thesis statement on racial segregation

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5 examples of thesis statements about racism for your next paper.

By Evans Apr 28 2021

Racism is a hot topic worldwide. It is one of the topics that never lack an audience. As expected, racism is also one of the most loved topics by teachers and even students. Therefore, it is not a surprise to be told to write an essay or a  research paper  on racism. You need to come up with several things within an incredible paper on racism, the most important one being a thesis statement. The term thesis statement sends shivers down the spine of many students. Most do not understand its importance or how to come up with a good thesis statement. Lucky for you, you have come to the right place. Here, you will learn all about  thesis statement  and get to sample a few racist thesis statements.

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Tips to writing a strong racism thesis statement

Keep it short.

A thesis statement is supposed to appear in the first paragraph of your essay. However, this does not mean that it should be the entire paragraph! A strong thesis statement should be one sentence (not an annoyingly long sentence), usually placed as the last sentence in the first paragraph.

Have a stand

A thesis statement should show what you aim to do with your paper. It should show that you are aware of what you are talking about. The thesis statement prepares the reader for what he or she is about to read. A wrong thesis statement will leave the reader of your paper unsure about your topic choice and your arguments.

Answer your research question

If you have been tasked with writing a  research paper  on why the Black Lives Matter movement has successfully dealt with racism, do not write a thesis statement giving the movement's history. Your thesis statement should respond to the research question, not any story you feel like telling. Additionally, the thesis statement is the summary of your sand and answer to the question at hand.

Express the main idea

A confused thesis statement expresses too many ideas while a strong, suitable one expresses the main idea. The thesis statement should tell the reader what your paper is all about. It should not leave the reader confused about whether you are talking about one thing or the other.

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Thesis Statements About Racism Samples

Racism in workplace thesis statement examples.

Racism is so rampant in the workplace. Thousands face discrimination daily in their workplaces. While this is definitely bad news, it gives us more data to choose from when working on an essay or research paper on racism in the workplace. Here are a few examples of thesis statements about racism in the workplace:

1.       Despite being in the The 21st century, racial discrimination is still rampant in the workplace. The efforts made by governments and world organizations have not helped to do away with this discrimination completely.

2.       Even with the unity that comes with digitalism, colour remains the one aspect of life that has continually caused a rift in this life. A lot of efforts have turned futile in the war against racism. The workplace is no exception. It is infiltrated with racial ideologies that remain within man's scope despite the professionalism within the workplace.

3.       Systemic racism is no new concept. It remains the favoured term with the tongues of many after food and rent. This is an indicator of how rooted the world is when it comes to the issue of racism. The now world has been configured to recognize racial differences and be blind to human similarity. Organizations have been established upon this social construct, and more often than it has led them into a ditch of failure. The loot that comes with racism is of great magnitude to bear.

Thesis statement about Racism in schools

Many academic institutions have been recognized for producing students who have passed with distinctions. Unfortunately, behind these overwhelming results lies a trail of many students who have suffered racism and have missed the honors board because of the color differences. Let's look at some of the examples of thesis statements on racism in schools:

1.       Merit should be the S.I unit upon which humanity is graded. Unfortunately, this is not the case, especially in schools, for the new merit score is the person's color. Many have found their way to the honour's board not because of merit but because they of the same color affiliation as the teacher.

2.       Enlightenment and civilization have found their way to the world through one important institution called schools. We owe that to it. Unfortunately, even with the height to which the world has reached civilization and enlightenment, one area has been left out and remains unaddressed- the world view of color. Despite the light and glamour, we see globally, one predominant view is called race. We continue to paint the world based on human color, even in schools.

3.       Bullying falls among the vices that have dire consequences to the victim. One of the spheres to which bullying exists is the sphere of color and race within the context of schools. Many student's confidence and esteem have been shuttered only because they are black or white. Many have receded to depression because they feel unwanted in the schools. One of the prominent times within American History is the Jim Crow Era, where racial segregation in schools within North Carolina was rampant. We saw schools have a section for white students and a separate section for black students within this era. The prevailing flag was black and white, and racism was the order of the day.

Final Thought

Coming up with a thesis statement does not have to difficult. No, not at all. Evaluate the topic or question and express yourself through the thesis statement from your stance or the answer. Mastering this one key in writing exams or assignments is one of the keys to scaling up the ladder of lucrative grades. However, practice is a discipline that will see you become a pro in writing a prolific strong, and catchy thesis statement. Henceforth, regard yourself as a pro, regard yourself as the best in thesis statement writing. If you are still having trouble with coming up with an excellent thesis statement, do not beat yourself up because of it.  Paper per hour  has the  best writers  who can help you with all your racism thesis statement needs.

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How to Write a Racism Thesis Statement: A Step-by-Step Guide (With Examples)

Jul 20, 2023

Jul 20, 2023 | Blog

As a student, you will handle many subjects and assignments.

One topic that is popular for essays and research papers is Racism.

Many resources are on the topic, so students assume a racism essay is easy.

The challenge you will face with a racism essay is not content but a thesis statement.

The racism thesis statement should be powerful and something your audience can understand and relate to.

This article will provide helpful guidelines and tips on writing a racism thesis statement and examples of powerful racist thesis statements.

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What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement is the backbone of a persuasive paper.

The thesis states your position or opinion as a factual claim and guides readers through their journey with you in this essay.

I am informing them on how they will navigate through it.

A good thesis statement is the equivalent of a preacher giving a sermon or a politician making an announcement.

As you craft your paper’s introduction, your goal will be to pique interest by announcing what you’re going to say in-depth throughout the rest of your essay.

Do you know how a preacher or politician might say, “Here’s what I’m going to tell you”?

The thesis statement is your announcement of what you’re trying to convey.

Difference between a TOPIC and a THESIS STATEMENT

A topic is a subject or good idea you would like to explore further.

A thesis statement is a specific argumentative stance you will take on the subject.

For example, Racism is a topic, while a thesis statement about Racism could be:

“While racism remains a problem in America, it can be reduced or potentially eliminated through the effective implementation of diversity training programs in schools and corporate institutions.”

How do I get started with writing a thesis statement on racial discrimination?

Use these three steps:

(1) brainstorm what you think

(2) refine your idea

(3) rewrite your idea in the form of a central claim

Let’s use a hypothetical sociology class assignment asking you to construct a response to the racism problem on our college campus.

Step 1: Brainstorm what you think 

You start by writing, “Racism is a prominent issue on our college campus.”

Even though this is a great starting point, it is not well-defined. It’s’ simply restating the assignment.

At this point, what you need to do is to brainstorm. On this given topic, what do you think about it?

What’s your opinion on the given topic?

How will you support your opinion?

What examples and facts can you provide?

Try putting these questions on paper and writing down your answers. You will then use the solutions you wrote down to formulate a stronger racism thesis statement.

Step 2: Refine your idea

One of the proven best methods of doing this is using the following model:

On a piece of paper, write this: “I think that ____________.

Using your initial brainstorming idea, fill in the blank.

In our case, it will be this: “I think that racism remains a problem on our college campus.”

While you have rewritten your rough idea at this stage, it is starting to form a thesis.

Next, complete this model as you continue building your thesis: I think racism Racism remains a problem on our college campus because __________.

Then you write: IRacism Racism remains a problem on our college campus because it does not require mandatory diversity training for all of its students.

Okay, now you are progressing and heading in a good direction.

Let’s reword the thesis to make it appear more “academic.”

Step 3: Rewrite your idea in the form of a central claim 

We need to replace the word “you” to make the thesis statement appear less personal and like the main claim.

To achieve this, delete the “I think that” from the sentence:

“Racism remains a problem on our college campus because the college does not require mandatory diversity training for all of its students.”

Hurray! You now have your thesis statement—many congratulations.

Essential details to keep in mind when writing a racism thesis statement

1) your racism thesis statement should appear at the beginning of the paper.

When writing a Racism essay on Racism, the thesis statement is important.

Readers should be given a clear idea of what your essay will cover and how it will unfold.

