750-1000 word response

1

Sociology 3004, Summer 2023 Dr. Wimberley Unit 4: Racial and Ethnic Inequality Lecture 2: Institutional Discrimination

Consider this situation: One person performs some action that results in another person’s death. Did the first person – the “killer” – intentionally kill? Was this person merely negligent? Or was the whole incident really just an unavoidable accident? The answers to those questions influence what we do with the killer. Regardless, we do the same thing with the victim: we bury them or scatter their ashes. Either way, the victim is just as dead.

***

*** Did you read all of the death scenario and all of the cartoon above? If not, go back and read them. The death scenario and the cartoon probably seem to have no relation to each other. Be patient – you’ll see that the death scenario as well as the cartoon both have to do with the concept of discrimination, and more specifically, institutional discrimination. Sociologists define discrimination as behavior with the result that members of a group are harmed by others’ actions just because they belong to that particular group. By “harm” I mean damage to the quality of life (see Unit 1, Lecture 2) experienced by members of this group. By “actions,” I mean actions conceived broadly, i.e., including actions that are simply the everyday enaction of the social structure as opposed to just direct interaction between people in different groups that

2

results in harm. But the word “discrimination” is a term that many people in our society use without a clear sense of what it might mean. We must unpack this concept carefully. So, here goes...

*** Sernau’s Chapter 5 documents considerable racial inequalities in average income, poverty, education, and incarceration, showing that race remains quite relevant in post-Jim Crow America. Your reading by Derald Wing Sue, “The Manifestation of Racial, Gender, and Sexual-Orientation Microaggressions” [pp. 8-9] mentions several concepts that suggest mechanisms that might produce those persistent inequalities: symbolic racism, modern racism, implicit racism, and aversive racism. But what accounts for these persistent inequalities in a society that seemingly has jettisoned Jim Crow-style racial discrimination, if not the reasons given by color-blind racism, as Bonilla-Silva explains that concept? This lecture helps to answer that question. Sernau’s Chapter 5 often mentions discrimination though without really explaining what it is. But his coverage of internal colonialism (pp.120-135, half the chapter) examines some of the structural bases of discrimination – institutional discrimination in particular. So what is institutional discrimination? Institutional (or institutionalized)1 discrimination is discrimination that results from the routine operation of existing social arrangements – arrangements that include social structure, norms and other cultural elements, laws, and organizational policies. This kind of discrimination (review the definition on the previous page) is “institutional” in the sense that it is built into – embedded in – the social order, i.e., into social structure and culture. This definition correctly implies that some discrimination isn’t institutional. That is, some discrimination is personal discrimination: one individual’s deliberate harmful treatment of another person that is linked to the second person’s race or ethnicity and that results from the first individual’s prejudice – NOT a result of social structure, norms and other cultural elements, laws, and organizational policies. A similar type of discrimination is small group discrimination, also not based in the social structure, culture, laws, or policies in the larger society, but unlike personal discrimination it is shared across a small group. But let’s get back to our primary concern, institutional discrimination. Institutional discrimination occurs in two major forms. First, some institutional discrimination is direct, i.e. it is a conscious act that is intended as harmful treatment of racial and ethnic minority groups. For example, when I – a White kid – was growing up in North Louisiana in the 1960s, the schools were legally segregated. Black kids had schools that were poorly maintained (e.g., plumbing repairs went undone, as some of my White friends discovered when a federal judge’s desegregation order moved them to a formerly Black school where, I believe I recall correctly, the water fountains didn’t work). The school board issued Black

