Racial%20Inequality%20and%20Racism%20(3/17)

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Racial Inequality and Racism (3/17)

• Structures of Group Inequality

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Feagin, again

• Feagins thought experiment, Starship Earth
  argued that disproportions of income, power,
  housing, etc. are always wasteful and divisive if
  they are allowed to get too large,
• But he further argues that this set of problems
  is much more serious if the disproportions are
  tied to an ascriptive trait, such as race.
• Those kinds of inequalities are particularly bad.

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The 4 Myths

• Racist America (2001) criticizes 4 myths
• American is basically a diverse, open, non-racist
  society
• There is a vanishing residue of prejudice and
  racist inequality.
• Affirmative action goes too far and privileges
  minorities.
• Nothing can be done. Change must be slow.

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1. America is a racist society

• It is true that the US is diverse,
• and will be majority minority by 2050,
• But it is not as diverse as many.
• What has been distinctive and almost
  unparalleled is the extreme forms of racial
  subordination and genocide,
• From chattel slavery to the present,
• That are built into the institutional structure.
• Feagins core argument is that racism is systemic
• A pattern of the whole society
• That has interdependent parts,
• That must be understood as a whole.

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What is a race, sociologically

• Visible differences are neither necessary nor
  sufficient for sociological races,
• Which are socially constructed.
• That is a race is any group that is considered to
  be a race.
• Therefore relations between ethnic and religious
  groups may become or may stop being treated as
  racial.

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The US the one drop rule

• The US rule for ascribing race is extremely
  unusual.
• Traditionally, black-white race relations have
  been governed by the rule that one is black if
  any of ones ancestors is black.
• This was necessitated by the unique set of
  social, legal and political structures of slavery
  and Jim Crow

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What are the racial regimes in SMMM?

1. Genocide the attempted extermination of an
   entire people.
2. Expulsion the forced transfer of a population to
   another area or to camps.
3. Subjugation the creation of a second class
   citizenship.
4. Segregation systematic social separation.
5. Assimilation social and cultural melting pot.

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What have been the regimes in the US?

• All five regimes appear in American history.
• The text suggests that the elimination of most
  Native American tribes was unintended.
• I disagree.
• But intentions are beside the point.
• Chattel slavery was a unique institution,
  although all forms of slavery are extremely
  degrading and destructive of the family, etc.
• And Jim Crow was a nearly unparalleled
  institutional subjugation.

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How much is US race a matter of black v. white?

• Often the central issue is how similar
  black/white relations are to ethnicity.
• Feagin argues that they are dissimilar, but
  black/ white relations are central because
• Relations between Europeans and Native Americans,
  Chinese, and Hispanic Americans were shaped by
  slavery,
• and immigrant groups defined themselves as not
  black by separating themselves from blacks.
• Sociology, Micro, Macro and Mega spends about 4
  times as much space on other groups.

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Peculiarities of U.S. slavery

• Race relations in the US have a dynamic that is
  different largely because slavery was different.
• Unlike Latin America, in the U.S. the definition
  of slaves as property was not checked by any
  structure of family, religion or other kinds of
  legal rights.
• And it was often accompanied by rituals of
  dehumanization.
• E.g. slaves eating from a trough.

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2) The Myth that racism ended long ago

• There have been really important transformations
• abolishing slavery in the mid-19th c. and
• abolishing enforced segregation (Jim Crow e.g. de
  jure segregation of education) in the mid-20th c.
• But in both cases, a substantial minority of
  whites resisted the change,
• And the majority was not willing to carry through.

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Reactions to reactions to loss of privilege.

• Feagin argues that in each of these cases, the
  majority of whites did not necessarily support
  inequality,
• But some whites felt that they were losing out
  (at least relatively),
• And the majority of whites (largely because of
  stereotypes, rather than theories) were unwilling
  to interfere.

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But isnt that ancient history?

