Institutional racism

SIGNIFICANCE: Institutional racism refers to the manner in which a society’s institutions operate systematically, both directly and indirectly, to favor some groups over others regarding access to opportunities and valued resources. This concept helps explain how a society can discriminate unintentionally against particular groups.

Racial discrimination, in the most general sense, is the denial of equal opportunities and rights to groups on the basis of race or ethnicity. The study of institutional racism (sometimes called institutional discrimination), rather than looking at individual attitudes as an explanation for racial inequality, focuses on the way society itself is structured or organized. Some scholars consider the term synonymous with "systemic discrimination" (or "systemic racism") though others see that as a broader category encompassing all aspects of society while institutional racism focuses specifically on organizations and other formal institutions.

Sociologist Joe R. Feagin distinguished among four types of discrimination, and included two types of institutional racism in his typology: direct institutionalized discrimination and indirect institutionalized discrimination. An example of the former, which was documented by Diana Pearce in a 1976 study in Detroit, is the practice by real estate companies of “steering” Black Americans away from homes in White-majority areas. This direct form of institutional discrimination is the easiest to identify, understand, and (given the will) eradicate. Most sociologists, however, use the term “institutional racism” to refer to the second type noted by Feagin: indirect discrimination.

The term "institutional racism" was coined in 1967 by African American civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) and Charles V. Hamilton. Carmichael and Hamilton were attempting to shift attention away from individual, overt, and direct forms of racial discrimination as the principal explanation for the persistence of racial inequality. The concept became an important part of sociological and political discourse over the next several decades. It also saw a surge of public attention amid growing protests against ongoing racism in the 2010s and 2020s, including the Black Lives Matter movement.

From the perspective of sociologists studying unintentional and indirect forms of institutional racism, consequences are the most important indicator of discrimination. If the results or consequences of a policy or practice are unequal along racial lines, then indirect institutional racism is thought to exist. As sociologist Jerome Skolnick stated, “a society in which most of the good jobs are held by one race, and the dirty jobs are held by people of another color, is a society in which racism is institutionalized no matter what the beliefs of its members are.”

Background

Prior to the 1920s, few sociologists studied race relations. When they did, beginning with the work of such sociologists as Edward Alsworth Ross, Lester Frank Ward, and William Graham Sumner, the tendency was to view discrimination as conscious acts performed by prejudiced individuals; this view continued to dominate until the 1960s. The assumption inherent in this “prejudice causes discrimination” model, as noted by Joe Feagin and Clairece Feagin, is that the way to eradicate racial discrimination is to eliminate racial prejudice. It was widely believed that, with time, this would happen. Racial discrimination was seen as an aberration, inconsistent with American ideals of equality and justice. Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal captured this belief well in the title of his classic and influential work on discrimination in the United States, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).

Beginning with the pioneering work on immigration by American sociologist Robert Ezra Park in the first half of the twentieth century, immigration scholars as a rule predicted the eventual assimilation of various ethnic groups. While most conceded that the situation of African Americans was unique in some respects, their assimilation into American society was also predicted. Along with this, it was thought, would come the diminution and eventual elimination of racial prejudice. Milton Gordon, in the 1960s, developed a more sophisticated theory of assimilation, in which he distinguished between cultural and structural assimilation. Structural assimilation refers to the ability of members of a minority group to participate in such societal groups and institutions as businesses, government, and private clubs; Gordon pointed out that cultural assimilation does not assure equal opportunities in these areas.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement made great strides in attaining legal equality for African Americans and other people of color. Robert Blauner observed that initially the civil rights movement adopted the view that African Americans, if guaranteed legal equality, would be able to assimilate into American society. In time, however, it became increasingly apparent to civil rights activists, as well as to many scholars, that overtly racist ideologies and prejudiced attitudes were not the “essence” of racism. Rather, racism was inherent in society’s institutions. This realization quickly led to a fundamental change in the study of race relations, a change spurred by the cultural climate of social unrest and protest during the 1960s. The Black Power movement of the 1960s called attention to how little the status of Black Americans had changed or promised to change despite progressive civil rights legislation and a reduction in overt racial prejudice. This relatively new way of analyzing racial stratification shifted the focus from individual expressions of racism to the manner in which society itself was structured and operated to favor some groups over others.