1 Either institutional or institutionalized is appropriate usage. Institutional does save a syllable and a few letters.

3

children textbooks only after we Whites had used those books for 8 or more years in the White schools. My older brother had similar recollections of seeing his old, breakdown-prone school bus #7 being passed on to Black kids in the 1950s when he and his White schoolmates got a new bus. These inequities were hardly limited to the educational sphere. The biggest employer in town, a company that owned several related factories, hired Blacks only for the less desirable and lower- paid positions, and hired Whites only for other, better jobs. (A few years after this policy ended, I worked in one of those formerly Black-only factory jobs one summer, and I can assure you it opened my eyes to what a bad job looked like.) Restrooms, housing, and swimming pools were strictly segregated; most places where I spent my time as a kid were off limits to Black people, but I do recall the segregated restrooms at the annual local parish (county) fair. Housing was strictly segregated, and Whites I knew didn’t give a second thought to referring to Black residential areas with a name that included the n-word (and the local White name for one common wildflower included the n-word – and no doubt some Whites there still use that name). Government officials – all the government officials were White – and other Whites who had power to enforce these practices directly intended them as inferior treatment for Blacks, and they had the consciously discriminatory support of the vast majority of Whites in the area. All these are examples of intended or direct institutional discrimination. Second, institutional discrimination also occurs indirectly, that is, without being intended. Wait – what was that I just said?! Institutional discrimination also occurs unintentionally. This contradicts a common assumption in American culture, rooted partly in our cultural biases favoring individualism (how ironic! individualism tends to dismiss culture and social structure, but itself is part of our culture and shapes our social structure), that “discrimination” means a discriminating individual intended to harm someone. What social science means by the word “discrimination” is something quite different. To repeat the definition above: discrimination is behavior resulting in members of a group being harmed by others’ actions simply as a consequence of belonging to that particular group. Notice that this discrimination definition refers to actions but makes no reference to what goes on in people’s minds. Discrimination is not an attitude or feeling in someone’s mind. It isn’t that racist thoughts are irrelevant. These negative attitudes and feelings sometimes do lead to harmful actions. So, we have a name for such negative feelings and stereotyped attitudes toward a group of people: prejudice. We distinguish prejudice from discrimination in order to distinguish racist thoughts from racist behavior because, as a practical matter, it matters a heck of a lot whether something is an attitude or an action. Accordingly, Virginia Tech’s Principles of Community emphasize this very distinction: “We reject all forms of prejudice and discrimination” (https://www.inclusive.vt.edu/Initiatives/vtpoc0.html). Like discrimination, prejudice is commonly institutionalized – in the sense that it’s culturally based – but ultimately we are primarily concerned about how an oppressed group fares in life, and not so much about other people’s mental processes. Intent, like prejudice, is a mental phenomenon; so, it’s not inherent in the “discrimination” concept – thus the distinction between intended and unintended institutional discrimination. There are extremely practical reasons for defining discrimination this fundamentally behavioral rather than mental way.

4

Consider this extended metaphor, which parallels the relationship between discrimination and intent – the scenario I posed at the beginning of this lecture: one person performs some action (e.g., fires a gun, drives a car at high speed) that results in another individual’s death. Did the first person – the “killer” – intentionally kill? Was this person merely negligent? Or was the whole incident really just an unavoidable accident? The answers to those questions influence what we do with the killer, and whether we even refer to that person as a “killer.” Regardless, we do the same thing with the victim: we bury them or scatter their ashes. The victim is just as dead. Indeed, the person would be just as dead if they were killed, say, in a car accident that happened only because a manufacturer unknowingly built a car with defective brakes. Ultimately, why are we concerned about the “killer’s” intent? Why does it matter in the first place? The only reason we care about intent is that we first care about the victim’s outcome. And regardless of whether we decide the “killer” really intended to kill – and regardless of whether we even call that person a killer – there’s no controversy about our calling the victim “dead.” If someone actually did claim the victim hadn’t died, and we had seen the body, our initial reaction might be “they’re nuts!” or that they simply hadn’t been exposed to the facts. And if we learned that this death-denier benefited in some way from the conditions that led to the death, we might indeed suspect the denier of trying to preserve those benefits, even if the denier wouldn’t admit this to himself or herself. In the very same way, we’re ultimately concerned about discrimination because of its outcome for the victim, not because of an individual discriminator’s intent. Regardless of whether the “discriminator” really intended to discriminate, whether they intended to harm someone – if indeed there exist any individual discriminators to be named and blamed – there should be no controversy about our calling the victim “discriminated against.” (This would be a good time for you to go back to page 1 once again to review the definition of discrimination, which revolves around the harm done to someone rather than the action of someone else). Bonilla-Silva’s concept of “color- blind racism” refers to many White Americans’ denial that such discrimination occurs, and to the fact that Whites benefit from such denials (even if they don’t consciously realize it) that help protect White privilege, a concept closely examined by Peggy McIntosh in “White Privilege and Male Privilege” that you read for Unit 1. The cartoon near the beginning of this lecture (I’m going to bug you again: go back and read it now if you didn’t already!) provides some pointed examples of how this can play out in our society – how, for example, when scarce resources such as immigration approval, good jobs, and better housing are divided up, Whites have historically benefited at the expense of other racial and ethnic groups, though Whites commonly take these privileges for granted and find it difficult to recognize that they benefitted from White privilege, which is a form of institutional discrimination. Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege and Male Privilege” from Unit 1 made similar points. So, I’ve now outlined the logic of social science’s definition of institutional discrimination as an observable real-world result – more specifically, as harm that disproportionately, systematically, predictably happens to members of a particular social group or category, and that results from the routine workings of social structure, cultural norms, laws, and/or organizational policies, regardless of anyone’s intent for that harm to occur. The result matters far more than any intent or other particular cause. Indeed, the cause matters to us only because of its result.