The racism thesis statement is an outlook for the rest of your paper in the introductory paragraph.

The introductory paragraph should clarify that you’re approaching this topic from all angles and know how complicated this issue can be in today’s society.

2) Your theRacismatement on Racism should give direction to the rest of your paper

A thesis statement on Racism gives your reader direction and provides several reasons for elaborating on a specific claim.

If you wish to accomplish this, your statement should expRacismhe the idea of Racism in-depth with different examples that will persuade readers.

For example: ”Racism does not exist” while still, an argument is insufficient as it has a false sense of structure.

However, if your thesis is that “racism does not exist because antiracist movements have grown in power and number over the years,” you can provide two reasons to support this claim within one sentence.

Such shapes the rest of your paper while leaving much time for evidence discussion later.

Such gives the paper the needed shape as evidence is discussed in detail to support this claim.

3) Ensure that you have a debatable argument

Although it’s important to question any information you are given, there is a certain knowledge that the public already values.

For exampRacismeryone, he knows Racism is a social and moral vice.

This means coming up with such a topic would not interest their audience.

Your argument becomes a racism thesis statement once you add an aspect.

For instance, oRacismld says, “Racism is the most harmful social and moral vice on earth. we might lose our unique identities and multicultural features if not eradicated soon enough.”

4) Keep your Racism thesis statement short!

It’s effortless to make your racism essay more interesting if you keep it short.

If you pick a broad topic, the magnitude of information will almost certainly give you trouble.

A good thesis statement should be small and localized rather than large or generalizing.

For example: “White police brutality on black people among many other things shows that Racism still exists in the United States” would make a powerful claim about something that was happening more often now than before

Tips On How To Write A Racism Thesis Statement

Before writing your thesis statement on Racism, consider the following guidelines.

Find a racism topic or issue to write about

Racism is a broad issue that continues to plague the world even today.

Therefore, finding an informative topic from which you can develop a thesis statement shouldn’t be difficult.

You can see Racism approach Racism through other social issues such as art, politics, economy, equitability, poverty, and history.

2. Pick a topic that is interesting to you

You might not be familiar with all the Racism surrounding Racism.

As asRacismoned earlier, Racism is a broad topic; there are many approaches you can take in your paper.

Therefore, to have an easier time developing a thesis, pick a racist topic that interests you.

For instance, if you are conversant with the history of America, your thesis statement could focuRacismhe the effects of Racism during the Civil Rights Movement that began in 1954 and ended in 1968.

3. Hook your reader

As you write your thesis statement, try to include a hook.

A hook is a statement that grabs the attention of a reader.

Try hooking your reader by relating your thesis to popular culture.

You could even refer to current issues on the news or relate to popular television programs, movies, or books.

4. Avoid offensiveRacismage

Remember, Racism is a personal issue; it is open to bias depending on your thinking.

Therefore, most of the issues surrounding this topic are controversial.

Avoid offensive and rude language when discussing a controversial topic in an academic paper.

Examples Of Racism Thesis Statements

It would help if you had a well-thought-out and well-constructed thesis statement to get a good score in your racism-related research paper or essay.

The following are examples of thesis statements on different racism topics.

Existence of Racism

Such an essay tries to prove that racial segregation is still a significant social problem.

Therefore, your thesis statement should focus on the problems racial segregation causes.

Consider the following example:

It is a fact that police killings involving people of color are more than white people. Joshua Correll of the University of Colorado confirmed this when he designed a game where the participants played cops. The game results indicated that, despite the people playing cop, they were more willing to kill a person of color and showed hesitation when the suspect was a white persRacismis. Racism continues to plague society.

Use our free Thesis Statement Generator Tool Here .

Workplace-related Racism

Racism is a form of prejudice often experienced in a workplace environment.

A workplace powerful racism thesis statement could read as follows:

Prejudice in a workplace environment is a backward practice that undermines productivity. In the professional sphere, white people are considered mentally superior, and therefore they get the top jobs that pay higher wages. Blacks are considered physically endowed and land physical labor jobs, which generally pay lower.

Anti-racism movements

Anti-racism is a phrase coined by people who formed movements to fight Racismnsequences of Racism.

Martin Luther King Jr led the greatest antiracist movement between the early 50s and the late 60s.

Another key antiracist figure was Nelson Madiba Mandela of South Africa.

Anti-racism also covers the beliefs and policies set to combat racial prejudice.

An anti-racism essay thesis statement should evoke emotion from a reader.

The following is an example:

Anti-racism movement leaders were treated inhumanely; Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years, and Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated. But, society today would not be as egalitarian as it is without them. Their sacrifices are the sole reason blacks and whites can walk on the same street and work together to create a brighter future.

Cause and effect

You can choose to write about Racism and the effect of Racism.

For example, ignoRacismis a cause of Racism that results in fear and eventually extreme violence.

The following is an example of a thesis statement that focuses on ignorance and fear as thRacismary causes of Racism.

Undoubtedly, Racism has negative consequences, the key among them being fear and violence, resulting from a need to protect themselves. Racism major cause of Racism is ignorance. Uneducated and unexposed feel threatened by people of a different race. Such people condone and practice this prejudice without considering its negative effects and consequences on the individuals they discriminate against and society.

Racism Thesis statements based on art and literature

Books, music, and movies cover a wide variety of racist topics.

The following are examples of literary artworks you can base a racism essay on:

Othello is a play by Shakespeare that addresses some delicate sociRacismssues such as Racism.

You could develop a thesis statemeRacismhlighting Racism in the play.

Othello, who was black, was highly disrespected by Lago and other characters such as Emilia, Roderigo, and Brabantio. These characters labeled him ”Barbary horse,” ”an old black ram,” ”thick lips,” and other demeaning names. He was also abused for marrying a Venetian woman. All this shows a strong conviction that one race is superior and a barbaric intolerance towards the ”inferior” race.

2. To kill a mockingbird

This book by Harper Lee is popular because it portrays the struggles of a black man in the southern states in the early 20 th century.

The book is a good source for Racism essays as it depicts Racism and its effects easily and comprehensibly.

The following is a good example of a racist thesis statement from To Kill a Mocking Bird :

Tom Robinson was suspected of murdering Mayella Ewell, a white woman, and was sentenced not because of any evidence but because he was black. Like Atticus Finch, Scout, and Jem, who tried to defend him, White characters were given shaming names such as ”Nigger lovers.” The story in the book clearly shows the tribulations a black man went through and how his word meant nothing.

3. Disney films

Disney films are popular for their fascinating stories and world-class acting and production.

However, scrutiny of several films will realize a certain degree of racial prejudice in how the films portray characters.

The following is an example of a thesis statement focusing on racial prejudice in Disney films:

There is a significant degree of racial prejudice in how Disney portrays characters in their films. For example, in Jungle Book, the gorillas communicated in an African vernacular language. Another example is Lady and the Tramp, where the cat villains had slanted eyes and spoke with an East Asian accent. The film production company portrays protagonists as white and antagonists as people of color.

4. Advertisements

The advertisement sector also depicts racial prejudice.

To demonstrate, consider this thesis statement:

Several surveys show that black people are underrepresented in commercials, mainstream media, and online ads. According to the US Census Bureau 2010 records, blacks  and other racial minorities represent 30%. Yet, only 7% of ads involve black people, while other racial minorities are hardly ever represented.

Racism is a fairly easy subject for an essay and research paper .

However, it has so many sources and different points of view that selecting one idea to focus on in creating a thesis statement can be problematic.

But, with the guidelines shared above, developing a thesis statement for your racism essay will not be as difficult.

Remember, you need to let the reader know your point of view and demonstrate your objectiveness on the issue.