Statistical Evidence

As the concept of institutional racism attracted increasing attention in the 1980s, statistical evidence of racism could be found in every institutional area. In 1980, for example, African Americans constituted nearly 12 percent of the population of the United States but only 1.5 percent of the country’s elected officials. Almost 50 percent of all prison inmates in the United States were African American. The dropout rate for African Americans in education was twice that of White Americans. The infant mortality rate for White Americans in 1985 was 9.3 per 1,000 live births, but for African Americans it was 18.2 per 1,000. The maternal mortality rate in 1984 for White women was 5.4 per 100,000 live births; for Black women it was 19.7. Forty-three percent of Black children and 16 percent of White children under the age of eighteen lived in poverty in 1986, and the median per capita wealth for African Americans in 1984 was $6,837, compared to $32,667 for whites. These inequities strongly suggested the existence of institutional racism. Similar trends would continue to be documented well into the twenty-first century, even despite gains for Black Americans in some areas.

The fact that Black Americans historically have not owned businesses proportional to their percentage of the population demonstrates another important element of institutional racism: the interrelatedness of institutions. A society’s institutions are interrelated in ways such that exclusion from one frequently means exclusion from all. Harold M. Baron called this phenomenon the “web” of urban racism. Black enterprise in the United States has been stifled by discrimination in education and the job market and by discriminatory banking practices that make it difficult for Black Americans to secure loans to start businesses.

Research and Remedial Efforts

The study of institutional racism does place considerable importance on the deep historical roots and lasting effects of direct racial discrimination. The effects of earlier practices, policies, and laws that were designed purposely to exclude and harm particular groups have continued to be felt even after most of them were eliminated by legislative and other measures. The cumulative effect of this discrimination left Black Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities—notably Mexican Americans, American Indians, and Puerto Ricans—at a competitive disadvantage with majority group members in virtually every institutional area. Into the twenty-first century, researchers continued to examine how institutional racism impacts Americans, uncovering potential root causes and interconnections.

Knowledge gained from the study of institutional racism is applied in a number of ways in attempts to counter it. Among the many approaches are civil rights legislation; executive orders, such as those for affirmative action; and changes in the criteria used by admissions offices in higher education. Examples of such efforts show that there has been some progress toward eliminating or alleviating structural racism, but also that there is often backlash against anti-discriminatory policies. Many scholars suggest that this indicates how deeply entrenched institutional racism is in society.

College Admissions

Historically, college admissions officers relied on so-called objective criteria in their decisions. The most important of these criteria have been class rank, grade point average, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), participation in extracurricular activities, and the quality of the high school attended by applicants. While it was not necessarily the intent of colleges to discriminate against members of minority groups, reliance on these criteria, in effect, often did so. Applicants of color, for example, are disproportionately poorer than White applicants. As a consequence, they are more likely to have attended poorly funded schools that offer fewer extracurricular activities and that generally provide a lower-quality education. Students of color also are more likely to have to work and to care for siblings, which in turn affects their academic performance and limits their participation in extracurricular activities.

Because of studies of institutional racism, many universities and colleges were able to see how their admissions policies were discriminating against members of certain groups and instituted affirmative action policies. In the 1960s, many institutions adjusted their admissions processes, including the criteria used to determine admissibility and predict academic potential, to take into account the disadvantaged positions in which members of minority groups find themselves. Instead of automatically penalizing students for not participating in extracurricular activities, for example, admissions officers sought to obtain information from applicants and high school guidance counselors on the activities available in the school and on applicants’ responsibilities, including work, which may have made it difficult for them to participate in school-sponsored programs. Admissions officers also began to consider possible biases in standardized tests and accorded test scores less weight in their decision to admit or not to admit a student. In 2023, however, the Supreme Court ruled broadly against affirmative action upon hearing arguments brought by two elite American universities. The ruling stated that affirmative action programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution. Critics condemned the decision, citing the negative repercussions it would have on people of color and the likely declining rates of admission for such populations at elite universities. Conservatives, meanwhile, hailed the ruling as upholding the US Constitution as a "colorblind" document.

