Discrimination Against Racial and Ethnic Minorities-Education

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