Examples of thesis statements on Racism

• Racism worldwide can end if the global collaboration and interracial and intercultural communication continue to increase.
• Racial minorities in America still face covert prejudice despite America’s institutional and societal changes in the sixties.
• Multiculturalism has failed as an institutional practice in Europe, which can be determined by the increase in hate crime cases and racial minority issues.
• Despite the significance of affirmative action in countering racial prejudice, there are concerns that it promotes racial differences.
• There exists a misconception that affirmative action is a women’s agenda.
• Racial prejudice founded on a single person’s actions but taken to be the general state of affairs for the given race is wrong.
• Racism in the workplace adversely impacts workers’ productivity as it affects their aggressiveness.
• It costs nothing to point out racist actions in the workplace.
• The majority of Racism in the world relies on Racism as a means of garnering votes and grabbing power.
• The rate of racial hatred and related crimes is high in Australian universities.
• Students’ diversity can play a significant role in reducing racial crimes and related issues.
• Embracing diversity in the workplace can help reduce incidences of racial intolerance.
• Transgender, bisexual, gay, and lesbian Americans have experienced prejudice from society.
• In the thirties, the Blacks lived in hatred and poverty, which was the cause of death of many innocent lives.
• It was considered strange to show affection to Black Americans in the past.
• Despite the frowning among most citizens in America, racial prejudice is a common practice, especially in the brave home.
• Racial equality is a social barrier that Americans are yet to overcome.
• There are wide geographical and psychological distances between Asians and Blacks in America. Such distances can be attributed to the segregation by the American society government or the white-centric media.

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List of Great Argumentative Essay Topics on Racism [Updated]

Bob cardens.

• August 1, 2022
• Essay Topics and Ideas , Nursing

The social issues that we face today are more complex and multifaceted than ever before. And, as a result, there are a lot of great argumentative essay topics on racism. Here are just a few examples:

What You'll Learn

Argumentative Essay Topics on Racism

• How has institutional Racism affected the history of minority groups in the US? –
• Should we consider Islamophobia racism?
• Racism: Can we refer to it as a mental disorder?
• Race: Does it serve any purpose in modern society?
• How Racism impact the way Chinese American has been viewed.
• Irishness: Should it be considered a show of racism?
• Comic books: Can we consider it racist against black people?
• How does Racism impact the way we view immigration? Description: In recent years, views of immigration in the United States have shifted with many Americans perceiving immigrants as a source of national prosperity, rather than an eminent burden
• Racism Against Hispanics in America Description: One of the main challenges facing American society is racism. While the country is a multicultural society comprising of individuals from different cultures around the world, minority groups often face discrimination in the form hate crimes and racist comments. Although the issue of racism affects all minorities.
• African American males are 10 times more likely to resist arrest than Caucasian males, is this due to them essentially resisting police brutality, or are other factors at play?
• What is the driving force of racial police brutality?
• Is defunding the police an effective way to end racial police brutality?
• Racism. Discrimination and racial inequality. Essay Description: Today, everyone wants to reap the benefits of a diverse workforce. However, racism continues to be a major challenge to achieving this goal.
• Prejudice towards ladies in hijab: Is it baseless?
• Racism: Is it rooted in fear?

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Argumentative Essay Ideas on Racism

• Does police brutality exist for other ethnicities other than African Americans?
• Do prisons treat Caucasians differently than other ethnic groups?
• Should prisons be segregated by race?
• Educational Institutions take to Address Systemic Racism Description: Racism is a social issue that has existed for a long time, causing chaos among people from various races. It refers to discriminating against a person based on skin colour and ethnicity. Systematic racism, sometimes called institutional racism, refers to racism embedded in the regulations.
• What countries are the most racist in the EU?
• Do you agree with the statement, “there will always be color racism?”
• Prejudice and racism: Are they the same thing?
• What can be done to create pathways for more minority judges to take the bench?
• Does Islamophobia separate minority populations in prison?
• Is enough being done in the legal system to deter and punish hate crimes?
• Should there be a zero-tolerance policy for racially biased police brutality?
• Racial Discrimination: How We Can Face Racism Description: One of the most effective approaches to face racism and defeat it is through teaching the people its detrimental effects and how each one of us can be an agent of change. (Argumentative Essay Topics on Racism)

Theories of race and racism in an Administration of Justice, Criminal Justice race, gender and Class

These are just a few examples – there are literally endless possibilities when it comes to racism that you can write about in an argumentative essay . So, if you’re looking for some inspiration, don’t hesitate to check out these Research Paper Ideas on Racism with prompts!

Research Paper Ideas on Racism with prompts

• Xenophobia, Racism and Alien Representation in District 9 Prompt: The term alien has many connotations for different people, from the scientific theory and sci-fi representations of extra-terrestrial life to the resurgence in modern society of legal uses regarding immigration. In popular culture these uses can often coincide whether metaphorical, allegorical, or explicit.
• White and Black Team in Remember the Titans Prompt: Reducing prejudice essentially entails changing the values and beliefs by which people live. For many reasons, this is difficult. The first is that the ideals and expectations of individuals are also a long-standing pillar of their psychological stability.
• Transformation of the American Government and “Tradition of Exclusion” Prompt: The United States of America is a country known for its pride in its democratic government, where the American Dream encourages everyone to strive for the very best. That rhetoric is deeply rooted in every aspect of life in this country from its conception until…
• This is America: Oppression in America in Glover’s Music Video Prompt: A common topic we see in our society is the debate of gun control in America. It has been an ongoing argument due to the mass of shootings in schools, churches, nightclubs, etc. The number of shootings has only been increasing over the years.
• Theory of Slavery as a Kind of Social Death Prompt: The Orlando theory of slavery as a social death is among the first and major type of full-scale comparative study that is attached to different slavery aspects.
• The Review of the Glory Road Prompt: Glory Road is an American sports drama film directed by James Gartner, in view of a genuine story encompassing the occasions of the 1966 NCAA University Division Basketball Championship. It was released on 13th January 2006.
• The Relationship Between Racism and the Ideology of Progress Prompt: Through the years, as a result of the two world wars and the Great Depression, the term progress and the meaning attached to it greatly suffered.
• The Racial Discrimination in Bob Dylan’s Song Prompt: President John F. Kennedy delivered a powerful message to the American People on June 11th of 1963, calling Congress to view civil rights as a moral obligation instead of a legal issue.
• The People Segregation by Society in Divergent Prompt: It is clear that the society in Divergent places unrealistic limits on its members identities from the beginning of the book. Segregating different personality types into different factions not only has consequences on society but on the individual.
• The Influence of Racial Or Ethnic Discrimination a Person’s Self-concept Prompt: Discrimination and prejudiced attitudes are assumed to be damaging aspects of society. The research presents the cognitive, emotional, and social damages related to experiencing discrimination. This research proposal focuses on determining the impacts of prejudice and how it negatively affects an individual. (Argumentative Essay Topics on Racism)
• Find out more on  Argumentative Essay Topics About Social Media [Updated]

Racism research paper  outline

Research questions on racism.

• Have you seen the video of George Floyd’s death? What was your reaction to it? How did it make you feel?
• How would you define racism?
• How have you experienced racism towards yourself or others? How did it make you feel?
• Has anyone ever assumed something about you because of the color or your skin? If so, explain.
• Have you ever assumed something about someone else because of the color of their skin? If so, explain.
• Has anyone ever called you the “N” word or referred to others in that way while you were present? If so, please share what happened.
• Why do you think racism exists in today’s society? How do you think it will affect your future?
• How has the police brutality and the protests/demonstrations impacted you on a personal level?
• Do you feel your relationship with God makes you better equipped to handle all that is going within society concerning race? Why or why not?
• Do you think it is important to celebrate the differences in people? Why or why not?
• Is it important to have oneness in Christ or sameness in Christ? Explain. Do you think there is a difference between the two? Explain.
• How do you think we can move forward and carry out racial reconciliation as a society?

