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Race and Injustice: A Clear Look at Racial Discrimination and Its Impact
Advanced Social Psychology · Chapter 6: Gender, Race, and Reducing PrejudiceSection 6.4 · lesson 36 of 8512 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Falling survey prejudice, unchanged audit-study discrimination.
- State the consensus that race is a social construct
- Distinguish interpersonal, institutional, structural, and cultural racism
- Differentiate aversive, symbolic, and implicit forms of prejudice
- Evaluate the field-experiment evidence on discrimination
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Everything said in the video, section by section (1,433 words). Read along, or search it.
Gender, Race, and Reducing Prejudice
Race and Injustice
This section contains one of the most important findings in the field. Explicit racial prejudice, measured on surveys, has declined substantially. Discrimination, measured by sending out identical resumes, has not. Holding both of those facts at once is the work of this section. We start with why race is treated as a social construct, and what that means. Then the four levels at which racism operates. Then three accounts of how bias persists in altered forms. Then the field-experiment evidence, which is the strongest evidence available. And finally the measured impact, on wealth and on health.
The Consensus
Race as a Social Construct
Contemporary biological and anthropological consensus treats race as a social category. A social and political category, rather than a biologically meaningful taxonomy. The evidence for that is quantitative, and worth stating precisely. Human genetic variation is substantial. But it is largely continuous, and gradient. And it is poorly captured by conventional racial categories. Roughly eighty-five to ninety percent of human genetic variation occurs within groupings. Within any racial grouping, rather than between groupings. Lewontin established this in nineteen seventy-two. The American Association of Physical Anthropologists restated it in twenty nineteen. Now think about what a within-group percentage actually tells you. If most variation sits inside each category, the category predicts the variation poorly. That is a claim about information content, not about morality.
Read It Correctly
Constructed Does Not Mean Unreal
Now the point that gets mangled most often in summary. Saying race is socially constructed does not mean race is unreal. Race is intensely real as a social classification. With profound consequences for life chances. What the finding means is narrower, and more demanding. Those consequences cannot be explained by underlying biological differences. So they must instead be explained by social, political, and historical processes. Notice the direction that argument runs. The finding does not reduce the disparity at all. It relocates the explanation, from biology to history and institutions. Which makes the disparity harder to explain away, not easier.
Four Levels
Where Racism Operates
Racism is conventionally distinguished into four mutually reinforcing levels. Interpersonal racism is the attitudes and behavior of individuals. Toward racialized others. Institutional racism is the policies, procedures, and practices of organizations. Schools, police departments, hospitals, banks. Practices that produce racially disparate outcomes. And they do so regardless of the intentions of individual actors. Structural racism is the cumulative pattern across institutions, over history. Multi-institutional, and accumulated rather than enacted. Cultural racism is the representations, narratives, and meanings. In mass media, in education, and in everyday discourse. Now the practical implication for research. Studying any single outcome typically requires attention to all four. School discipline. Mortgage approval. Sentencing. They are mutually reinforcing, not alternative explanations to choose between.
The Puzzle
Falling Endorsement, Persisting Bias
Here is the puzzle this section is built around. Survey research documents a substantial decline in explicit endorsement. Endorsement of overt racist statements, in many democracies. Since the mid-twentieth century. That decline is real, and it is large. Several theoretical traditions argue that the surface change conceals something. The persistence of bias in altered forms. Note carefully what that claim is not. It is not that the survey decline is fake. It is that the survey measures one thing while another thing continues. Three accounts describe what continues. Aversive racism, symbolic racism, and implicit bias. Each contributes something the other two do not.
Gaertner And Dovidio
Aversive Racism
Gaertner and Dovidio's aversive racism framework dates from nineteen eighty-six. We met it in section five point one, and it is worth revisiting here. It describes individuals who explicitly endorse egalitarian values. And who also harbor negative implicit reactions toward racial outgroups. Both at once, and both sincerely. Their signature is that they discriminate selectively. In contexts where bias can be rationalized on non-racial grounds. That is what makes the pattern so hard to catch. In an unambiguous situation, the egalitarian value governs the behavior. The bias surfaces only where an alternative account is available. Which gives an unusual and testable prediction. Discrimination should appear in ambiguous situations. And disappear in clear-cut ones.
