Colorblind Racism

By Sally Lehrman, Institute for Justice and Journalism. Posted September 18, 2003.

Editors Note: This is the first in a short series of articles by Sally Lehrman, a veteran journalist and Expert Fellow of USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism, which are being published by AlterNet in an effort to provide context about issues related to racial and ethnic identity. The Institute for Justice and Journalism was created at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication with Ford Foundation funding to strengthen news coverage and public understanding of justice and civil rights issues.

African Americans with a college diploma find themselves unemployed almost twice as often as whites with the same education. Hispanics must get by on only about half of the individual income that Asian Americans and whites divvy up among the bills.

And when blacks and Latinos are hospitalized with a heart problem, they are less likely than European Americans to receive catheterization, be sent home with beta blockers, or even be advised to take aspirin to protect their health.

While many Americans agree that open racial bigotry is generally a thing of the past, stark disparities in daily life persist, as documented by academic researchers, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Institute of Medicine.

Frustrated with theories plainly unable to explain the problem, sociologists increasingly are relying on a new framework to understand racism and develop solutions. "It's not just Archie Bunker any more," says Troy Duster, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and New York University who is president-elect of the American Sociological Association.

Just in the past six months, at least five books -- including one co-authored by Duster -- have put forward a fresh analysis of racial injustice. They set aside overt prejudice and individual acts of discrimination, which they assert actually may have little impact in today's world. Instead they pull back the covers on social practices and policies sewn into the fabric of work, school and the medical system that favor whites. Even the most well-intentioned white person, they say, benefits from a legacy of accumulated preferential treatment.

In part, these scholars hope to inject new ways of thinking into California's debate over the potential value of "color-blind" government policies to create a more equitable society. They aim to create new paradigms for pushing beyond historical discrimination in order to understand the roots of ongoing racial injustice.

"Intellectuals lost track of the ability to discuss what racism is after the Civil Rights Act," says Andrew Barlow, referring to the landmark 1964 legislation that prohibited employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion or national origin. Research on inequities continued to focus solely on discriminatory acts by individuals, he explains, adding, "We are really at the beginning of a new era."

The emerging school of sociologists also is responding to intellectuals such as Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom (America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible, 1997), and Shelby Steele (A Dream Deferred, 1999), who assert that discrimination is old news. Consisting mostly, but not entirely, of conservatives, this group says the country needs to transcend race by acknowledging the progress made over the past several decades. Race-conscious policies, they argue, only stir up resentment among whites while also promoting a lack of ambition among people of color by holding them to a lower standard.

As support for their claims, they point to the genetic evidence provided by the Human Genome Project that race has no biological foundation as a way to categorize people. They also cite a 1998 statement by the American Anthropological Association that explains "race" as a classification system invented in the 18th century to justify status differences between European settlers and conquered and enslaved peoples, then expanded to support efforts such as the Nazi extermination of Jews.

In August 2002, the American Sociological Association took a stand against such attempts to abolish "race" as untrue and irrelevant. In a statement, the professional society urged social scientists not to ignore race classifications or stop using them as a research tool, even though they may be biological fiction. "Those who favor ignoring race as an explicit administrative matter, in the hope that it will cease to exist as a social concept, ignore the weight of a vast body of sociological research that shows that racial hierarchies are embedded in the routine practices of social groups and institutions," the society wrote.

The statement sparked a debate in the society's newsletter, in which California State University-Los Angeles professor Yehudi Webster complained that sociologists -- as well as government officials, educators, and journalists -- who use race classifications promote racial awareness and separatism, which in turn foster exclusion and discrimination. Intermarriage, migration and genetic redistributions make such boundaries meaningless, Webster wrote.

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