Great, just what I need.
Colorblind Racism
By Sally Lehrman, AlterNet
September 18, 2003
African Americans with a college diploma find themselves unemployed almost twice as often as whites with the same education. Hispanics must get by on only about half of the individual income that Asian Americans and whites divvy up among the bills.
And when blacks and Latinos are hospitalized with a heart problem, they are less likely than European Americans to receive catheterization, be sent home with beta blockers, or even be advised to take aspirin to protect their health.
While many Americans agree that open racial bigotry is generally a thing of the past, stark disparities in daily life persist, as documented by academic researchers, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Institute of Medicine.
Frustrated with theories plainly unable to explain the problem, sociologists increasingly are relying on a new framework to understand racism and develop solutions. "It's not just Archie Bunker any more," says Troy Duster, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and New York University who is president-elect of the American Sociological Association.
Just in the past six months, at least five books - including one co-authored by Duster - have put forward a fresh analysis of racial injustice. They set aside overt prejudice and individual acts of discrimination, which they assert actually may have little impact in today's world. Instead they pull back the covers on social practices and policies sewn into the fabric of work, school and the medical system that favor whites. Even the most well-intentioned white person, they say, benefits from a legacy of accumulated preferential treatment.
In part, these scholars hope to inject new ways of thinking into California's debate over the potential value of "color-blind" government policies to create a more equitable society. They aim to create new paradigms for pushing beyond historical discrimination in order to understand the roots of ongoing racial injustice.
"Intellectuals lost track of the ability to discuss what racism is after the Civil Rights Act," says Andrew Barlow, referring to the landmark 1964 legislation that prohibited employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion or national origin. Research on inequities continued to focus solely on discriminatory acts by individuals, he explains, adding, "We are really at the beginning of a new era."
The emerging school of sociologists also is responding to intellectuals such as Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom (America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible, 1997), and Shelby Steele (A Dream Deferred, 1999), who assert that discrimination is old news. Consisting mostly, but not entirely, of conservatives, this group says the country needs to transcend race by acknowledging the progress made over the past several decades. Race-conscious policies, they argue, only stir up resentment among whites while also promoting a lack of ambition among people of color by holding them to a lower standard.
As support for their claims, they point to the genetic evidence provided by the Human Genome Project that race has no biological foundation as a way to categorize people. They also cite a 1998 statement by the American Anthropological Association that explains "race" as a classification system invented in the 18th century to justify status differences between European settlers and conquered and enslaved peoples, then expanded to support efforts such as the Nazi extermination of Jews.
In August 2002, the American Sociological Association took a stand against such attempts to abolish "race" as untrue and irrelevant. In a statement, the professional society urged social scientists not to ignore race classifications or stop using them as a research tool, even though they may be biological fiction. "Those who favor ignoring race as an explicit administrative matter, in the hope that it will cease to exist as a social concept, ignore the weight of a vast body of sociological research that shows that racial hierarchies are embedded in the routine practices of social groups and institutions," the society wrote.
The statement sparked a debate in the society's newsletter, in which California State University-Los Angeles professor Yehudi Webster complained that sociologists - as well as government officials, educators, and journalists - who use race classifications promote racial awareness and separatism, which in turn foster exclusion and discrimination. Intermarriage, migration and genetic redistributions make such boundaries meaningless, Webster wrote.
While race may not hold up as a biological concept, responded Duster and Barlow, its workings as a social idea cannot be ignored. "Not everything 'real' is genetic, and we use racial categories to interact with each other in ways that have significant consequences," explains Pilar Ossorio, a microbiologist and assistant professor of law and medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin. In its statement, the sociological society urged members to track and study race-based data collected by public agencies in order to understand and respond to the deep inequities caused by racialized social and economic structures.
