Sociological Categories In The Early Twentieth Century

Symbolic interactionism proposes that the origin of the meaning of sociological categories is the interaction between individuals and that these interactions shape the way that these categories change over time. George Herbert Mead, and Herbert Blumer, the proponents of the theory in the early Twentieth Century, believed in the effectiveness of the analysis of social problems in the micro scale. In terms of race, their theory proposes that racial inequality could arise from the stereotypes perpetuated and the meaning assigned to different racial groups in individual face-to-face interactions (Ferris and Stein 32-33). Certainly, interactions between the groups do shape levels of tolerance because they help to dispel or reinforce stereotypes and “fear of the
Meanings assigned to African-Americans abound in American law. One prominent example is the so-called Three-Fifths Clause of the U.S. Constitution that appears in Article 1, Section 2, which in 1787 defined a black American as three-fifths of a “free” man, or indeed as categorically less than a human being in the eyes of the law ("The Constitution Of The United States: A Transcription." ). Much more effective than the individual exchange of ideas, definitions such as this reinforced the bigotry of the time, and powerfully justified and perpetuated these beliefs on a national scale. Indeed, after the American Civil War, in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court continued to give constitutional justification to the prevalent racist ideology of the time, when it denied black Americans the right to be protected from discrimination from “private individuals.” (USSC, 109, 3). The result was that, in all spheres of daily life, African Americans were defined as people excluded from equal protection under the law. With this precedent, the discrimination they faced continued unchecked, even if face-to-face interactions widely subjugated the racist ideas behind it over