greatly to the development of a distinctive American culture and
interbred extensively with the white population. However, it was
only with the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that they can be said to have
achieved full and effective citizenship.Dominance, assimilation and social pluralism
As far as both ethnic and racial relations are concerned, three main
alternative social and political patterns seem possible. First, a
relationship of (usually racial) social and political dominance – the
South African term of ‘apartheid’ being appropriate. An extreme
expression of this pattern is where one group is enslaved by the other.
In more recent years, however, such a frank state of affairs has
seemed unacceptably bad public relations in a world in which the
rhetoric, at least, of democracy predominates. Therefore the language
of equality and nationalism usually prevails. In America the official
doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ prevailed between the landmark
Supreme Court rulings of Plesseyv Ferguson(1896) and Brownv the
Board of Education of Topeka(1954), until it was conceded that such
a doctrine was a contradiction in terms. In Africa, white dominance in
South Africa was justified by the creation of ‘homelands’ in which
blacks were accorded the trappings of sovereignty – millions of blacks
being declared aliens in the land of their birth. In contemporary
Europe there is a similar tendency to declare immigrant ‘guest-
workers’ of unsuitable ethnic origin to be non-citizens without
rights. Similarly, in Malaysia, ‘Malays’ (those who speak Malay,
practise Islam and conform to Malay customs) have a special status in
citizenship and land law as opposed to others – in effect those of
Chinese and Indian origin (Suffian et al., 1978: 94).
The most extreme expression of the attitudes towards racial and
ethnic difference implicit in a pattern of dominance is where the state
machinery is employed in an attempt to eliminate an ethnic, national
or racial group from a particular geographical area (or indeed totally).
This is known in international law as genocide. The best known
example is the Holocaust in which the Nazi state attempted to
eliminate the European Jewry. Unfortunately more recent examples
of ‘ethnic cleansing’ can be cited in the former Yugoslavia and in
Rwanda. This is usually accompanied by attempts to stereotype the112 PROCESSES