An increasing number of sociologists acknowledge that the old ways of understanding racial disparities are no longer very useful. Along with studying individual discrimination, they now are attempting to unravel the ways racial privilege has been structured into the day-to-day workings of institutions from education to public transportation to criminal justice. "White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society," written by seven scholars including Duster, begins the story in the 1930s with Roosevelt's New Deal, aimed to protect the working class but revised by Congress to safeguard racial segregation as well.
The Social Security Act excluded domestic and agricultural workers from old-age pension and unemployment compensation. Three-quarters of the black population, from domestics to self-employed sharecroppers, fell through the net. Similarly, the Wagner Act, which empowered unions, also allowed labor to shut black workers out from closed shops. Loans under the Federal Housing Act differentially provided whites the wherewithal to move into new suburbs, while federal subsidies built public housing to contain black migrants from the South in urban areas.
The GI bill, enacted in 1944, radically expanded the already racially biased economic provisions of the time. While millions of returning veterans and war industry workers became eligible for low-interest mortgages and free access to higher education, whites benefited most. Federal lending rules favored segregated suburbs and they had the educational credentials to go to college. These policies formed a foundation that has supported white economic advantage generation-to-generation to this day, the book's authors write.
The racial hierarchy established over the middle of the 20th century has largely held fast because one generation builds on the accomplishments of the last, Duster explains. Like interest on a bank deposit, children collect economic potential for themselves from the property and social status of their parents. Just as directly, he argues, disadvantages such as barriers to well-paying jobs, segregation in housing and discrimination in lending reverberate from parent to child. "The past becomes relevant to the present as personal wealth and assets are reproduced from generation to generation," agrees Barlow. His new book on globalization makes a similar argument about the historical underpinnings of U.S. racial stratification. Furthermore, privileges in housing, jobs, education and other arenas reinforce and augment one another, he says.
And far from lessening over time, Barlow argues that the disparities built into American society are becoming more entrenched. In the 1960s and '70s, business regulation, low-income housing, job training, public health and other social programs successfully began to compensate for long-term economic advantages held by white people. But starting in the 1980s, the growth of the service sector and technology information jobs, the mobility of businesses, and policy changes such as deregulation and the curtailment of taxes reversed the trend. As industry extends its global reach and creates large pools of investment capital in developed countries, whites are clinging tightly to their privileges, he says. "A greater disparity in income and growing inequality makes more and more of the middle class experience a sense of crisis, so they try to buffer themselves," says Barlow, who describes himself as a civil rights activist as well as a sociologist. "We need to think about racism in a new way."
Scholars now are studying the cause and effect of racial stratification in more detail. New York University doctoral candidate Julie Sze, for example, is identifying the neighborhoods where medical waste incinerators most often are built, then examining both why those sites were chosen and how those decisions may contribute to health disparities such as higher rates of asthma among African Americans. Other research explores economic issues such as the ways housing segregation limits people's job options. Sociologists Lawrence Bobo of Harvard University and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva of Texas A&M are studying hidden racial animosity, while others have investigated differences in the ways the same teachers treat students of different races.
Barlow, Duster and colleagues emphasize that whites may have no awareness of their privileged status even as they protect their interests. When parents successfully fight to protect funding for suburban high schools, for example, they enable those facilities to offer advanced placement classes and leadership opportunities that in turn help students win a spot in the best colleges. Urban educators rarely have such advocates, and thus are unable to offer the same level of academic advantages. But both parents and graduates of top-tier schools - most often white or Asian American - are likely to consider their achievements solely the result of the young peoples' own hard work.
While whites will acknowledge that disparities in education or other realms exist, Barlow says, they are more likely to attribute these to a lack of ambition and effort on the part of minorities than to structural favoritism toward whites built into U.S. institutions for generations.
"You don't need to be a racist to promote policies that are race-conscious," says David Wellman, a professor of community studies at UC-Santa Cruz and one of the "White-Washing Race" authors. "Most whites don't see white as a race. Like a fish in water, they don't think about whiteness because it's so beneficial to them."