5

But in the news media, you’ll periodically hear a politician or commentator contend that “if it isn’t intentional, it isn’t discrimination.” (The next time you hear this, think of my response to it, or at least the polite version of my response: baloney!) Politicians and commentators who make this statement imply, and sometimes continue aloud with, the following words: “... and if it isn’t discrimination, we don’t need to take any action against it.” They rule out – by definition, not by evidence of a causal relationship (do you see the difference between the two?) – any harm that isn’t caused by an identifiable individual acting with intent to harm. In effect, they have simply refused to discuss the matter, but they defend their refusal by trying to convince others there’s nothing to discuss. But SOC 3004 has shown you many widespread patterns of harm that don’t affect people randomly; by now you’ve learned that some categories of people are indeed disproportionately likely to experience harm in such areas as income, education, and jobs. There’s one more distinction to make at this point: unintended institutional discrimination may or may not be rooted in beliefs or attitudes. You may be familiar with the concept of implicit association as it’s applied to racial or other prejudices: implicit biases or implicit stereotypes. There is even an Implicit Association Test (IAT), offered by Project Implicit, that you can take to assess the degree to which you harbor such hidden biases (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html). Organizations in business and medicine have put the IAT to practical use. Implicit bias is focused on unconscious biases, biases that may even contradict what one consciously believes; such unconscious beliefs can and sometimes do result in a person acting in a discriminatory way. These phenomena have cultural origins, though the degree to which individuals embrace them varies by individual. But unintended institutional discrimination may also arise from structural forces with no particular basis in any negative attitudes or beliefs to others based on their race, gender, or other differences, or may arise from a combination of such unconscious and structural processes.

*** To recap, so far the lecture has introduced you to these concepts:

1. Discrimination a. Personal discrimination b. Small group discrimination c. Institutional discrimination (our primary concern)

i. Intended (direct) institutional discrimination ii. Unintended (indirect) institutional discrimination

1. Unintended institutional discrimination arising from beliefs or attitudes (e.g., from implicit bias)

2. Unintended institutional discrimination NOT arising from beliefs or attitudes, but more purely structural in origin

2. Prejudice (unlike discrimination, there’s not much detail to add to this one, because it’s not our primary concern here)

***

So, what does unintended institutional racial discrimination look like in the real world? How does it happen?

6

Here are some U.S. examples of unintended institutional racial discrimination: 1. Many, many people get jobs partly because they know someone, or know someone who knows

someone – as when a manager asks employees if they know of someone who might fill a newly-vacant position in a company. Why do this manager’s actions create an instance of institutional, if unintended, discrimination? Because, due to past discrimination, Whites are apt to be the employees available for the manager to ask, and due to structured patterns of social interaction, these Whites tend to be neighbors of, friends with, and relatives to other Whites (multiracial families are still very much the exception). So guess who's in the best position to be told about the open job? Other Whites. The result is discriminatory, even though the intent wasn't. And it turns out that, in our society, most people get jobs through such informal social networks as this. (Ask yourself if you’ve ever gotten a job this way. When I ask this question in a face-to-face class, lots of hands always go up.) Under such social arrangements, it’s unsurprising that Blacks have higher unemployment rates and lower average incomes than Whites. While these networks may result partly from unconscious racial bias, their negative impact flows directly from the network structure itself.

2. Compared to a petty bourgeoisie member who isn’t White, a White member of the petty bourgeoisie may know more and richer people (family members, friends, neighbors, college acquaintances) in the petty bourgeois or capitalist class; this creates better business connections and opportunities for the White petty bourgeoisie member. Why? As in the previous example, because Whites historically have been economically advantaged, Whites tend to have more social ties to advantaged people.

