Chapter Seven:
Understanding
Racial Inequality
Today: Sociological
Theories of Racism
By Tanya Maria Golash-Boza
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Microaggressions
• Racism entails not just big moments
or actions, but also
• Brief verbal barbs that could occur
in a split second
• A pattern of everyday treatment
that the victim is sure is due to race
but the violator can attempt to hide
within other issues
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The presumption
that Asian
Americans use
chopsticks at
every meal is
based on an idea
of inherent cultural
differences.
We don’t see
these same
presumptions
applied to third
generation Italian
Americans or Irish
Americans.
Microaggressions
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Different Groups Faced
Different Struggles
For example:
• Native Americans faced the taking of
their lands and the struggle to retain
cultures and identities based in
particular landscapes.
• Blacks faced a history of being treated
as property and also cultural and
identity loss with capitalism as one
motive behind this oppression.
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Persistence
• “One way that individual racism persists,
even in a society that decries racism, is
through racial microaggressions—daily,
commonplace insults and racial slights
that cumulatively affect the psychological
well-being of people of color.” (p. 181)
• These can build up one after another
during the course of a day’s experience.
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Responses
• It is difficult to know how to respond to these
microaggressions as some are committed by
even well-intentioned people.
• Responding would be accompanied with
various emotions: anger, hurt, resentment,
frustration
• Responding might require constantly
educating other people on why something
was inappropriate and offensive
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From the Voices section: If you were a
bystander when this happened, how would
you handle it?
Substitute Teacher: Quiet down! You’re
acting like a bunch of wild Indians! (p.
183)
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From the Voices section: If you were a
bystander when this happened, how would
you handle it?
“I am a registered nurse and always get
told that I speak English so well. I was born
in Australia and I am of Filipino
background. I don’t think about my
appearance until a patient or their family
member points it out and they are quite
amazed/baffled that someone who
appears Asian ‘speaks so well’ and could
be considered a ‘real Australian.’” (p. 183)
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From the Voices section: If you were a
bystander when this happened, how would
you handle it?
“Oh, but you’re Latin, so you must love
the heat! While discussing the summer
weather. I’m from Bogotá—the average
temperature is 60°F. I feel like nobody
in the States bothers to understand
that Latinos are not just one monolithic
entity.” (p. 183)
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From the Voices section: If you were a
bystander when this happened, how would
you handle it?
“‘Sorry, that must be my black coming
out.” [Said by] my biracial friend
(African American and Mexican).
Whenever she does or says something
negative she blames it on the ‘Black’
side of her. Makes me feel angry,
belittled, resentful.” (p. 183)
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From the Voices section: If you were a
bystander when this happened, how would
you handle it?
“I express that my brother attends a
private university. Immediately a girl in
the car responds in a sure voice ‘Oh, he
plays football?’ This is the second time
this has happened. As if a young black
male can only attend a prestigious
private college on a football
scholarship.” (p. 183)
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Forms of Racism
Acts of racism committed by individuals
are not the only form of racist actions—
institutions, society, and historical
legacies are part of perpetuating racism
as well. Sociologists can draw from
explanations of racism that include
• Institutional
• Systemic
• Structural
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Institutional Racism
• This occurs when racist actions
permeate the everyday processes of a
large bureaucracy or components of a
larger entity:
Protestors calling for the end of
police brutality
march through downtown
Sacramento, California, in 2013.
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Almost all victims of police brutality
are black or Latino.
Institutional Racism
An example would be the criminal justice system:
“…it makes sense to argue that racial discrimination
has become institutionalized in the criminal justice
system. This is because racial discrimination happens
at every single level of this system. The laws are
written in ways that discriminate against blacks—the
disparities in sentences for possession of crack and
possession of cocaine are one example. Police
officers are consistently more likely to pull over and
arrest black men than they are white men. Blacks
are more likely to get harsher sentences or even the
death penalty.” (p. 186 )
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Institutional Racism
To sociologically determine if institutional
racism is at work one needs to establish
two elements:
• That a non-white group is more likely to
be negatively affected by that system
And
•That the negative effect occurs on a
regular basis and throughout each level
of a system
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Systemic Racism
• Systemic Racism, an explanation of racism
that emerges from the sociological work of
Joe Feagin, refers to “daily
microaggressions, deep-seated
inequalities; and anti-black ideologies” as
well as how “racism and racial inequality
were created by whites and continue to be
perpetuated by white individuals and
white-owned institutions.” (p. 187)
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Systemic Racism and
Hurricane Katrina
New Orleans was a
slave market in the
US from 1700s –
1800s.