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16792
By Sally Lehrman, AlterNet
September 18, 2003
African Americans with a college diploma find themselves unemployed almost twice as often as whites with the same education. Hispanics must get by on only about half of the individual income that Asian Americans and whites divvy up among the bills.
And when blacks and Latinos are hospitalized with a heart problem, they are less likely than European Americans to receive catheterization, be sent home with beta blockers, or even be advised to take aspirin to protect their health.
While many Americans agree that open racial bigotry is generally a thing of the past, stark disparities in daily life persist, as documented by academic researchers, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Institute of Medicine.
Frustrated with theories plainly unable to explain the problem, sociologists increasingly are relying on a new framework to understand racism and develop solutions. "It's not just Archie Bunker any more," says Troy Duster, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and New York University who is president-elect of the American Sociological Association.
Just in the past six months, at least five books - including one co-authored by Duster - have put forward a fresh analysis of racial injustice. They set aside overt prejudice and individual acts of discrimination, which they assert actually may have little impact in today's world. Instead they pull back the covers on social practices and policies sewn into the fabric of work, school and the medical system that favor whites. Even the most well-intentioned white person, they say, benefits from a legacy of accumulated preferential treatment.
In part, these scholars hope to inject new ways of thinking into California's debate over the potential value of "color-blind" government policies to create a more equitable society. They aim to create new paradigms for pushing beyond historical discrimination in order to understand the roots of ongoing racial injustice.
"Intellectuals lost track of the ability to discuss what racism is after the Civil Rights Act," says Andrew Barlow, referring to the landmark 1964 legislation that prohibited employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion or national origin. Research on inequities continued to focus solely on discriminatory acts by individuals, he explains, adding, "We are really at the beginning of a new era."
The emerging school of sociologists also is responding to intellectuals such as Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom (America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible, 1997), and Shelby Steele (A Dream Deferred, 1999), who assert that discrimination is old news. Consisting mostly, but not entirely, of conservatives, this group says the country needs to transcend race by acknowledging the progress made over the past several decades. Race-conscious policies, they argue, only stir up resentment among whites while also promoting a lack of ambition among people of color by holding them to a lower standard.
As support for their claims, they point to the genetic evidence provided by the Human Genome Project that race has no biological foundation as a way to categorize people. They also cite a 1998 statement by the American Anthropological Association that explains "race" as a classification system invented in the 18th century to justify status differences between European settlers and conquered and enslaved peoples, then expanded to support efforts such as the Nazi extermination of Jews.
In August 2002, the American Sociological Association took a stand against such attempts to abolish "race" as untrue and irrelevant. In a statement, the professional society urged social scientists not to ignore race classifications or stop using them as a research tool, even though they may be biological fiction. "Those who favor ignoring race as an explicit administrative matter, in the hope that it will cease to exist as a social concept, ignore the weight of a vast body of sociological research that shows that racial hierarchies are embedded in the routine practices of social groups and institutions," the society wrote.
The statement sparked a debate in the society's newsletter, in which California State University-Los Angeles professor Yehudi Webster complained that sociologists - as well as government officials, educators, and journalists - who use race classifications promote racial awareness and separatism, which in turn foster exclusion and discrimination. Intermarriage, migration and genetic redistributions make such boundaries meaningless, Webster wrote.
While race may not hold up as a biological concept, responded Duster and Barlow, its workings as a social idea cannot be ignored. "Not everything 'real' is genetic, and we use racial categories to interact with each other in ways that have significant consequences," explains Pilar Ossorio, a microbiologist and assistant professor of law and medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin. In its statement, the sociological society urged members to track and study race-based data collected by public agencies in order to understand and respond to the deep inequities caused by racialized social and economic structures.