Great Racism Research Paper Topics

• What are the effects of racism on society?
• How can we stop racism from spreading in contemporary society?
• The mental underpinnings of racism
• How does racism impact a person’s brain?
• Amounts of racism in various social groups
• The importance of socialization in racial and ethnic groups
• How does racial tension affect social interactions?
• The following are some ideas for essays on racism and ethnicity in America.
• Interethnic conflict in the United States and other countries
• Systematic racism exists in America.
• Racism is prevalent in American cities.
• The rise of nationalism and xenophobia in America.
• Postcolonial psychology essay topics for Native Americans
• Latin American musical ethnography issues.
• Legacy of Mesoamerican Civilizations
• Endangered Native American languages
• What steps are American businesses taking to combat racism?
• The role of traditionalism in contemporary Latin American society
• Ethnopolitical conflicts and their resolutions are good topics for African American research papers.
• The prevalence of racism in hate crimes in the US.
• Latin America Today: Religion, Celebration, and Identity
• National politics of African Americans in contemporary America.

Good racism essay topics:

• Why Should We Consider Race to Understand Fascism?
• The Racial Problem in America
• Postwar Race and Gender Histories: The Color of Sex
• The Relevance of Race in Fascism Understanding
• Cases of Racial Discrimination in the Workplace in the United States
• Problems with Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Modern Society
• “Frankie and Alice”: Race and Mental Health
• The history of immigration, race, and labor in America
• Power and racial symbolism in Coetzee’s “Disgrace.”
• In America, race and educational attainment are related.
• Race to the Top: The Early Learning Challenge
• Social learning, critical racial theory, and feminist theories
• Minority Crime and Race in the United States
• Racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in society
• Documentary series “Race: The Power of an Illusion.”

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• Tutorial Review
• Open access
• Published: 20 December 2021

Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

• Mahzarin R. Banaji 1 ,
• Susan T. Fiske   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1693-3425 2 &
• Douglas S. Massey 2  

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications volume  6 , Article number:  82 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation, with disproportionate costs to Black Americans’ opportunities, networks, education, wealth, health, and legal treatment. These institutional and societal systems build-in individual bias and racialized interactions, resulting in systemic racism. Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans’ inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human . Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals’ systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior. Interracial interactions likewise convey disrespect and distrust. These systematic individual and interpersonal patterns continue partly due to non-Black people’s inexperience with Black Americans and reliance on societal caricatures. Despite systemic challenges, Black Americans are more diverse now than ever, due to resilience (many succeeding against the odds), immigration (producing varied backgrounds), and intermarriage (increasing the multiracial proportion of the population). Intergroup contact can foreground Black diversity, resisting systemic racism, but White advantages persist in all economic, political, and social domains. Cognitive science has an opportunity: to include in its study of the mind the distortions of reality about individual humans and their social groups.

Introduction

Significance.

American racial biases persist over time and permeate (a) institutional structures, (b) societal structures, (c) individual mental structures, (d) everyday interaction patterns. Systemic racism operates with or without intention and with or without awareness. But because these responses are based on socially defined racial categories, they are racialized, and because they are negative, they reveal the roots of racism. At the level of most behavior, they are also controllable, even if many non-Black people rarely notice these relentless patterns. Systemic racism is a unified arrangement of racial differentiation and discrimination across generations. Understanding these formidable challenges is necessary to understand and then dismantle them. Cognitive science can illuminate the fine-grained levels of inbuilt racial bias because it has the methods and the theories to do so. Moreover, studying racial bias is interesting; it will improve the science; and it is the obvious path to ensuring a mutually respectful, peaceful society that flourishes economically, politically, and socially.

At the Editor’s invitation, this article presents the social and behavioral science of systemic racism to a cognitive science audience. The tutorial defines systemic racism, describes its origins in US history, shows how the resulting racialized societal structures have become built-in cognitive structures that propagate in social interactions, resisting change. But these very societal-cognitive-social features can also be agents for change.

Systemic racism is said to occur when racially unequal opportunities and outcomes are inbuilt or intrinsic to the operation of a society’s structures. Simply put, systemic racism refers to the processes and outcomes of racial inequality and inequity in life opportunities and treatment. Systemic racism permeates a society’s (a) institutional structures (practices, policies, climate), (b) social structures (state/federal programs, laws, culture), (c) individual mental structures (e.g., learning, memory, attitudes, beliefs, values), and (d) everyday interaction patterns (norms, scripts, habits). Systemic racism not only operates at multiple levels, it can emerge with or without animus or intention to harm and with or without awareness of its existence. Its power derives from its being integrated into a unified system of racial differentiation and discrimination that creates, governs, and adjudicates opportunities and outcomes across generations. Racism represents the biases of the powerful (Jones, 1971 ), as the biases of the powerless have little consequence (Fiske, 1993 ). Footnote 1

We highlight the “inbuilt” aspect of systemic racism to be its signature feature and the touchstone necessary to understand the nature of systemic racism and its resistance to awareness and change. We begin with the concept’s more traditional domains: institutional and societal systems. Then, given the current venue, we expand the levels of analysis to include individual mental systems that have built in those systems of inequalities. We close with the interaction of those minds in social behavior, which can either maintain or change racial systems.

Institutions and Society . As the first section explains, the term systemic racism has traditionally referred to systems that uphold racism via institutional power (Feagin, 2006 ), with stark examples of what is also called institutional racism (Jones, 1972 ) visible in inequities in housing and lending, as well as more broadly in access to finance, education, healthcare, and justice. This section focuses on the institutional level in depth, as it provides the strongest evidence of systemic racism. At an even more macro s ocietal level, however, the inbuilt aspect of systemic racism is evident in race-based demarcations created by large-scale state and federal programs, which offer levers either to increase or decrease systemic racism. To remain within the scope of the paper, we consider the structures of institutional and societal racism in a single section.

Individuals and Interactions . In tandem with the previous section, this section focuses on individual bias and interactional racism, together bringing into view the inbuilt nature of systemic racism. To expand on this inclusive view of systemic racism, we end by reviewing what we know about the individual human being, alone and interacting with others. Individuals are agentic entities, the primary actors within all systems of life and living. Their attitudes (preferences, prejudices), beliefs (stereotypes), and behaviors (discrimination) are inbuilt or intrinsically enmeshed into the foundation of the mental systems that feed systemic racism. At the individual level, “inbuilt” refers to the common psychological processes that represent race in the minds of individuals. This evidence reveals systemic race bias.

Note that, here, we use slightly different terms: Systemic Racism refers to much of the sociological, demographic, and historic material as well as anything in the psychological section that is explicit and conscious racism. Systemic Race Bias is about implicit cognition—people who may not be aware of the harm they may cause. Implicit race bias does not mean a person is a racist. In this view, keeping racism and bias separate as terms seems advisable. Others view even unexamined racism as systemic racism in its individual manifestation. Each section elaborates on the meaning of racism in that context.

Individual racial bias propagates through both face-to-face and virtual interactions within families, classrooms, playfields, and workplaces, both verbally and non-verbally. Individual minds create and consume racial representations in books, social media, and entertainment. Footnote 2 We focus here on everyday interactions that convey disrespect and distrust of Black Americans.

Why? Role for psychological science in studying systemic racism

Individual humans are the creators and consumers of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but also the policies and practices that lie at the heart of systemic racism. Psychology as a field has historically remained silent on the topic of systemic racism, per se (e.g., Guthrie, 2004 , “Even the rat was white”; for exceptions, see: Jones, 1971 ; DuBois, 1925 ). Perhaps psychologists have regarded systemic racism to be a form of institutional racism and hence in the bailiwick of social scientists who study institutions and society, not individuals. Nonetheless, we attempt here to include individual minds and face-to-face interaction as playing a role. This goal has precedents: Early scholars who straddled disciplines, such as George Herbert Mead ( 1934 , p. 174), would likely find our attempt to be quite compatible with his stance that mind and society must be considered in intertwined fashion.

Today, psychologists are increasingly attempting to bridge the divide between the individual mind and society. Cultural psychology, for example, has attempted to analyze racism as the “budding product of psychological subjectivity and the structural foundation for dynamic reproduction of racist action” (Salter, Adams & Perez, 2018 , p. 151). This dynamic can emerge in individual racist actions (with or without awareness) that are fitted into the structure of everyday life and perpetuate systemic racism. Interpersonal interactions bridge individual and collective representations of race. Individual minds, sharing some notions about each other’s salient identities (e.g., probable race, gender, age) treat each other according to social norms, cultural habits, and cultural scripts. In the case of race, these individual mental representations and social interaction patterns rarely benefit Black participants facing Whites.

