,” he said. “We want a colorblind society, a society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This passage from King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech has become a go-to for conservatives seeking to discredit efforts to address the pervasive disadvantages that Black Americans face. And it works so effectively because few Americans have read the entire speech, and even fewer have read any of the other speeches or writings in which King explicitly makes clear that colorblindness was a goal that could be reached only through race-conscious policy. Four years after giving his “Dream” speech, King wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” And during a 1968 sermon given less than a week before his assassination, King said that those who opposed programs to specifically help Black Americans overcome their disadvantage “never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the Black man’s color a stigma; but beyond this they never stop to realize that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.”

But as the sociologist Stuart Hall once wrote, “Those who produce the discourse also have the power to make it true.” Reagan deftly provided the road map to the nation’s racial future. Tapping into white aversion to acknowledging and addressing the singular crimes committed against Black Americans, conservatives, who had not long before championed and defended racial segregation, now commandeered the language of colorblindness, which had been used to dismantle the impacts of legal apartheid. They wrapped themselves in the banner of rhetorical equality while condemning racial-justice activists as the primary perpetrators of racism.

“There’s this really concerted, strategic effort to communicate to white people that racial justice makes white people victims, and that when people demand racial justice, they don’t actually mean justice; they mean revenge,” Ian Haney López, a race and constitutional law scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “Black people are treated as if they are just any other Americans. There is no history of racial subordination associated with Black people. There is no structural or systemic racism against African Americans. By 1989, it’s over. Reactionary colorblindness has won.”

Diversity vs. Redress

Perhaps no single person has more successfully wielded Reagan’s strategy than Edward Blum. In 1992, Blum, who made his living as a stockbroker, decided to run for Congress as a Republican in a Texas district carved out to ensure Black representation. Blum was trounced by the Black Democratic candidate. He and several others sued, arguing that a consideration of racial makeup when creating legislative districts violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause. Despite the fact that until a 1944 Supreme Court ruling, Texas had selected candidates through all-white primaries, and the fact that the district had been created in part in response to the state’s history of Black-voter suppression, Blum’s side won the case, forcing a redrawing of legislative districts in a manner that diluted Black and Latino voting power. Since that victory, Blum has mounted a decades-long campaign that has undermined the use of race to achieve racial justice across American life.

Blum is not a lawyer, but his organizations, funded by a mostly anonymous cadre of deep-pocketed conservatives, have been wildly effective. It is Blum, for instance, who was the strategist behind the case against the Voting Rights Act. When the Supreme Court again narrowly upheld affirmative action in college admissions in the early 2000s, Blum set his sights on killing it altogether. In that 2003 case, Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion preserving limited affirmative action but putting universities on notice by setting an arbitrary timeline for when the court should determine that enough racial justice will have been achieved. “It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student-body diversity in the context of public higher education,” O’Connor wrote. “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” The use of the term “racial preferences” is key here. Instead of a policy created to even the playing field for a people who had been systematically held back and still faced pervasive discrimination, affirmative action was cast as a program that punished white Americans by giving unfair preferential treatment to Black Americans.

Blum didn’t wait 25 years to challenge affirmative action. His case brought on behalf of Abigail Fisher, a soft-spoken white woman who sued the University of Texas at Austin, after she was denied admission, went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court ultimately upheld the university’s admissions program. In his second attempt, Blum changed tactics. As he told a gathering of the Houston Chinese Alliance in 2015: “I needed Asian plaintiffs.” In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Blum’s group argued, and the court agreed, that affirmative-action programs discriminated against Asian Americans and, at the University of North Carolina, also white students. But many saw Blum’s use of another historically marginalized group in the lawsuit as an attempt to neutralize any argument that those targeting affirmative action opposed racial equality.

Blum’s success relied on defining affirmative action as a program about “visual diversity,” treating race as a mere collection of physical traits and not a social construct used to subordinate and stigmatize. When colleges seek diversity, he said, they are “really talking about skin-color diversity. How somebody looks. What’s your skin color? What’s the shape of your eyes? What’s the texture of your hair? Most Americans don’t think that the shape of your eyes tells us much about who you are as an individual. What does your skin color tell the world about who you are as an individual?” This reasoning resounds for many Americans who have also come to think about race simply as what you see.