• Many people say that that was then and this is
  now blacks should get over it.
• One index of how a society has progressed is who
  it honors.
• Who is the American that has the most monuments
  to his memory?
• Forrest founder of the KKK.
• Why?

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The cumulative character of privilege

• There is a structure of unjust enrichment and
  unjust impoverishment.
• For example, when slavery was ended, there was no
  transfer back of the accumulated wealth.
• Active Civil Rights really only occurred from the
  late 1960s to the early 1970s.
• Administrations since then have been opposed or
  hamstrung.

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The pattern of change in attitudes in the US
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The dynamic of race today

• Table 21.4 (p.406) details four centuries of
  legal progress and setbacks.
• different people conceive of that dynamic in
  different ways.
• There has been a sharp decline of views such as
  There should be laws against intermarriage,
  (though 10 to 20 of the white pop. still agrees
  with such items.)
• But most of the change was completed by 1968, and
  there has also been a decline in support for
  reducing existing inequalities.

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What is the relation between prejudice and racial
inequality

• Myrdals argument was that racism and racial
  inequality reinforce each other.

Racism
Racial Inequality

• This is sometimes wrongly interpreted to mean
  that racism is the individual sentiment that
  produces discriminatory behavior.

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Myrdal vs. Feagin

• Feagin criticizes Myrdal as proposing a model
  that seems to suggest an attitudinal model
• Prejudice Discrimination Racism
• Feagin, as the theorist of institutionalized
  discrimination, argues that the relations go
  Racism Discrimination Prejudice

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Institutional discrimination and systemic racism

• Feagin suggests that over American history,
  racism, as a pervasive institutional system
  maintains itself as a structure of inequality and
  privilege.
• Racism is not a matter of prejudice.
• It is maintained by relatively little
  individually prejudiced action (except in
  response to change efforts).

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How much racial inequality is there?

• Feagin Racism directly or indirectly costs the
  average black American about 10 of their life
  span 40 of their income and 90 of their
  wealth.
• Sociology, Micro, Macro and Mega 1990
• White Black Hispanic
• 4 yrs col. 22 11 9
• in poverty 11 32 28
• Median inc. 36,915 21,423 23,431

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Individual, Institutional and Cultural racism in
SMMM

• Individual racism is individual prejudice or
  discrimination
• Institutional racism are institutionalized
  structures that disadvantage a group, and which
  are often maintained for reasons having little to
  do with prejudice.
• Cultural racism is a belief in the superiority of
  European culture.

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3 Myth that affirmative action goes too far.

• Feagin argues that the playing field has been
  partly leveled by affirmative action.
• But in housing, employment, schooling and other
  areas, the reality is still one of a non-level
  playing field that privileges white males.
• He suggests that white males usually overlook
  immense structures of privilege (such as feeder
  schools and legacy admissions) in order to attack
  any counterbalance.

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4 The Myth that nothing can be done

• There are not only huge shifts in attitudes,
• But also large differences and relatively rapid
  changes in different institutions.
• The army went from largely vertically segregated
  to the most integrated large institution in the
  US in decades.
• The process was similar to that pictured in
  Remember the Titans

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The problem in the army and other armed forces

• The problem was that vertical segregation was
  divisive.
• Incoming candidates differed in test scores, such
  that allowing those scores to determine placement
  insured it.
• Are the test score differences innate or due to
  differences in schools, etc.
• The army argued that there was evidence of the
  latter, and if so it is unjust as well as
  inefficient to accommodate to it.

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Nature of army programs

• A set of four main compensatory programs.
• None insures one a position, only a chance.
• They are not aimed to replace the educational
  system, but to remedy the cumulative racial
  inequality.

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The army and the navy, again.

• Feagin does not believe that the army is any more
  utopian than the navy.
• Nor were the average sentiments of either most
  people or most officers different.
• The main difference was a commitment by the
  leadership to a sufficient set of policies
  directed at both inequality and prejudice.