Hiring Practices

Affirmative action programs are principally intended to be remedies for institutional discrimination. Affirmative action requires race consciousness rather than “color blindness,” because (as studies of institutional racism have shown) society is structured in such a way that race-neutral or colorblind policies exclude people of color. In the area of employment, for example, affirmative action programs were created to increase the pool of qualified candidates of color and to eliminate discriminatory practices from the selection process. Approaches included advertising positions in places where potential candidates from minority groups can be reached more effectively.

A longstanding and common recruitment practice has been to hire new workers through personal connections. Because of prior racial discrimination, however, the people doing the hiring in many industries were disproportionately White, and their connections tended to be White as well. Hence, Black Americans and other people of color were often excluded. Affirmative action programs have sought to eliminate this practice, which, even if its practitioners did not intend it to be, is discriminatory. Advertising positions widely, even nationally when possible, has been one remedy prescribed.

A seemingly innocuous practice used by some police agencies provides another example of institutional racism. Many police forces maintained a minimum height requirement, which placed Latinos, Asians, and women at a disadvantage. Because members of these groups generally tend to be shorter than White or Black males, this requirement reduced significantly the pool of qualified applicants from these groups. Although the height requirement seemed to be neutral, or nondiscriminatory, it, in fact, discriminated against particular groups; intent is not necessary for a requirement to be discriminatory. In many instances, such discriminatory job requirements have been eliminated or modified.

In yet another example, seniority systems, established to provide job security for longtime employees, can discriminate against people of color. Black Americans have been adversely affected in disproportionate numbers by this practice because, as a group, they were long denied job opportunities on the basis of race until court decisions and legislative initiatives made it illegal to discriminate on this basis. Being the most recently hired employees, they would often be the first fired when layoffs became necessary. While seniority systems may not have been established to discriminate intentionally against members of certain groups, they did so nevertheless. As a consequence, the courts in a number of instances have ordered employers to cease the practice.

In the 1960s, the US federal government, spurred by the civil rights movement, began taking various steps intended to counter institutional racism in the workplace. However, with the conservative resurgence in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, there was a backlash against this approach. Through several Supreme Court rulings and other policy decisions, there was a growing tendency to place the burden of proof on plaintiffs in discrimination cases. In other words, a plaintiff had to prove that the defendant (typically an employer) intended to discriminate against them—a very difficult, often impossible, task. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 was drafted partly in response to this situation. The bill stipulates that once the plaintiff can show that an employer’s practice adversely affects a particular group, then the burden falls on the employer to “demonstrate that the challenged practice is job related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity.” This is consistent with an approach designed to counter institutional discrimination; a practice is deemed discriminatory if it has a disparate impact on any group, irrespective of intent.

Bibliography

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Dell, 1963.

Blauner, Robert. Racial Oppression in America. Harper, 1972.

Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Vintage, 1967.

Feagin, Joe R. Racial and Ethnic Relations. 10th ed. Pearson, 2014.

Feagin, Joe R., and Clairece Booher Feagin. Discrimination American Style: Institutional Racism and Sexism. 2nd ed. Krieger, 1986.

"Glossary for Understanding the Dismantling Structural Racism/Promoting Racial Equity Analysis." The Aspen Institute, www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/content/docs/rcc/RCC-Structural-Racism-Glossary.pdf. Accessed 16 Dec. 2021.

Harmon, Amy, et al. "From Cosmetics to NASCAR, Calls for Racial Justice Are Spreading." The New York Times, 14 Sept. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/13/us/george-floyd-racism-america.html. Accessed 16 Dec. 2021.

Hurley, Lawrence. "Supreme Court Strikes Down College Affirmative Action Programs." NBC News, 29 June 2023, www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-strikes-affirmative-action-programs-harvard-unc-rcna66770. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

Knowles, Louis L., and Kenneth Prewitt, editors. Institutional Racism in America. Prentice, 1969.

"Structural Racism in America." Urban Institute, www.urban.org/features/structural-racism-america. Accessed 16 Dec. 2021.

Ward, James D., and Mario Antonio Rivera. Institutional Racism, Organizations & Public Policy. Peter Lang, 2014.

"What Racism Looks Like." Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 30 June 2020, fpg.unc.edu/sites/fpg.unc.edu/files/resources/other-resources/What%20Racism%20Looks%20Like.pdf. Accessed 16 Dec. 2021.