3. Much of the information and expertise needed to make people successful in their jobs are shared in informal social settings – e.g., parties, beers after work, church services – rather than in formal business settings (Vedantam and Greene, “Being in the Minority Can Cost You and Your Company,” National Public Radio, July 24, 2013). Most often, it is people who aren’t White who are less likely to be participants in these circles, and therefore they are cut out of these informal information flows, which also impedes their advancement in their jobs. (This is something of a digression, but: Vedantam and Greene’s NPR report also notes that not only individuals but the companies themselves are harmed by this, because there are racial barriers to informally sharing information that’s valuable to company success. Employees who are more skilled at informal communication across these barriers are valuable to companies because they help overcome these problems. Studying sociology in college is a way of developing such skills.) Like example #1 above, although implicit bias or a similar social psychological phenomenon may well contribute to such racially differentiated patterns of social interaction, these are social structural patterns, and it is these patterns – not any unconscious bias – that generates institutional discrimination against members of racial minorities who tend to get left out.

4. A person who isn’t White is more likely to have their work constantly questioned or inspected for quality due to some White supervisors’ unconscious biases, whereas a White person is less likely to experience this – which could affect job evaluations, promotions, and pay increases. This point was made in Unit 1, in Peggy McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” (Such questioning or inspection can also result from conscious prejudice, of course, but as described here it is an example of implicit bias playing out.)

5. From early childhood, students of color are surrounded by school materials about White people in history books, in literature, in stories used to teach reading, etc., and they feel that school isn’t about them, much as they feel to some degree that White people tend to view them as people who don’t really belong here. As Jo Ann Robinson, a faculty member at Alabama State College, says at very end of the documentary “Eyes on the Prize: Awakenings” (I might assign

7

that one for you to watch in Unit 6): the experience of racial discrimination – albeit she was referring to quite intentional discrimination – is like being in “the other man's country and you are an alien in it.” Consequently, many of them are less motivated to learn, and they perform more poorly in school. This tends to divert them from college-track courses and from high school graduation. (It’s a pretty limited comparison, but perhaps the closest comparable experience I can recall as a White kid in Southern schools was my first- and second-grade experience with “reader” textbooks about a family and a neighborhood where stereotypical White suburban white-collar fathers commuted to work each day in a large city [probably New York] – a very alien setting, if, like me, you were a kid in the semi-rural South, from a lower- middle class blue-collar family. Did someone intentionally provide a White kid like me with such an alien experience in order to make me feel distance from the materials I was learning to read with? No; those were simply the textbooks that were available on the market, put there by people with privilege that gave them the power to represent the world as they experienced it. Did it interfere with my learning to read? Ultimately, no, but I came from a family that emphasized education; there were otherwise similar White kids I went to school with whose homes’ only book was possibly a Bible, and probably a telephone directory – you know what those were, right? J – and a lot of those kids didn’t do so well. The Black kids my age who – years later – ended up with these textbooks would surely have found them vastly more alien than I did, though I don’t pretend to be able to meaningfully imagine how those books came across to them. None of which means that some of the Black kids weren’t from families that emphasized education, had books, and encouraged reading. Dramatically unlike me, of course, they simultaneously were learning that they could be targeted with violence simply because of their race, and learning that if they weren’t sufficiently deferential to people of a different, dominant race, their opportunities or physical safety could be endangered.) The fact that educational materials today remain heavily White-oriented isn’t necessarily because Whites consciously intended to leave out people of color, but it is a consequence of social structure in the form of policymakers and bureaucracies that can’t conceive of literature or U.S. history that isn’t White-dominated.

6. Children of color who do get on the college track ultimately take SAT (or ACT) exams whose context is the same predominantly White world as in #5 above, and they tend to make lower scores than White students. This is an example of “culturally biased” testing. To the extent that colleges rely on SAT scores, these students are at a disadvantage in admission decisions. (Many White people assume the SAT is an objective, “true” measure of college applicants’ abilities. It isn’t.) It doesn’t seem likely that these tests are deliberately used to put a barrier between people of color and higher education; rather, this is the result of a long-established, taken-for-granted social structure of test construction, test-giving, and admissions processes, shored up by economic interests in maintaining the system as it is.

7. White-centric educational materials continue into the college level and aren’t limited to history, as the assigned reading by Sue on microaggressions describes. As Jose Lara said in a Cal State conference, "White privilege is your history being part of the core curriculum and mine being taught as an elective"2 (though this is now less common, at least at the college level, than it once was). U.S. sociological analysis of inequality has historically been similarly White- centric, and you can see many lingering indications of this in the Gilbert textbook.

2 Jose Lara, "Power in the Classroom: Teaching Ethnic Studies: From Theory to Policy and Practice" (symposium), October 28, 2015, California State University – Northridge. This is the commonly attributed source, but it may not be the original.