Slavery ends,
“separate but equal”
continues the
inequality.
People wade through floodwaters on
their way to the
Superdome in New Orleans,
Louisiana, looking for shelter
in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
in 2005.
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Lead up to Hurricane Katrina
• When schools officially desegregated most white
families moved out of integrated school districts of
put their kids in private school.
• Black families left in underfunded schools,
diminished job opportunities and limited housing
choices.
• 2/3s of residents were black, 25% below poverty
line, highest rate of black poverty in the country
(40% of black residents in the city).
• 60% of poor blacks lacked access to a car. Only
17% of poor whites didn’t have access to a car.
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Ways Systemic Racism is
Enacted
• Patterns of unjust impoverishment of nonwhites.
• Vested group interests of whites to maintain
racism.
• Omnipresent and routinized discrimination
against non-whites.
• The rationalization of racial oppression
• An imbalance of power where whites are able
to reproduce inequality through control of
major political and economic resources
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Explaining the Unrest in Ferguson,
Missouri: Systemic Racism
DOJ: “Court practices exacerbating the harm of Ferguson’s
unconstitutional police practices and imposing particular
hardship upon Ferguson’s most vulnerable residents, especially
upon those living in or near poverty.”
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Systemic Racism: Ferguson, Missouri
Statistics
DOJ: “The harms of Ferguson’s police and court practices are
borne disproportionately by African Americans and that this
disproportionate impact is avoidable.”
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Racism: Ferguson, Missouri
Statistics
DOJ:
“Focusing on
revenue over
public safety,
leading to court
practices that
violate the 14th
Amendment’s
due process
and equal
protection
requirements.”
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Racism: Ferguson, Missouri
Statistics
DOJ: “Conducting stops without reasonable suspicion and arrests
without probable cause in violation of the Fourth Amendment”
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Structural Racism
• This form of racism “focuses on
accumulated acts of racism across
history and throughout one’s
lifetime.” (p. 189)
• Structural racism – inter-institutional
interactions across time and space
that reproduce racial inequality.
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Structural Racism
This type of racism develops out of historical
legacies and the experience of discrimination in
more than one setting.
“For example, racial inequality in housing leads to
racial inequality in schooling, which in turn leads to
racial inequality in the labor market. Across
generations, this chain of events becomes a cycle,
because parents who are less well-positioned in the
labor market cannot afford housing in the better
neighborhoods, which means that their children
will be less likely to attend better schools.” (p.189)
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Wealth Inequalities as Explained
by Oliver and Shapiro
• Historical legacies one after another in time contribute to
wealth inequality for blacks, who hold one twentieth of the
wealth compared to whites:
•
Emancipation of black persons who were enslaved
without providing them an economic starting point
•
The housing separation when suburbs were created as
white spaces while blacks were forced to live in innercity with low infrastructure
•
Current institutional racism in mortgages and the real
estate market
• Certain non-racial specific policies that have racial effects
because of already existing inequality
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Median Net Worth of
Households
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Racial Formation
This theory focuses on how cultural and
social elements make and remake race both
to perpetuate racism and in some cases to
prevent racism.
The actual definition from the scholarship
of Omi and Winant is the following: “the
sociohistorical process by which racial
categories are created, inhabited,
transformed, and destroyed.”
(p. 191)
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Racial Formation
Racial formations work through racial
projects:
Officially defined as “simultaneously an
interpretation, representation, or
explanation of racial dynamics, and an
effort to reorganize and redistribute
resources along particular racial lines.”
(p. 191 )
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White Supremacy and Settler
Colonialism
• For Native Americans additional
explanations of racism work well to
explain their experiences with racism.
Those explanations include White
Supremacy and Settler Colonialism.
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White Supremacy—affecting
different groups of people
• Anti-black Racism—People as propertycapitalism used as a justification
• Genocide—The idea that Native people
should disappear- one justification used
for colonialism
• Orientalism—Certain cultures and groups
of people present a threat to white
“civilizations” and this justifies violence
and war
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Settler Colonialism Theory
• This investigates how the actions of
settlers against Native Peoples
contributed to a long pattern that
continues through present day
inequalities such as in Canada, with
the disproportionate amount of
children in the foster care system.
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Intersectionality
• Intersectionality – a simultaneous
look at race and gender
oppression.
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Conclusion: Theories Help Us
Understand Racism and Race
All these theories can be utilized for
different situations and time periods to
better explain the dynamics of specific
racial inequalities.
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