Blum has described racial injustice against Black Americans as a thing of the past — a “terrible scar” on our history. As he awaited the court’s ruling last April, Blum told The Christian Science Monitor that today’s efforts to address that past were discriminatory and in direct conflict with the colorblind goals of Black activism. He said that “an individual’s race or ethnicity should not be used to help that individual or harm that individual in their life’s endeavors” and that affirmative action was “in grave tension with the founding principles of our civil rights movement.” But the civil rights movement has never been about merely eliminating race or racism; it’s also about curing its harms, and civil rights groups oppose Blum’s efforts.

Yet progressives, too, have unwittingly helped to maintain the corrupt colorblind argument that Blum has employed so powerfully, in part because the meaning of affirmative action was warped nearly from its beginning by the Supreme Court’s legal reasoning in Bakke. When the court determined that affirmative-action programs could stand only for “diversity” and not for redress, many advocates and institutions, in order to preserve these programs, embraced the idea that the goal of affirmative action was diversity and inclusiveness and not racial justice. Progressive organizations adopted the lexicon of “people of color” when discussing affirmative-action programs and also flattened all African-descended people into a single category, regardless of their particular lineage or experience in the United States.

Campuses certainly became more “diverse” as admissions offices focused broadly on recruiting students who were not white. But the descendants of slavery, for whom affirmative action originated, remain underrepresented among college students, especially at selective colleges and universities. At elite universities, research shows, the Black population consists disproportionately of immigrants and children of immigrants rather than students whose ancestors were enslaved here.

So, at least on this one thing, Blum is right. Many institutions have treated affirmative-action programs as a means of achieving visual diversity. Doing so has weakened the most forceful arguments for affirmative action, which in turn has weakened public support for such policies. Institutions must find ways, in the wake of the affirmative-action ruling, to address the racism that Black people face no matter their lineage. But using affirmative action as a diversity program — or a program to alleviate disadvantage that any nonwhite person faces — has in actuality played a part in excluding the very people for whom affirmative action and other racial redress programs were created to help.

Taking Back the Intent of Affirmative Action

Just as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund used the Brown v. Board of Education ruling as a legal catalyst for eliminating apartheid in all American life, Blum and those of like mind intend to use the affirmative-action ruling to push a sweeping regression in the opposite direction: bringing down this nation’s racial-justice programs and initiatives.

Right after the June ruling, 13 Republican state attorneys general sent letters to 100 of the nation’s biggest companies warning that the affirmative-action ruling prohibits what they call “discriminating on the basis of race, whether under the label of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ or otherwise. Treating people differently because of the color of their skin, even for benign purposes, is unlawful and wrong.” Companies that engage in such racial discrimination, the letter threatened, would “face serious legal consequences.”

The letter points to racial-justice and diversity-and-inclusion programs created or announced by companies, particularly after the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. In response to the killing, a multigenerational protest movement arose and faced violent suppression by law enforcement as it sought to force this nation to see that the descendants of slavery were still suffering and deserved repair. Corporations took a public stance on racial justice, vowing to integrate everything from their boardrooms to their suppliers. Monuments to white supremacists and Confederates that had stood for 100 years were finally vanquished from the public square. And many colleges and other institutions vocally committed to racial justice as an ethos.

But that fragile multiracial coalition — which for a period understood racial redress as a national good needed to secure and preserve our democracy — has been crushed by the same forces that have used racial polarization to crush these alliances in the past. Conservatives have spent the four years since George Floyd’s murder waging a so-called war against “woke” — banning books and curriculums about racism, writing laws that eliminate diversity-and-inclusion programs and prohibiting the teaching of courses even at the college level that are deemed racially “divisive.”

In other words, conservatives have used state power to prepare a citizenry to accept this new American legal order by restricting our ability to understand why so much racial inequality exists, particularly among the descendants of slavery, and why programs like affirmative action were ever needed in the first place.

“Something really stunning and dangerous that has happened during the Trump era is that the right uses the language of colorblindness or anti-wokeness to condemn any references to racial justice,” Haney López told me. “This rhetoric is a massive fraud, because it claims colorblindness toward race but is actually designed to stimulate hyper-race-consciousness among white people. That strategy has worked.”