“Inbuilt”: A useful metaphor guiding the essay

There are these two fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ’Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’ Wallace, 2009

The fable highlights a simple idea—that the most fundamental feature of any system may be so completely pervasive that it ceases to be perceptible or when perceptible, fails to be recognized in its true form. This paradox creates a challenge for social and behavioral scientists, who must not only generate evidence about the complexities of systemic racism, but we must also confront unthinking rejection of that evidence. Other scientists face similar challenges in documenting their own complex phenomena, such as the resistance faced by the theory of evolution or the denial of evidence about climate change.

In most cases, evidence eventually reaches a tipping point, after which it ceases to be denied and even becomes sufficiently commonplace that its previous denial itself is puzzling. An easy example is the denial of scientific evidence about the position of the earth in the solar system and its shape, with few arguments today (but not zero!) about a flat earth. However, we are far from that tipping point of knowledge and acceptance when it comes to the idea of systemic racism. This paper, then, is yet another attempt, by connecting across the individual, interactional, and institutional/societal levels, to shed light on its existence.

The obvious allegorical lesson from the fable about the fish is of course the ease of being ignorant of that which is pervasive. However, the fable also points out that not all the fish are ignorant of their surroundings. The older fish, swimming the same ocean as the young fish, seems to have figured out the truth about the substance that suffuses its environment so fully that it is imperceptible to its peers. Ignorance then, need not be the only guaranteed outcome, even when perception and awareness are hard. Hence, one section uses the term “unexamined” to describe controllable attention to or willful neglect of one’s own biases (see also Fiske, 1998 ). Social scientists commenting on resistance to socioeconomic inequality have used the term “clueless” (Williams, 2019 ), which is admittedly harsh but suggests that learning some facts would permit more evidence-based understanding. Regardless, the evidence for systemic racism, at the level of institutions and society or at the level of individuals and interactions, requires re-examining the taken-for-granted, whether the water we swim or the air we breathe.

Systemic racism: the role of institutional and societal structures

Contemporary societal racism rests on Black–White segregation, historical and current. This first substantive section presents evidence that systemic racism has long pervaded US institutional and societal systems—creating a context for the minds of individuals within these systems, enabling an omnipresent neglect. First, this section shows that continued housing segregation by race obstructs Black opportunity and mobility, perpetuating racial disparities, challenging many Black Americans in ways White Americans never experience (Massey, 2020 ). At a societal level, Black disadvantage and White advantage come in part from residential hypersegregation (Massey & Tannen, 2015 ). More than any other racial group, Whites live in racially isolated neighborhoods (Rugh & Massey, 2014 ); and in the US neighborhood segregation translates directly into school segregation (Massey & Tannen, 2016 ; Owens, 2020 ). Both segregation and local funding undermine the quality of predominantly Black schools.

To elaborate these points, this section describes the historical context for US racism, territory likely to be less familiar to cognitive scientists. Our takeaway: Systemic racism pervades US social institutions, policies, and practices; later sections show how the societal structures make into the minds of the humans within these systems.

History: segregation and systemic racism

To explain systemic racism, we start with the historical origins of race in the US—that is, the social/political/economic mechanisms that have maintained it over time. Race is baked into the history of the US going back to colonial times (Higginbotham, 1998 ; Jones, 1972 , 1997 ) and continuing through early independence when slavery was quietly written into the nation’s Constitution (Waldstreicher, 2009 ). Although the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution ended slavery and granted due process, equal protection, and voting rights to the formerly enslaved, efforts to combat systemic racism in the US faltered when Reconstruction collapsed in the disputed election of 1876, which triggered the withdrawal of federal troops from the South (Foner, 1990 ).

The absence of federal troops to enforce Black civil rights enabled states in the former Confederacy to construct a new system of racial subordination known as Jim Crow (Packard, 2003 ). It rested on a simple principle: in any social encounter, the lowest status White person was superior to the highest status Black person. By law and custom, Black voting rights were suppressed, and Black Americans were socially segregated from Whites, relegated to menial occupations, inferior schools, dilapidated housing, and deficient facilities throughout Southern society. Any challenges to the Jim Crow system, perceived or real, were met with violence, often lethal, both within and outside the legal system (Tolnay & Beck, 1995 ).

From 1876 to 1900, 90% of all African Americans lived in the South and were subject to the dictates of the repressive Jim Crow system; 83% lived in poor rural areas, occupying ramshackle dwellings clustered in small settlements in or near the plantations where they worked. Although conditions were somewhat better for the 10% of African Americans who lived outside the South (68% in cities), anti-Black prejudice was widespread, racial discrimination was common and, as in the South, the prospect of racial violence was never far away (Sugrue, 2008 ).

Before, 1900, few African Americans lived in cities, and levels of urban racial residential segregation were modest. Black workers and servants generally lived within walking distance of their workplaces, and social contact between the races was common (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). At that time, the share of Blacks among city residents was small, and they were not perceived to be a threat to White hegemony, obviating the need for spatial segregation. The Great Black Migration of the twentieth century changed this status quo and transformed race relations in the US, making race truly a national rather than regional issue (Lemann, 1991 ). This transformation also created a new system of racial subordination based on Black residential segregation.

Between 1900 and 1970, millions of African Americans left the rural South in search of better lives in industrializing cities throughout the nation. As a result of this migration, by 1970 nearly half of all African Americans had come to live outside the South, 90% in urban areas (Farley & Allen, 1987 ). It was during this period of Black urbanization that the ghetto emerged as a structural feature of American urbanism, making Black residential segregation into the linchpin of a new system of racial stratification that prevailed throughout the US irrespective of region (Pettigrew, 1979 ).

Black out-migration from the South began slowly at first, but accelerated after 1914, when the onset of the First World War curtailed the arrival of workers from Europe. It accelerated again after 1917, when the US entered the war, boosting labor demand as conscription drew workers out of the labor force. The imposition of strict immigration restrictions in 1921 and 1924 guaranteed that Black workers and their families would continue to pour into cities during the economic boom of the 1920s (Wilkerson, 2010 ). The entry of ever-larger cohorts of impoverished Black laborers and sharecroppers into the nation’s cities unnerved White urbanites, prompting them to organize collectively by creating “neighborhood improvement associations.” These organizations pressured landlords not to rent to Black tenants and tried to convince Black home seekers that it was in their best interest to locate elsewhere, using persuasion and payoffs when possible but resorting to violence when these blandishments failed (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

As the number of incoming Black migrants continued to rise despite these efforts, White city residents demanded that politicians act to “do something” about the perceived “Black invasion.” Officials in smaller towns and cities responded by enacting “sundown laws” that required all Blacks to leave town by sunset (Loewen, 2018 ). In large cities, legislators passed municipal ordinances that confined Black residents to a specific set of already disadvantaged neighborhoods and excluded them from all others. These ordinances were the functional equivalent of South Africa’s Group Areas Act, which underlay the establishment of that country’s apartheid system in, 1948. These ordinances were widely copied and were spreading rapidly from city to city when, in 1917, the Supreme Court declared them to be unconstitutional (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). Sundown laws, however, were never challenged in court and remained in force well into the Civil Rights Era.

The end of legally mandated neighborhood segregation in cities occurred just as Black migration surged in the aftermath of America’s entry into the First World War. The sudden influx of workers caused existing areas of Black settlement to fill up rapidly and eventually overflow into adjacent White areas, where the arrivals met with increasingly violent resistance. The violence peaked in the late teens as anti-Black race riots swept through the nation’s cities, culminating in the Great Chicago Race Riot of 1919 (Tuttle, 1970 ). Even established Black neighborhoods were not safe, as evidenced by the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood was systematically attacked and razed by mobs of White vigilantes, leaving thousands homeless and dozens, perhaps hundreds, killed (Madigan, 2001 ).