An increasing number of sociologists acknowledge that the old ways of understanding racial disparities are no longer very useful. Along with studying individual discrimination, they now are attempting to unravel the ways racial privilege has been structured into the day-to-day workings of institutions from education to public transportation to criminal justice. "White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society," written by seven scholars including Duster, begins the story in the 1930s with Roosevelt's New Deal, aimed to protect the working class but revised by Congress to safeguard racial segregation as well.
The Social Security Act excluded domestic and agricultural workers from old-age pension and unemployment compensation. Three-quarters of the black population, from domestics to self-employed sharecroppers, fell through the net. Similarly, the Wagner Act, which empowered unions, also allowed labor to shut black workers out from closed shops. Loans under the Federal Housing Act differentially provided whites the wherewithal to move into new suburbs, while federal subsidies built public housing to contain black migrants from the South in urban areas.
The GI bill, enacted in 1944, radically expanded the already racially biased economic provisions of the time. While millions of returning veterans and war industry workers became eligible for low-interest mortgages and free access to higher education, whites benefited most. Federal lending rules favored segregated suburbs and they had the educational credentials to go to college. These policies formed a foundation that has supported white economic advantage generation-to-generation to this day, the book's authors write.
The racial hierarchy established over the middle of the 20th century has largely held fast because one generation builds on the accomplishments of the last, Duster explains. Like interest on a bank deposit, children collect economic potential for themselves from the property and social status of their parents. Just as directly, he argues, disadvantages such as barriers to well-paying jobs, segregation in housing and discrimination in lending reverberate from parent to child. "The past becomes relevant to the present as personal wealth and assets are reproduced from generation to generation," agrees Barlow. His new book on globalization makes a similar argument about the historical underpinnings of U.S. racial stratification. Furthermore, privileges in housing, jobs, education and other arenas reinforce and augment one another, he says.
And far from lessening over time, Barlow argues that the disparities built into American society are becoming more entrenched. In the 1960s and '70s, business regulation, low-income housing, job training, public health and other social programs successfully began to compensate for long-term economic advantages held by white people. But starting in the 1980s, the growth of the service sector and technology information jobs, the mobility of businesses, and policy changes such as deregulation and the curtailment of taxes reversed the trend. As industry extends its global reach and creates large pools of investment capital in developed countries, whites are clinging tightly to their privileges, he says. "A greater disparity in income and growing inequality makes more and more of the middle class experience a sense of crisis, so they try to buffer themselves," says Barlow, who describes himself as a civil rights activist as well as a sociologist. "We need to think about racism in a new way."
Scholars now are studying the cause and effect of racial stratification in more detail. New York University doctoral candidate Julie Sze, for example, is identifying the neighborhoods where medical waste incinerators most often are built, then examining both why those sites were chosen and how those decisions may contribute to health disparities such as higher rates of asthma among African Americans. Other research explores economic issues such as the ways housing segregation limits people's job options. Sociologists Lawrence Bobo of Harvard University and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva of Texas A&M are studying hidden racial animosity, while others have investigated differences in the ways the same teachers treat students of different races.
Barlow, Duster and colleagues emphasize that whites may have no awareness of their privileged status even as they protect their interests. When parents successfully fight to protect funding for suburban high schools, for example, they enable those facilities to offer advanced placement classes and leadership opportunities that in turn help students win a spot in the best colleges. Urban educators rarely have such advocates, and thus are unable to offer the same level of academic advantages. But both parents and graduates of top-tier schools - most often white or Asian American - are likely to consider their achievements solely the result of the young peoples' own hard work.
While whites will acknowledge that disparities in education or other realms exist, Barlow says, they are more likely to attribute these to a lack of ambition and effort on the part of minorities than to structural favoritism toward whites built into U.S. institutions for generations.
"You don't need to be a racist to promote policies that are race-conscious," says David Wellman, a professor of community studies at UC-Santa Cruz and one of the "White-Washing Race" authors. "Most whites don't see white as a race. Like a fish in water, they don't think about whiteness because it's so beneficial to them."
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16792