Sears And Henry
Symbolic Racism
Symbolic racism is the second account, also called modern racism. Sears and Henry characterized it in two thousand three. It is a constellation of beliefs, not a single attitude. First, that minorities violate cherished values. The work ethic is the example the source gives. Second, that they are no longer the targets of discrimination. Third, that they demand undeserved advantages. Now notice what those three beliefs have in common. None of them asserts inferiority. They are framed entirely in the language of fairness and merit. Which is precisely why they survive a social climate where overt claims do not. The belief has changed its vocabulary rather than its target.
Implicit Bias
Automatic Associations, and an Open Debate
The third account is implicit bias. Greenwald, Banaji, and colleagues developed the measurement. Using the Implicit Association Test. It shows that automatic evaluative associations diverge from explicit reports. Associations between racial groups and positive or negative attributes. Now, report the controversy alongside the finding, because it is live. Debates continue over the magnitude of measured implicit bias. And over its behavioral significance. The divergence from self-report is well established. What that divergence predicts about actual behavior is less settled. Compare section five point one, where the same instrument was flagged. For test-retest reliability, and for construct validity. An advanced citation carries the dispute along with the result.
Steele And Aronson
Stereotype Threat, in This Context
Steele and Aronson's stereotype threat hypothesis appeared in nineteen ninety-five. The situational salience of a negative stereotype about your group can impair performance. On tasks for which that stereotype is relevant. In the original demonstration, Black undergraduates took a difficult verbal test. For one group it was framed as diagnostic of intellectual ability. For the other, as non-diagnostic. Performance was worse under the diagnostic framing. And here is the control that makes the design work. White participants showed no such effect. The manipulation was identical. The threat was not. Stereotype threat has since been documented across racial, gender, age, and class identities. Though, as with much of social psychology, replication work has refined it. Effect sizes and moderators have both been revised. Practically, the literature produced usable intervention strategies. Self-affirmation. Identity-safe framing. Exposure to counter-stereotypic exemplars. Section six point seven examines those further.
Sue, 2007
Microaggressions
Derald Wing Sue introduced the concept of microaggressions in two thousand seven. It captures brief, often unintended everyday slights. Indignities and insults directed at members of marginalized groups. Questions about where someone is really from. Assumptions about ability, or about criminality. The invocation of stereotypes as compliments. Sue distinguishes three types, and the distinction matters. Microassaults are deliberate. Microinsults are rudeness that conveys bias. The bias travels in the manner rather than in the content. Microinvalidations are denial of the target's experience. Telling someone the thing they just described did not happen to them. The construct is contested on methodological grounds. Debate has focused on measurement reliability. And on the relative weight of objective features versus target interpretation. Empirical work nonetheless links cumulative exposure to measurable outcomes. Elevated stress, depressive symptoms, and physical-health indicators.
Audit Studies
The Cleanest Evidence There Is
Field experiments provide some of the cleanest evidence available. Because the applicant is held constant by construction. Bertrand and Mullainathan ran the best-known one, in two thousand four. They sent matched fictional resumes to employers. Varying only the candidate name, to signal race. Resumes with white-coded names received roughly fifty percent more callbacks. Than identical resumes with Black-coded names. Pager's audit study, from two thousand three, produced a starker comparison. She examined the labor-market consequences of a criminal record. A white applicant with a record received more callbacks. More than a Black applicant without one. Comparable audit studies in housing, rentals, and consumer transactions converge. But the trend line is the hardest finding of all. Quillian, Pager, Hexel, and Midtboen meta-analyzed US hiring audits in twenty seventeen. They found no meaningful decline in discrimination against Black applicants. Across the period nineteen eighty-nine to twenty fifteen. Despite substantial declines in explicit racial prejudice on surveys.
Impact
A Social Determinant, Not Only a Moral Problem
Racial discrimination is causally implicated in disparities across several domains. Health, wealth, education, and criminal-justice contact. The racial wealth gap is the clearest single measure. Median wealth of white households, compared with Black and Latino households. It remains an order of magnitude larger than the income gap. Which tells you something about the mechanism. It reflects cumulative effects on asset accumulation. Historical and contemporary discrimination both. Assets compound across generations in a way that income does not. Health research links experiences of discrimination to physiological outcomes. Elevated cortisol reactivity. Hypertension. Adverse birth outcomes. Williams and Mohammed documented these in two thousand nine. And they hold independent of socio-economic confounds. So the advanced framing is this. Discrimination is not only a moral problem. It is a measurable social determinant of population health and economic outcomes.
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