Aspiration to Community: Community Responses to Rejection

While people may belong to multiple psychological communities, each has a have primary community which reinforces norms, values, identities and, provide structures and social support systems that are crucial to the well-being of its members. In some situations, people aspire to membership of a community, but are rejected. This paper examines the responses of coloured South Africans and Anglo-Indians in their aspirations to membership of European communities. By the use of status borrowing, relative advantage, and social comparison, these groups tried to enhance the importance of the language and culture they shared with the Europeans, while rejecting the indigenous parts of their heritage. However, the European groups rejected them as "inferiors", while still providing them with some degree of status and privilege above that of the indigenous groups. It was found that socially constructed differences and social distances between communities, racism, and other negative outcomes associated with rejection and marginality operated at social and psychological levels to suppress the members of the aspirant groups. A proposal of immediate and longer term responses to the social stratifications and inequities are set forward in order to understand the adjustments over time that must be made by these groups. It is recommended that understandings of response to oppression and marginalization should go beyond the individual level to include community level responses.