The Diversity Challenge: Social Identity and Intergroup Relations on the College Campus

7. In Search of a Common Identity: National and University Identities

Chapter 7 In Search of a Common Ingroup Identity: National and University Identities I n chapter 6, we argued that, in some contexts, the ethnic identities of Asian American and Latino students vary more as a function of how close they are to the immigrant experience than as a function of how much discrimination they have experienced as members of minority ethnic groups in the United States. This pattern is consistent with a black exceptionalism hypothesis of race and ethnicity, which proposes that, at least in the United States, a color line divides those of African ancestry from everyone else. According to this model, African Americans are unique in that their high levels of ethnic identification are driven by strong and persistent beliefs that they and other members of their ethnic group are discriminated against in American society . As such, the previous chapter emphasized similarities in the content , origins, and effects of the college experience on the ethnic identities of Asian Americans and Latinos and the uniqueness of blacks along these dimensions. By contrast, this chapter highlights ways in which the ethnic identities of people in the dominant ethnic group in the United States, whites, differ from the ethnic identities of people in ethnic minority groups—Asian Americans, Latinos, and blacks. This chapter also differentiates the experience, on the one hand, of Latinos and African Americans—minority ethnic groups with relatively low socioeconomic status—from the experience, on the other hand, of Asian Americans—a minority ethnic group with intermediate socioeconomic status. The main distinction between this chapter and the previous one is in how the ethnic groups are categorized. In the previous chapter, ethnic groups were categorized according to immigrant status. On average, Asian Americans and Latinos in the United States are much closer to the immigrant experience than whites and blacks. For this reason, they tend to describe themselves in terms of their national origins more than whites and blacks do, and those with stronger ethnic identities tend to be those who have immigrated to the United States more recently. In another important way, however, the ethnic identities of Asian Americans and Latinos are more similar to the ethnic identity of African Americans , with whom they share subordinate ethnic status in the United States, than to that of whites. For example, some recent research suggests that for the three ethnic minority groups, ethnic identity tends to bolster feelings that minorities get unfair treatment in the United States. For whites, on the other hand, ethnic identity appears to be associated with a denial that minorities get unfair treatment (see, for example , Levin et al. 1998; Peña and Sidanius 2002; Sidanius et al. 1997). Findings such as these suggest that ethnic identity reflects not only the unique immigrant experience of Asian Americans and Latinos but also the experience of subordination shared by all ethnic minority groups in the United States. Using both social dominance theory and the common ingroup identity model as interpretive frameworks, this chapter examines the intersection between students’ subgroup identities as members of specific ethnic groups and superordinate identities as members of larger groups such as Americans or UCLA students. The social dominance model argues that the experience of ethnic subordination within a society creates similarities in the meaning of ethnic identity for all subordinated groups and that this subordinate ethnic identity is distinct in many ways from the ethnic identity of the dominant group. In the United States, for example , ethnic identity among whites should imply a “group dominance” orientation that favors group-based inequality, because ties to the highstatus white ingroup afford greater access to the economic and political resources used in maintaining social hierarchy. In contrast, for members of minority groups, ethnic identity should imply a counterdominance orientation or a rejection of the system that relegates one’s ethnic group to a subordinate position in the social hierarchy. In the United States, The Diversity Challenge 164 then, ethnic identities may be imbued with either support for or opposition to group-based hierarchy, depending on the status of one’s ethnic group.1 Given these contrasting group identities, many fear that tensions will rise as members of different ethnic groups come together on the college campus. One way to reduce such intergroup tension, as suggested by Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio in the common ingroup identity model, is to get people to accept higher-order, superordinate identities that emphasize what...