Today we have a society where constitutional colorblindness dictates that school segregation is unconstitutional, yet most Black students have never attended a majority-white school or had access to the same educational resources as white children. A society with a law prohibiting discrimination in housing and lending, and yet descendants of slavery remain the most residentially, educationally and economically segregated people in the country. A society where employment discrimination is illegal, and yet Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, even when they hold college degrees.

Despite these realities, conservative groups are initiating a wave of attacks on racial-equality programs. About 5 percent of practicing attorneys are Black, and yet one of Blum’s groups, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, sued law firms to stop their diversity fellowships. In August, it also sued the Fearless Fund, a venture-capital firm founded by two Black women, which through its charitable arm helps other Black women gain access to funding by giving small grants to businesses that are at least 51 percent owned by Black women. Even though according to the World Economic Forum, Black women receive just 0.34 percent of venture-capital funds in the United States, Blum declared the fund to be racially discriminatory. Another Blum group, Students for Fair Admissions, has now sued the U.S. Military Academy, even though the Supreme Court allowed race-conscious admissions to stand in the military. Another organization, the Center for Individual Rights, has successfully overturned a decades-long Small Business Administration policy that automatically treated so-called minority-owned businesses as eligible for federal contracts for disadvantaged businesses.

Last year, a group called the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation sued the City and County of San Francisco over their funding of several programs aimed at eliminating disparities Black Americans face, including the Abundant Birth Project, which gives stipends for prenatal care, among other supports, to Black women and Pacific Islanders to help prevent them from dying during childbirth. Even though maternal mortality for Black women in the United States is up to four times as high as it is for white women, conservatives argue that programs specifically helping the women most likely to die violate the 14th Amendment. Even as this lawsuit makes its way through the courts, there are signs of why these sorts of programs remain necessary: It was announced last year that the Department of Health and Human Services opened a civil rights investigation into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for allegations of racism against Black mothers following the death of a Black woman who went there to give birth.

It is impossible to look at the realities of Black life that these programs seek to address and come to the conclusion that the lawsuits are trying to make society more fair or just or free. Instead they are foreclosing the very initiatives that could actually make it so.

And nothing illuminates that more than the conservative law group’s letter warning Howard — an institution so vaunted among Black Americans that it’s known as the Mecca — that its medical school must stop any admissions practices that have a “racial component.” Howard’s medical school, founded in 1868, remains one of just four historically Black medical schools in the United States. Howard received nearly 9,000 medical-school applicants for 130 open seats in 2023. And while almost all of the students who apply to be Howard undergraduates are Black, because there are so few medical-school slots available, most applicants to Howard’s medical school are not. Since the school was founded to serve descendants of slavery with a mission to educate “disadvantaged students for careers in medicine,” however, most of the students admitted each year are Black.

That has now made it a target, even though Black Americans account for only 5 percent of all U.S. doctors, an increase of just three percentage points in the 46 years since Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in Bakke. Despite affirmative action at predominantly white schools, at least 70 percent of the Black doctors and dentists in America attended an H.B.C.U. H.B.C.U.s also have produced half of the Black lawyers, 40 percent of Black engineers and a quarter of Black graduates in STEM fields.

Even Plessy v. Ferguson, considered perhaps the worst Supreme Court ruling in U.S. history, sanctioned the existence of H.B.C.U.s and other Black-serving organizations. If institutions like Howard or the Fearless Fund cannot work to explicitly assist the descendants of slavery, who still today remain at the bottom of nearly every indicator of success and well-being, then we have decided as a nation that there is nothing we should do to help Black Americans achieve equality and that we will remain a caste society.

What we are witnessing, once again, is the alignment of white power against racial justice and redress. As history has shown, maintaining racial inequality requires constant repression and is therefore antithetical to democracy. And so we must be clear about the stakes: Our nation teeters at the brink of a particularly dangerous moment, not just for Black Americans but for democracy itself.

To meet the moment, our society must forcefully recommit to racial justice by taking lessons from the past. We must reclaim the original intent of affirmative-action programs stretching all the way back to the end of slavery, when the Freedmen’s Bureau focused not on race but on status, on alleviating the conditions of those who had endured slavery. Diversity matters in a diverse society, and American democracy by definition must push for the inclusion of all marginalized people. But remedies for injustice also need to be specific to the harm.