Shocked by the wanton destruction of property, the real estate industry moved to institutionalize racial discrimination in housing markets and assert control over the process of racial change in cities (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). In 1924, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers adopted a code of ethics stating that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood” (Helper, 1969 , p. 201). In 1927, the Chicago Real Estate Board devised a model racial covenant to block the entry of Blacks into White neighborhoods and offered it to other cities for adoption throughout the country (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). A racial covenant is a private contract in which property owners within a defined geographic area collectively agree not to rent or sell to African Americans. Once approved by a majority of property owners, the contract became enforceable, and violators could be sued in civil court.

As the real estate industry gradually assumed control of racial change in urban areas, racial violence abated and neighborhood transitions from White to Black came to be managed professionally by realtors who sought to minimize confrontation and maximize profits. As Black migration continued throughout the 1920s, recognized Black neighborhoods steadily increased in density as housing units were divided and subdivided. Basements, garages, attics, and even closets were converted into rental units. Eventually, however, no more living space could be squeezed into the confines of the existing ghetto. Realtors then conspired to move the residential color line, selecting an adjacent neighborhood for racial transition and initiating an institutionalized process known as “block busting” (Philpott, 1978 ).

Realtors began the process by choosing a few poor Black families just arrived from the rural South and obviously unused to city ways to be placed strategically into selected units within the targeted neighborhood. Agents then moved through the neighborhood block by block warning residents of a pending Black “invasion.” Panic selling ensued, enabling realtors to purchase homes cheaply for subdivision into smaller apartments, which were then leased at inflated rents to African Americans desperate for living space. Owing to these institutionalized practices, Black segregation levels steadily climbed through the 1920s and ghetto areas gradually expanded their boundaries through the profitable management of neighborhood racial turnover by realtors (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

The exclusively private auspices of Black residential segregation ended with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. When Franklin Roosevelt came to power with his New Deal in 1933, the nation was in the midst of a catastrophic banking crisis. Millions of middle-class homeowners had lost jobs and were in danger of defaulting on their mortgages, putting both their homes and their bankers at financial risk. In response, the Roosevelt Administration created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to help middle class homeowners refinance their mortgages using long-term, federally insured, low-interest loans (Jackson, 1985 ). Together the federal guarantees and extended amortization periods reduced monthly mortgage payments to affordable levels, saving both the banks and the homeowners from financial losses through foreclosure.

To qualify for the federal guarantees, however, HOLC loans had to meet certain government-mandated criteria. In addition to low interest rates, minimal down payments, and long amortization periods, lenders were obliged to consider the riskiness of the neighborhoods in which properties were located. To this end, HOLC officials worked with local realtors and bankers to create a series of Residential Security Maps for use in cities throughout the nation. These maps color-coded neighborhoods according to their creditworthiness. Green indicated a safe investment, yellow indicated caution, and red indicated excessive risk and hence ineligibility for HOLC lending. Black neighborhoods were invariably coded red, along with adjacent neighborhoods perceived to be at risk of Black settlement (Rothstein, 2017 ).

The HOLC lending program only helped the minority of families that already owned homes, however, and in order to spread housing wealth to a wider population and create jobs in the real estate and construction industries, in 1934 the Roosevelt Administration created a much larger loan program under the Federal Housing Authority. The FHA offered long-term loans to prospective home buyers , not just owners. As before, federally guaranteed loans had to meet federally mandated criteria, which evinced a strong anti-urban bias. Specifically, they excluded from eligibility all multiunit buildings, attached dwellings, row houses, and structures containing a business. These provisions effectively restricted FHA loans to single family houses on large lots, thus channeling housing investment away from central cities toward vacant land on the urban fringes (Jackson, 1985 ).

Reflecting the prejudices of the realtors, bankers, and builders who helped to design the program, FHA underwriters were also required to make use of the HOLC’s Residential Security Maps, formally institutionalizing the practice of redlining in real estate and banking and systematically cutting off investment in Black neighborhoods for decades to come. The FHA Underwriter’s Manual explicitly stated that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” In addition to requiring the use of Residential Security Maps, the manual went on to advocate the use of racial covenants to protect FHA-insured properties. When a parallel loan program was created in the Veterans Administration by the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, it adopted the FHA’s racialized practices and procedures (Katznelson, 2006 ).

The anti-urban biases and discriminatory practices built into federal loan programs had little effect on housing patterns during the 1930s and 1940s owing to the tiny amount of new residential construction that occurred during the Great Depression and Second World War. In the postwar period, however, FHA and VA lending drove forward a massive wave of suburban home construction that made new homes widely accessible to White but not Black households. Given high rents and home prices in central cities owing to the influx of workers during the war years, in the late 1940s and early 1950s it was cheaper to buy a brand-new house in the suburbs than to rent an apartment in the city (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

The end result was a government-subsidized mass exodus of middle and working class White families from central cities to suburbs, creating a distinctly American urban configuration of Black cities surrounded by White suburbs. The homes left behind by the departing Whites seeking their piece of the American Dream in the suburbs were quickly occupied by Black in-movers coming to the city to take jobs in the still-vibrant urban manufacturing sector. Neighborhood turnover accelerated, and the nation’s urban Black ghettos rapidly expanded, both demographically and geographically (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

Although neighborhood transitions in the 1950s and 1960s improved Black access to housing in the short term, in the long term the neighborhoods turned into poverty traps. Because of redlining and racial discrimination built into housing and credit markets by federal policies and private practices, once a neighborhood became Black, it was cut off from investment, ensuring that its housing stock and business infrastructure would progressively deteriorate. It also left the Black middle class without a means to finance the purchase of homes, and predatory lenders stepped into the resulting void.

Drawing on their own capital, these lenders purchased homes and then offered to “sell” them to middle class Black families by means of Loan Installment Contracts (Satter, 2009 ). LICs were essentially rent-to-own schemes with high interest rates, bloated monthly payments, and no property rights or transfer of title until the final contract payment was made. Any missed payment could bring about immediate eviction by the property owner, no matter how long the aspiring family had been making payments under the contract.

Other predatory investors also purchased ghetto properties to become landlords, subdividing them into ever-smaller units and leasing them to poor and working class Black tenants at inflated rents (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). Whether city housing was being sold under an installment contract or rented on usurious terms, however, the absentee owners could not themselves get loans to offset depreciation or purchase insurance policies to protect their properties, creating a strong financial incentive for landlords to defer maintenance, minimize capital investment, and extract high rents as long as possible until the properties deteriorated to the point of becoming uninhabitable.

As Black ghettos expanded geographically during the 1950s and 1960s in cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, they ultimately came to encroach on zones in which White elites had place-bound investments in universities, hospitals, museums, and business districts. In desperation, local politicians and civic leaders turned to state and federal agencies for help. Drawing on funding from the National Housing Act, they created locally controlled Urban Renewal Authorities with the power of eminent domain, thereby enabling White interests to gain control of the Black neighborhoods threatening their place-bound investments (Bauman, 1987 ; Hirsch, 1983 ). Once in control of the land, they evicted the residents, razed their homes, and demolished neighborhood businesses, replacing them either with large-scale middle-class housing projects or institutional developments that strategically blocked the expansion of the ghetto toward the threatened White properties, prompting James Baldwin to quip that “urban renewal means Negro removal” (Dickinson, 1963 ).

Because of a “one-for-one rule” embedded within the National Housing Act, for every unit of housing torn down in the name of renewal, planners had to identify another unit into which the displaced tenants could theoretically move. To satisfy this rule, local elites once again turned to the federal government, garnering additional funds authorized by the National Housing Act to construct large public housing projects for families displaced by renewal. Given that the displaced families were Black, it was politically impossible to build the housing project in a White district, so another Black neighborhood was targeted for renewal and torn down to build dense collections of high-rise projects that now had to house two neighborhood’s worth of displaced families (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

This pairing of urban renewal and public housing did not itself increase the level of Black residential segregation (Bickford & Massey, 1991 ). Segregation levels were already high in the cities where this pairing occurred; but it did dramatically increase the spatial concentration of poverty within the ghetto by replacing relatively class-diverse Black neighborhoods and business districts with tightly packed blocks of high-rise projects in which being poor was a criterion for entry, yielding neighborhood poverty rates of 90% or more (Massey & Kanaiaupuni, 1993 ).

