099 Sociocultural Leveraging: How and Why Status Majorities Elevate One Minority Group to Downgrade Another

Saturday, March 15, 2014: 9:00 AM-10:45 AM
Blue Room (Omni Shoreham)
This panel aims to theorize a social and political process through which members of a status majority group elevate one minority group in order to further isolate and repress another. Such processes of “socio-cultural leveraging” have been identified in a wide variety of locations and time periods. In Europe, populist Dutch parties have publicly sympathized with gays who have been targeted by Muslims; in so doing, they tap into a broader cultural context by claiming one historically marginalized group as part of the national community while stigmatizing another. Similar processes are found in Britain and France, where Hindus and East Asians respectively are compared favorably to Muslims, and where Afro-Caribbeans have been elevated at the neighborhood level compared to South Asians. The process also operates in tandem with gender dynamics, such as when male political leaders identify Muslim women as victims of Muslim men.  In this panel, we assemble a number of examples of this process in order to identify the theoretical elements underpinning this process, including the mechanisms by which leveraging occurs and the forces driving it.  Utlimately we aim to develop this new theoretical concept so it can be applied to a wide range of settings.
Organizer:
Kimberly Morgan
Chair:
Erik Bleich
Discussant:
Tom Guglielmo
The Nativist Triangle: Religion, race, and sex in the Netherlands
Markus Balkenhol, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Jan Willem Duyvendak, University of Amsterdam; Paul Mepschen, University of Amsterdam
Racial and ethnic leveraging in a color-blind context: Roma and Muslim patients in French hospitals
Christophe Bertossi, French Institute of International Relations; Dorothée Prud'homme, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux
See more of: Session Proposals