Discrimination
against Racial and Ethnic Minorities
In 2016, while many us do not feel personally
racist, prejudiced or bigoted we are still encountering a great amount of
discrimination in our nation. Whereas prejudice refers to attitudes,
discrimination refers to actions or practices that result in differential
treatment of categories of individuals.
Individual versus Institutional Discrimination (Mooney,
Linda, Knox, David, and Schacht)
Individual discrimination occurs when individuals
treat other individuals unfairly or unequally because of their group
membership. Individual discrimination can be overt or adaptive. In overt
discrimination, individuals discriminate because of their own prejudicial
attitudes. For example, a white landlord may refuse to rent to a Mexican
American family because of prejudice against Mexican Americans.
In adaptive discrimination, the injustice occurs
due to the discrimination of others. The landlord may refuse the Mexican
American family due to the discrimination of other tenants and for fear that
they would move.
Institutional discrimination refers to
institutional policies and procedures that result in unequal treatment of and
opportunities for minorities. Institutional discrimination is covert and
insidious and maintains the subordinate position of minorities in society. For
example, when schools use standard intelligence tests to decide which children
will be placed in college preparatory tracks, they are limiting the educational
advancement of minorities whose intelligence is not fairly measured by
culturally biased tests developed from white middle-class experiences. And the
funding of public schools through local tax dollars results in less funding for
schools in poor and largely minority school districts.
Educational Discrimination and Segregation
Both institutional discrimination and individual
discrimination in education negatively affect racial and ethnic minorities and
help to explain why minorities (with the exception of Asian Americans) tend to
achieve lower levels of academic attainment and success. Institutional
discrimination is evidenced by inequalities in school funding---a practice that
disproportionately hurts minority students (Kozol 1991). Because minorities are
more likely than whites to live in economically disadvantaged schools, which
serve primarily minority students, receive less funding per student than do
schools in more affluent, primarily white areas.
Another institutional education policy that is
advantageous to whites is the policy that gives preference to college
applicants whose parents or grandparents are alumni. The overwhelming majority
of alumni at the highest-ranked universities and colleges are white. Thus,
white college applicants are the primary beneficiaries of these so-called
legacy admissions policies. About 10 to 15 percent of students in most Ivy
League colleges and universities are children of alumni. Harvard University
accepts about 11 percent of its overall applicant pool, but the admission rate
is 40 percent for legacy applicants (Schmidt 2004).
Minorities also experience individual
discrimination in the schools as a result of continuing prejudice among
teachers. In a survey conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, 1,100
educators were asked whether they had heard racist comments from their
colleagues in the past year. More than a quarter of the survey respondents
answered "yes" (Hear and Now 2000). It is likely that teachers who are
prejudiced against minorities discriminate against them, giving them less
teaching attention and encouragement.
Racial and ethnic minorities are also treated
unfairly in educational materials, such as textbooks, which often distort the
history and heritages of people of color (King 2000). For example, Zinn (1993)
observed, "To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as
navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a
technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves, unwittingly----to
justify what was done" (P. 355).
Finally, racial and ethnic minorities are largely
isolated from whites in a largely segregated school system. U.S. school in the
2000-2001 school year were more segregated than they were in 1970 (Orfield 2001).
School segregation is largely due to the persistence of housing segregation and
the termination of court-ordered desegregation plans. Court-mandated busing
became a means to achieve equality of education and school integration in the
early 1970s, after the Supreme Court (in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg)
endorsed busing to desegregate schools. But in the 1990s, lower courts lifted
desegregation orders in dozens of school districts (Winter 2003). And in 2007,
the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling, in a bitterly divided
5-to-4 votes, that race cannot be a factor in the assignment of children to
public schools. The decision jeopardizes similar plans in hundreds of districts
nationwide, and it further restricts how public school systems may achieve
racial diversity.
References
Kozol, Joathan. 1991. Savage
Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. New York: Crown.
Schmidt, Peter. 2004 (January 30). “New Pressure Put on
Colleges to End Legacies in Admissions.” Chronicle
of Higher Education 50(21): A1.
“Hear and Now.” 2000 (Fall). Teaching Tolerance, p. 5.
King, Joyce E. 2000 (Fall). “A Moral Choice.” Teaching Tolerance 18:14-15.
Zinn, Howard. 1993. “Columbus and the Doctrine of Discovery.
“In Systemic Crisis: Problems in Society,
Politics, and World Order, William D. Perdue, ed (pp. 351-357). Fort Worth,
TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Orfield, Gary. 2001 (July). Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Civil Rights Project.
Winter, Greg. 2003. “Schools Resegregate, Study Finds.” New
York Times, January 21. Available at www.nytimes.com
