Abstract
Positive intergroup contact with socially and economically advantaged national majorities has been shown to reduce ethnic identification among minorities, thereby undermining ethnic minority activism. This finding implies that ethnic identity is the relevant social identity driving ethnic minorities’ struggle for equality. We argue that the study of the “sedating” effect of positive intergroup contact for minorities should be more nuanced. The existence of multiple and sometimes interplaying social identities can foster a reinterpretation of the meaning of “ethnic” activism. This study therefore examines how the interplay of ethnic and national identities shapes the sedating effect of contact on minority activism. We expect national identification to buffer the sedated activism resulting from reduced ethnic identification. That is, the mediation from intergroup contact to reduced ethnic activism through weakened ethnic identification is expected to be moderated by national identification. With survey data from Bulgaria, we investigated support for ethnic activism among Bulgarian Roma (N = 320) as a function of their contact with the national majority as well as their degree of ethnic and national identification. The predicted moderated mediation was revealed: a negative indirect relationship between contact and activism through decreased ethnic identification occurred among Roma with low national identification, whereas no sedating effect occurred among Roma identifying strongly as members of the Bulgarian nation. We discuss the meaning of national identification for the Roma minority, who experience harsh discrimination in countries where they have been historically settled, as well as convergence of these findings with work on dual identification. We highlight the role of interacting social identities in mobilizing resources for activism and the importance of adopting a critical view on ethnic discourse when studying activism in both traditional and immigrant minorities.
Highlights
Minority activism aims at modifying norms or practices established by a majority group (Moscovici, 1976)
Building on the literature revealing this “irony of harmony” resulting from positive intergroup contact (Saguy et al, 2009; see Kauff et al, in press), our goal is to examine whether the sedating effect of positive contact on ethnic activism via reduced ethnic identification is buffered by national identification of minority members
The analytic strategy was to first attempt to replicate the sedating effect of intergroup contact on ethnic activism through reduced ethnic identification, and to test whether national identification can buffer this effect
Summary
Minority activism aims at modifying norms or practices established by a majority group (Moscovici, 1976). Most countries are ethnically diverse in this sense, and ethnic identities usually differentiate subordinate minorities from dominant majorities within superordinate nation-states (see Staerklé et al, 2010). The ethnic identities of national minorities (or majorities) are in part relational, stemming from interdependent comparisons, and frequently, unequal treatment. Notwithstanding the criticism addressed to integration policies that focus on prejudice reduction rather than addressing structural inequalities, recent research has shown that members of ethnic minorities who experience positive contact with members of the advantaged, or dominant, majority display attenuated ethnic activism (e.g., Dixon et al, 2007), partly because of reduced ethnic identification (e.g., Wright and Lubensky, 2009). We conducted a cross-sectional survey in Bulgaria, a multicultural society composed of ethnic minorities among which Roma are the second largest
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