ABSTRACT
Sometimes an ethnic minority dominates a majority, as in the well-known example of South Africa, where the political system is structured upon racial differences. In the post-war period there has been an influx of two major groups of people from other countries and other cultures into several Western European countries. Others emigrated because they had more or less identified with the colonisers, and no longer felt comfortable, or felt even unsafe, in their own decolonized homelands. Prejudice is a negative attitude toward a social group and toward individual members of that group. Unlike prejudice, a stereotype, which is a set of beliefs and expectancies about a social group, is not necessarily negative. Both prejudice and stereotypes are based upon a categorization process, a grouping of persons into categories on the basis of some common characteristic. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