By 1970, high levels of Black residential segregation were universal throughout metropolitan America (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). Footnote 3 As of 1970, 61% of Black Americans living in US metropolitan areas lived under a regime of hypersegregation (Massey & Tannen, 2015 ), a circumstance unique to Americans. Although in theory, segregation should have withered away after the Civil Rights Era, it has not. In 2010, the average index of Black–White segregation remained high and a third of all Black metropolitan residents continued to live in hypersegregated areas (Massey & Tannen, 2015 ). This reality prevails despite the outlawing of racial discrimination in housing (the 1968 Fair Housing Act) and lending (the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act).

Why does modern segregation persist, despite Whites’ reported racial attitudes improving?

Accompanying these legislative changes was a pronounced shift in White racial attitudes. In the early 1960s, more than 60% of White Americans agreed that Whites have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods. By the 1980s, however, the percentage had dropped to 13% (Schuman et al., 1998 ). The fact that discrimination is illegal, and White support for segregation has plummeted, begs the question of why segregation persists. The reasons are multiple.

First, although the Fair Housing Act banned discrimination in the rental and sale of housing, enforcement mechanisms in the original legislation were eliminated as part of a compromise to secure the bill’s passage (Metcalf, 1988 ). Federal authorities were likewise granted only limited powers to enforce the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Community Reinvestment Act (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

Although overt discrimination in housing and lending has clearly declined in response to legislation, covert discrimination continues. Rental and sales agents today are less likely to respond to emails from people with stereotypically Black names (Carpusor & Loges, 2006 ; Hanson & Hawley, 2011 ) or to reply to phone messages left by speakers who “sound Black” (Massey & Fischer, 2004 ; Massey & Lundy, 2001 ). A recent meta-analysis of 16 experimental housing audit studies and 19 lending analyses conducted since 1970 revealed that sharp racial differentials in the number of units recommended by realtors and inspected by clients have persisted and that racial gaps in loan denial rates and borrowing cost have barely changed in 40 years (Quillian, Lee, & Honoré, 2020 ).

Audit studies, conducted across the social and behavioral sciences, include a subset of resume studies in which researchers send the same resume out to apply for jobs, but change just one item: the candidate’s name is Lisa Smith or Lakisha Smith. Then, they wait to see who gets the callback. The bias is clear: employers avoid “Black-sounding” names (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004 ). In fact, in both Milwaukee’s and New York City’s low-wage job market, Black applicants with no criminal background were called back with the same frequency or less as White applicants just released from prison (Pager, 2003 ; Pager, Western & Bonikowski, 2009 ).

That is, in the minds of hiring managers whose mental make-up is expected to be no different than the readers of this article, a White felon is equivalent to a Black non-felon. The same housing application, the same bank loan application, the same health data, the same behavior, lead to different outcomes depending on the race of the applicant, even though the decision-makers believe they are paying attention to the merits of the case and explicitly not to race, which most decision makers in these studies regard to be irrelevant to the decision.

What makes the problem of systemic racism so perverse is that “good people” with no explicit expression of we would call “racism” are the contributors to such decisions that produce widespread and unnoticed bias, resulting in systemic racism (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013 ). Racial discrimination continues because, although White support for Black segregation may have declined in principle, Whites nonetheless continue to harbor negative racial stereotypes about Black people , which limit their tolerance for integration in practice. Indeed, the willingness of Whites to enter or remain in a neighborhood declines steadily as the percentage of Black neighbors rises (Charles, 2003 ; Emerson, Chai & Yancey, 2001 ). And negative racial stereotyping of Black Americans strongly predicts White opposition to government efforts to enforce Black civil rights (Bobo, Charles, Krysan & Simmons, 2012 ).

In White American social cognition, as later sections elaborate, racial biases remain entrenched both explicitly (Moberg, Krysan & Christianson, 2019 ) and implicitly (Eberhardt, 2019 ). This extends to preferred neighborhoods : Residential searches are inevitably embedded within racialized expectations about neighborhoods and homes that reflect the racially segregated world that most Americans inhabit (Krysan & Crowder, 2017 ). The “correlated characteristics heuristic” relies on a single salient neighborhood trait—in this case racial composition—to represent an area’s acceptability. In White social cognition, the mere presence of Blacks denotes lower property values, higher crime rates, and struggling schools, irrespective of what the objective neighborhood conditions are (Krysan, Couper, Farley & Forman, 2009 ; Quillian & Pager, 2001 , 2010 ). Although Whites in surveys and interviews say they welcome the presence of Black neighbors, in practice Whites avoid neighborhoods containing more than a few Blacks and confine their searches to overwhelmingly White residential areas exhibiting White percentages well above those they report in describing their “ideal” neighborhood on surveys (Krysan & Crowder, 2017 ).

Although rarely admitted, explicit prejudice against Black Americans has hardly disappeared. Google search frequencies on the epithet “nigger” for different metropolitan areas strongly predicted an area’s level of Black residential segregation (Rugh & Massey, 2014 ). This index of explicit racism also strongly predicts the degree to which a city’s suburbs are covered by restrictive density zoning regimes (Massey and Rugh ( 2018 ), a key proximate cause of both racial and class segregation (Rothwell & Massey, 2009 , 2010 ). Owing to the persistence of discrimination, Black Americans are far less able that other Americans to translate their income attainments into residential mobility, greatly compromising their ability to access more integrated and favored neighborhoods (Massey & Denton, 1985 ). As of 2010, the most affluent Black Americans were still more segregated from Whites than the poorest Hispanics (Intrator, Tannen & Massey, 2016 ).

No other group in the history of the US has ever experienced such intense residential segregation in so many areas and over such a long period of time (Massey & Denton, 1993 ; Rugh & Massey, 2014 ). Systemic racism in federal housing policies (Katznelson, 2006 ), real estate (Helper, 1969 ), banking (Ross & Yinger, 2002 ), and insurance (Orren, 1974 ) has ensured a vicious cycle of racial turnover and neighborhood deterioration for most of the past century. As a result, many Black Americans have been compelled to live in societally isolated, economically disadvantaged, physically deteriorated neighborhoods produced and sustained by powerful external forces beyond their ability to control, the precise embodiment of systemic racism.

Because of racial residential segregation and the blocked mobility and spatial concentration of poverty it produces, neighborhoods have become the key nexus for the transmission of Black socioeconomic disadvantage over the life course and across the generations (Sharkey, 2013 ). Half of all Black Americans have lived in the poorest quartile of urban neighborhoods for two consecutive generations, compared with just 7% of Whites, a gap that cannot be explained by individual or family characteristics.

Whereas in the 1960s Black poverty was transmitted across generations by the inheritance of race and the discrimination and exclusion that came with it (Duncan, 1969 ), in the twenty-first century Black poverty is transmitted by the inheritance of place and the concentrated poverty it entails (Massey, 2013 ; Massey & Brodmann, 2014 ; Peterson & Krivo, 2010 ; Sampson, 2012 ; Sharkey, 2013 ). Black disadvantage with respect to income and social mobility is explained almost entirely by the poor neighborhood circumstances they experience (Chetty, Hendren, Jones & Porter, 2020 ; Massey & Brodmann, 2014 ). Racial residential segregation has become linchpin for systemic racism in the US in the twenty-first century (Massey, 2016 , 2020 ).