8

8. Derald Wing Sue (“Microaggressions”) examines how even statements that Whites intend to be complementary to members of minority groups are actually degrading because of the implicit assumptions of White superiority that lie behind those statements (e.g., “you are a most articulate young man” to a Black student, the subtle implication being that for a Black person to be articulate is exceptional and therefore noteworthy). (This is another example of implicit bias.)

So, we see that discrimination is complex and can be very subtle. Laws that merely forbid blatant individual discriminators from intentionally discriminating will not stop discrimination, because a lot of discrimination isn’t intentionally committed by blatant individual discriminators. Laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act and court rulings like Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 that prohibit overtly racially discriminatory government practices and laws also won’t stop all discrimination, because a lot of discrimination isn’t the result of overt, intended institutional discrimination. More nuanced affirmative action policies are required, even though they can be rather imprecise instruments. A 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court relied on this logic of unintended institutional discrimination when they ruled in June 2015 that

the 1968 Fair Housing Act prevents more than just intentional discrimination in the housing market. The court said the law can also prohibit seemingly race-neutral policies that have the effect of disproportionately harming minorities and other protected groups, even if there is no overt evidence of bias behind them.... As overt racial discrimination has receded from the housing market, civil rights lawyers and housing advocates have argued that "disparate impact" claims are vital to dismantling policies and practices that sound like they have little to do with race at all, such as zoning laws that bar multi-family apartment construction in wealthier white suburbs.... The case arose from a lawsuit filed by the Inclusive Communities Project against the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs over how it distributes tax credits for low-income housing. ICP argued that the state's formula effectively ensured that low-income housing was primarily built in poor, minority neighborhoods, and seldom placed in white suburban ones. As a result, poorer, minority families in need of affordable housing had little option but to live in impoverished communities without access to good schools, jobs or opportunity. [Emily Badger, “Supreme Court upholds a key tool fighting discrimination in the housing market,” Washington Post, 6/25/15, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/25/supreme-court- upholds-a-key-tool-fighting-discrimination-in-the-housing-market/]

This ruling is an example of the practical, if not uncontroversial, value of sociology for revealing harmful social phenomena that can’t be understood merely by examining individual actors and their intentions. The 4 justices in the minority seem to have needed some sociology courses. History is full of prestigious and powerful individuals being wrong – for example, at one time, lots of them believed the sun revolved around the earth, and some of them punished people who correctly claimed it was the other way around.

9

Microaggressions as institutional discrimination Derald Wing Sue’s essay on microaggressions, that you are reading for this unit, provides many examples of culturally-based behaviors that constitute institutional discrimination – sometimes intentional, but much more commonly unintentional. Sue, a psychologist, is one of the foremost scholars of microaggressions: “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual-orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group” (p. 5). I hope that as you read that essay you will envision yourself as the aggressor in at least some of Sue’s examples, and come away from that reading to stop yourself from committing similar behaviors in everyday life. No one (of any gender, racial or ethnic, or other group – along with every single member of this class, including myself) is immune from committing these behaviors.

*** One of the most important things you should take away from this lecture is that we should look for racism not in particular individuals and their actions – though many people intentionally or uncaringly act in racist ways – but in our culture and social structure. It’s called systemic racism, or institutional racism, or structural racism. Racism is fundamentally systemic; individuals enact it, but they do so as a result of it being embedded in our culture and social structure. I’ll close this lecture by repeating two paragraphs from Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege and Male Privilege” (pp. 372-373) that you read in Unit 1. At this point in the course, you should be able to see it a bit differently than when we started a few weeks ago. Read it again and look in her more eloquent prose for many of the concepts (not necessarily labeled with the same words) introduced in this lecture.

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms that we can see and embedded forms that members of the dominant group are taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring racial dominance on my group from birth. Likewise, we are taught to think that sexism or heterosexism is carried on only through intentional, individual acts of discrimination, meanness, or cruelty, rather than in invisible systems conferring unsought dominance on certain groups. Disapproving of the systems won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes; many men think sexism can be ended by individual changes in daily behavior toward women. But a man's sex provides advantage for him whether or not he approves of the way in which dominance has been conferred on his group. A "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems. To redesign social systems, we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

Obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that

10

democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already. Though systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me, and I imagine for some others like me, if we raise our daily consciousness on the privileges of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken invisible privilege systems and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

Is it “reverse racism,” or a well-justified assist (i.e., affirmative action)? Cartoons by Barry Deutsch.

Dr. Wimberley, 6/16/23