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Migratory flux and new racism

October 14, 2002

The growing migratory flux to Portugal makes it necessary to re-examine the fundamental question of social co-existence among groups that are culturally different. Recent research in social psychology carried out at Instituto de Ci'™ncias Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa - ICSUL (Social Sciences Institute of Lisbon University), within the framework of the programme "Racism and naturalization of cultural differences", reveals important results about the attitudes of white citizens towards black citizens in Portuguese society.

The study developed by Marcus Lima and Jorge Vala assesses the role of values of meritocratic individualism, characteristic of western societies, with regard to the white majority towards the black minority. The main objective of the authors was to check if the black group were subject to discrimination by the white group in situations where the values mentioned are adopted by the minority group. The values in question are profit, wealth, power and social recognition.

This study aims to understand if it is the perception of difference or cultural similarity among these groups that motivates racial discrimination. In this way the research analyses, basically, the response of white individuals about minority groups that change their culture of origin, making themselves more culturally similar to the dominant group.
In theory, within the social psychology framework, individualistic values represent an important symbolic resource in competition in the job market, and so the adoption of those values by an exogroup of another ethnic group will be seen in a negative way. In this way, similarity constitutes a double threat: on a symbolic level, it means a threat to the specific nature of the group identity, and the fear of losing this; in the context of the job market, the threat is material.

The research was carried out with white university students in Lisbon aged between 18 and 37, and the analysis of the responses took into account the level - be it high or low-of adherence to meritocratic individualism. This meant evaluating the responses to two situations: a minority group changes its culture and abandons its collectivist values, substituting them for individualistic ones, and the other being where the minority group resist the change and remains collectivist.

It was confirmed that black people who do not change their culture and remain collectivist are viewed more positively than those who adopt the individualism of the dominant group. Apart from this, black people that do not change are viewed more positively than white people who do not change.

It was also shown that the negative evaluation of black people who assimilate culturally, is done by the negation of the positive points of that group, and not through the attribution of negative points, resulting in new, veiled expressions of racism. This means that ostensible racism, supported by the ideas of race and of social hierarchy, nowadays has a tendency to decrease. New forms of racism are not based on the exclusion of black people from the category of human beings but in infra-humanization, which means their exclusion from the category «modern and civilised men».

The present context of immigration, that apart from the flux of black population, more recently has brought people from Eastern Europe, brings up the issue of how to manage cultural diversity in Portuguese society. The ideal coexistence could come through the establishment of common identities and simultaneous maintenance of particular identities, in such a way as to allow more cooperative and less conflicting relationships.

From the researchers point of view, inter-group cooperation will only be possible when the idea of diversity is integrated into common identities. The results of the study show that one of the obstacles to a human prototype characterised by diversity is the western model of man, stuck in the values of power and meritocratic individualism. A prototype characterised by diversity implies a cultural change, oriented by the values of universalism, that are characterised by an openness to inter-group contact.

This means urgent change and reflection, as "millions of new immigrants prepare to knock on the door of Europe and Europe cannot survive without letting them in".

Observatório da CiÙncia e do Ensino Superior