with his personal power and his role. His personal power, however meager, is enough for him to accept any larger scale imbalances. For him and many others, power equals status. Keeping the members of the minority class severed, assures the continuance of white male supremacy. The dominant culture uses division, separation, segregation, and differentiation to suppress blacks, who fight among each other as directed by a white society, thereby unwittingly collaborating with the powerful to maintain the unfair statuses. Blacks support the socially stratified system of race relations, driving the existing antagonism underground.
In a similar manner, the dominant culture also uses monolithic, unitary stereotypes, or status generalizations. In other words, people exercise selectivity of the senses; they generally see what they want to see, often by bringing preconceived ideas into a situation. This selective attention, which sometimes leads to drastic contradictions of true characters, focuses on the ascribed status characteristics of an individual (f
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