From: timlee@public.btr.com
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american
Subject: Re: Group Rights vs. Individual Rights / Group Power vs. Individual Power
Date: 13 Aug 92 04:50:27 GMT
Reply-To: timlee@btr.com (Timothy J. Lee)
Followup-To: soc.culture.asian.american
Distribution: soc

shaw@whopper.lcs.mit.edu (Andy Shaw) writes:
|Unlike rights, there is a concept of "group power".  Whereas a group may
|not have any more rights than an individual, a group can have
|_significantly_ more power than an individual, and some groups can have
|_significantly_ more power than other groups.  The individual power that
|each member of a group has is highly dependent upon the power that his
|group holds.
|
|This does not imply that every member of a more powerful group is more
|powerful than every member of a weaker group.  For instance, it is clear
|that I, as a member of the Asian-American group, am _more_ powerful than
|most members of the white group, despite the fact that the white group in
|the US is much more powerful than the Asian-American group.

Maybe I'm just more cynical, but it seems to me that in situations
where a given group becomes powerful, the power that group holds
tends to concentrate in a small subset known as leaders (presidents,
chairpersons, executives, directors, etc.), while most of the members
of the group have little power.  They may derive benefits from the
power of the group (e.g. a labor union winning better pay), but
have little control over the group's exercise of power (e.g. the
legendary stories of corruption in some labor unions).

This means that one should always take with a grain of salt any
claim that someone claims to represent you as part of a group.
For example (for USA citizens living in the USA), does Congress
represent you, a member of the group known as citizens of the USA?
If you are a voter for a minority party in a well-gerrymandered
district, probably not very well.

|Do I have the power of an equally talented white American?  Probably not.
|But even if I did, let's ask a more pertinent question -- does the average
|Asian-American have the same power as the average white American?
|Definitely not.  Group power means that the mediocre members of your group
|get an advantage over the mediocre members of other groups, and in so
|doing, add to the power of the above-average members of your group.

Note, however, that the groups under discussion (Asian American
people and European American people) do not necessarily wield
power in an organized manner.  The use of power to effect racial
discrimination causes greater harm on average to Asian American
people than to European American people simply because there are
more non-Asian American people than there are non-European American
people using their power to racially discriminate and because
discrimination against one's own group is rare.  It is not a
large scale organized effort; instead it is the sum of individual
actions.

I suppose the conclusion would be that the nature of power and
its exercise depend on the nature of the group and its degree of
organization.  A highly organized group provides its leaders with
large shares of the group's power, while the others in the group
hold little power.  An unorganized group, on the other hand, does
not grant individuals unusual powers, although the aggregation of
individuals' exercise of power can have a group effect.  In each
case, persons in the group may benefit or be harmed by the group's
actions (whether organized or unorganized) whether or not they
personally have power.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy J. Lee                 timlee@btr.com  ...!decwrl!btr!timlee
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Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american