So we, too, must shift our language and, in light of the latest affirmative-action ruling, focus on the specific redress for descendants of slavery . If Yale, for instance, can apologize for its participation in slavery, as it did last month, then why can’t it create special admissions programs for slavery’s descendants — a program based on lineage and not race — just as it does for its legacy students? Corporations, government programs and other organizations could try the same.

Those who believe in American democracy, who want equality, must no longer allow those who have undermined the idea of colorblindness to define the terms. Working toward racial justice is not just the moral thing to do, but it may also be the only means of preserving our democracy.

Race-based affirmative action has died. The fight for racial justice need not. It cannot.

Top photo illustration by Mark Harris. Photograph by Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine focusing on racial injustice. Her extensive reporting in both print and radio has earned a Pulitzer Prize, National Magazine Award, Peabody and a Polk Award. More about Nikole Hannah-Jones

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International Women’s Day 2024: Five insightful charts on gender (in)equality around the world

Anna tabitha bonfert, divyanshi wadhwa.

As we commemorate International Women’s Day in 2024 , the urgency for gender equality is more palpable than ever. With the World Bank's forthcoming 2024–2030 Gender Strategy aiming to expedite gender parity to end poverty on a livable planet, it is imperative to delve into the data highlighting the critical areas requiring immediate attention. Drawing from the World Bank’s Gender Data Portal , let’s navigate through three pivotal goals underscoring the pressing need for progress: combating gender-based violence, enhancing economic opportunities, and fostering women’s leadership roles.  

Did you know about our #Gender Data Portal? Explore hundreds of indicators spanning 14 topics from around the globe, accompanied by engaging data visualizations, stories, guidelines, and resources. Dive in now: https://t.co/Qn0AoSeuIj pic.twitter.com/ZMBIW9gVqN — World Bank Data (@worldbankdata) March 4, 2024

Chart #1: Gender-based violence (GBV) remains inexcusably prevalent

Gender-based violence (GBV) is the most egregious manifestation of gender inequality and an alarming challenge to global public health, human rights, and development. One in three women worldwide experience physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence by a non-partner over the course of their life. Young women are the most at-risk group. This pattern holds irrespective of country income classification. GBV has wide repercussions, including deteriorating physical and mental health, reduced access to education and jobs, and worse human development and economic outcomes for survivors and their children.  

Chart #2: Gains in human capital for both boys and girls

Human capital is the foundation for economic progress and development success. The last few decades saw some hard-won gains in gender equality.  

Chart #3: Exploring economic barriers faced by women

Women’s economic prospects remain constrained. Across all regions of the world, women’s labor force participation remains below that of men.  

Chart #4: Women and girls’ time poverty limits their choices

In every single country with data available, women spend more time on unpaid domestic and care work. Women’s disproportionate burden of care and household work has wide-ranging consequences. It takes away time that could be spent working for pay, developing new skills, or growing a business. As a result, women often remain stuck in informal and lower-paying jobs or remain completely outside of the labor force. Valuing unpaid care work is essential for addressing existing gender inequalities and improving labor market outcomes for women.   

Chart #5:  Spotlighting the gap in women’s leadership representation

Though there are many initiatives focused on increasing women's leadership roles at the local governance level, women are still underrepresented in national governance structures and in corporate management.  The last 25 years have seen a steady increase in the proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments more than doubling from about 12% in 1997 to 27% in 2022. Yet, even in high income countries women account for just over 30 percent of parliamentarians. In lower middle-income countries 4 out of 5 parliament seats are occupied by men. 

What lies ahead?

Global trends such as climate change, natural resource scarcity and technological transitions will further exacerbate gender inequalities if no mitigating action is taken. Tracking global trends on key gender statistics will be more vital than ever to develop and implement solutions. Women’s economic participation and leadership improves the management of natural resources, strengthens resilience, and makes economies more competitive. Closing gender gaps remains an urgent imperative, on this day and every day. 

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• International Women’s Day

Data Scientist, Gender Group

Data Scientist, Development Data Group, World Bank

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