Minority, Majority, and Ethnic Groups and Ethnic Switching

Q1

Minority group is a culturally associated term that refers to the subordination given to a
group of people. In mixed-race societies and developed countries where socioeconomic
differences are apparent, the concept of minority/majority groups prevails highest. According to
Conerly (2021), minority groups are regarded as objects of collective discrimination by a large
part of the population. These people are singled out based on their physical characteristics or
those socio-culturally defined for maltreatment. The aspect of maltreatment intertwines receiving
or having limited access to community resources and shared majority interests. As posited in the
second sentence, minority groups are substantially left out of competitive societal resources. For
example, the education level of white Americans beat that of the Native Americans. In this case,
the Native Americans are the minority groups. They are underserved and underpopulated
compared to most whites in the country.
Contrastively, the majority group conceptualizes the dominating population. In a mixed
social community, the majority group concept applies to who holds the highest number of social
positions, the most educated, and the most socially privileged. When a given race of people holds
more political positions in executive administration, policing oversight, and law enforcement,
they dominate. In return, they discriminate against the subordinate group for reasons ranging
from reduced job opportunities and economic downturns. For example, the migrants into the
United States have often formed the minority while the majority of white Americans, whether
with jobs or jobless, have been the majority group. Therefore, the migrants have socially been at
the mercy of the white Americans.

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Lastly, an ethnic group refers to that group sharing social culture. The social cultures, as
underpinned by Conerly (2021), express that beliefs in religion, traditions, languages, norms, and
values influence an ethnic group. Although the term applies in concepts of race and racism
classification, the trigonometry about it is on societally ascribed meaning. For example, Irish,
African, and Italian Americans have distinct sociocultural characteristics. Therefore, ethnic
group is a subset connotation for denoting the sociocultural origin of a people.

Q2

Ethnic switching is a term that refers to members who change their ethnicity to another
for varying political and social reasons. This concept was first witnessed in the 1960 and 1990
American census. There were reported cases of increased native Indian population. As attributed
by Nagel (2020), the reasons for the surge in the population of Native Americans could not be
accounted for naturally through births or immigration. It purposely had people from outside the
community changing their ethnic identities to become more native in representation. Therefore,
their solidification into one could have been attributed to political activation and the need for
cultural identity retention (Nagel, 2020). The native American communities were known
historically to be scattered. Ethnic switching in this dichotomy surrounds itself with aspects of
making a racially dwindling community more vibrant and self-sustaining in the face of opposing
factors.
Ethnic switching has positively impacted the census count of Native Americans. While a
census is conducted to ramify how a population behaves in a decade timeline, it also shows
projections and forecasts about resource distribution to a given people. Over the years, the effect
of ethnic switching has seen an upsurge in the political representation of Native Americans in
national politics (Nagel, 2020). The rise in the number of people identifying as Native Americans

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has influenced the formation of Federal Indian Policy and political Indian activism (Nagel,
2020). Tentatively, where there is evidence of people, the focus shifts to activism if the
communication slowly diminishes. Moreover, by positively impacting the census count of Native
Americans, resources such as healthcare, education, and land rights have equally ramified how
ethnic interactions occur across America. Many native Americans have become empowered
economically, socially, and politically. In conclusion, ethnic switching revamped the image of
Native Americans after periodic census counts.

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References

Conerly, T. R. (2021). Introduction to Sociology 3e. OpenStax. Available at
https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/11