Discussions of segregation typically highlight how it operates to increase the social isolation of Blacks, but in fact it does more to isolate Whites, who are by far the most spatially isolated group in the US. In 2010, the average Black metropolitan resident lived in a neighborhood that was 45% Black, but the average White metropolitan resident occupied a neighborhood that was 74% White (Massey, 2018 ), and in suburbs the figure rose to 80% (Massey & Tannen, 2017 ). As a result, the advantages of segregation to Whites and the disadvantages to Blacks are invisible to most White Americans.

Feagin ( 1999 , p. 79), put this paradox into perspective by relating the experience of a British immigrant’s confrontation with the realities of race in the US:

Some time after English writer Henry Fairlie emigrated to the USA in the mid-1960s, he visited Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation and took the standard tour. When the White guide asked for questions, Fairlie inquired, “Where did he keep his slaves?” Fairlie reports that the other tourists looked at him in disturbed silence, while the guide “swallowed hard” and said firmly that “the slaves’ quarters are not included in the official tour.” (Fairlie, 1985 .) Housing segregation, and the systemic racism it reveals, are still not on the official tour.”

Two decades later, the question we must answer is whether we are willing, as scientists and citizens, to put housing segregation—and all the other institutions that do so much to dictate the vicissitudes of Black life—on the official tour of the USA.

Systemic racial bias: the role of mental structures and resulting social interactions

We began with institutions and society. Now, we move to individual minds surrounded and shaped by these societal structures. Next, we then move to interacting minds, which further perpetuate societal and individual racial distinctions. Racial bias at each level supports bias at the other levels, creating a racist system.

To understand individual mental structures, we start with unconscious inference, identified by Helmholtz, and its heir, implicit bias, most relevantly as expressed by Whites associating Black racial cues with negative concepts. Socially motivated (mis)perception goes one stage earlier to bias information seeking and interpretation. More specific links among racial bias in perceiving physiognomy, linked to dehumanizing associations, and aggressive behavior close this first section on the individual.

Unconscious inference

Among the intellectuals who contributed to the emergence of experimental psychology as an independent discipline in the nineteenth century was the German polymath, Herman von Helmholtz, whose numerous contributions to science include the concept of “ Unbewuste Schluss ” or “ unconscious inference .” Helmholtz’s concept was simple, but its implications are profound, even more so today with recent advances in the mind and brain sciences. Given the complexity of just the visual world, how are humans to represent it based on their individual-level, meager sensory and perceptual system, which entails the shunting of packets of data from the world outside, through the eyes and into the brain? Helmholtz offered two ideas. First, perception is not veridical, given the complexity of the world and the rudimentary nature of the minds attempting to make sense of it. Second, as implied by the word inference , what one deduces from the evidence provided by the senses is not a replica of what is out there. Rather, mental representations of the physical world are mere approximations.

Whittling the self-esteem of Homo sapiens down further, Helmholtz went on to say that perception is not controllable, but rather that it unfolds automatically. He used a commonplace example to make this point. We know that it is not the Sun that rises, but rather that the Earth revolves around it. But when we sit on our porch at sunrise, and look toward the horizon, we incontrovertibly experience ourselves as being fixed, and the Sun, however bulky, pushing itself up to meet us. To say about the Sun that “it rises” is completely inaccurate yet completely compelling. That incorrect perception is not something over which we have choice. To think otherwise is to delude ourselves.

Helmholtz’s two ideas contained in the phrase “unconscious inference,” with many additional levels of social complexity, summarizes the challenge when we confront systemic racism. On the one hand, we “know” the facts about an economy purportedly mounted on free labor for 250 years, the undelivered promise of 40 acres and a mule, the failure of Reconstruction, the resistance to desegregation, the history of redlining and gerrymandering, a history of unequal access to education, jobs, housing, finance, healthcare, and a lack of equal protection under the law. On the other hand, the limited sensory, perceptual, learning, and memory systems of humans set up a built-in blindness and automatic inferences that generate the illusions that, for instance, White people experience more discrimination than Black people (Norton & Sommers, 2011 ). Or, if Black Americans have any challenges, they have created their own situation in America today (Pettigrew, 1979 ) and therefore are responsible for getting themselves out of that situation. Not that minorities have no illusions, but the illusions of the higher-status group have more consequences because they usually also have more power.

The features of human minds that feed into the production of systemic racism come in two forms: ordinary errors of perception, attention, learning, memory, and reasoning that are the hallmarks of all thinking systems with human-like intelligence. In addition, we add another level of theorizing familiar to psychologists, that of motivated reasoning , the idea that our preferences, goals, and desires can bias our reasoning and lead to prejudicial decisions and outcomes (Fiske & Taylor, 2021 ; Kunda, 1990 ).

Another hallmark of human cognition is the phenomenon of loss aversion , the finding human beings much prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979 ). Even as White Americans resist and deny the reality of systemic racism, they nonetheless feel the loss of White privilege and social status quite keenly, creating powerful resentments that motivate them to reason away the potential existence of systemic racism (Craig & Richeson, 2014 ; Parker, 2021 ).

Implicit racial bias

Beginning in the 1980s, psychologists began to document a puzzling result. Individuals who claimed to have no racial animus showed evidence of negative attitudes and stereotypes toward Black Americans (Devine, 1989 ; Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986 ). Soon, the hunt for methods to better access “implicit bias” (as contrasted with standard, explicit bias measured in surveys) was underway, with specific calls for the invention of better technologies that could bypass conscious awareness or conscious control (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995 ).

One such measure, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has demonstrated a wide array of group evaluative associations. Typically, people can pair own-group cues faster with positive concepts, and other-group cues faster with negative ones—compared with vice versa. For example, White and other non-Black Americans show robust race bias in their inability to associate “good” and “bad” equally rapidly with the social categories Black and White. The IAT has attracted considerable attention (see Greenwald et al., 2020 , for best practices, reliable effects, and ongoing investigations). A public online location, since 1998, has provided data from millions of tests taken by volunteer participants at http://www.implicit.harvard.edu . Several signature results have replicated multiple times with large samples over time:

Race bias is consistently visible in the data.

A small positive correlation between stated and implicit race attitudes exists, but the two are largely dissociated, i.e., many of those who report being neutral (no negative explicit attitudes toward Black or White Americans), do carry implicit associations of Black + bad and White + good to a larger extent than White + bad and Black + good. This result prompts us to yet again note that the term “racism” has been used by contemporary psychologists to refer to conscious forms of race prejudice and to emphasize its semi-independence from less conscious or implicit forms of race bias. To make this distinction clear, researchers who study implicit race bias have gone to great lengths to reserve the term racism to only refer to conscious expressions of racial animus. Our usage of the term systemic racism in this article is undertaken is in the interest of including all levels of analysis (individual, institutional, societal) and all forms, from the most explicit to the most implicit. The result of a low correlation between explicit racism and implicit race bias makes the point empirically that the two are not the same. Of course, implicit race bias feeds into what may become racism, and for this reason it is best to think about implicit race bias as the roots of racism, not the above ground, visible structure. Implicit race bias also results from systemic racism.

Asian Americans show the same pattern as White Americans, even though as a third-party group in response to a Black–White test, they might be assumed to have neutrality. From the point of view of systemic racism, this is an example of what it means to live in a system of inequity at all levels. Even third-party groups will acquire negative and positive attitudes toward groups that are not their own.

Black Americans express strong positive feelings toward their own group but on the measure of implicit cognition, they show no preference for their own group, with scores of almost any sample of Black Americans showing relative neutrality, i.e., equal association of good and bad for Black and White Americans. This absence of ingroup-favoring attitudes—juxtaposed with the ingroup-favoring lack of neutrality in all other groups in the same society—is open to various interpretations, from moral balance to internalized racism to astute pragmatism; all await other data.

Tests of anti-gay bias revealed it to be quite high in 2007 but steadily dropping off (by 64% since 2013) to be at an all-time low today. By comparison, anti-Black bias has dropped, but to a much lesser extent, by about 25% (Charlesworth & Banaji, in press). A 25% drop-off in race bias is not insignificant, and although the genders differ in magnitude of bias, both men and women are losing bias at equal speed. Although all demographic groups are changing, young Americans are changing faster than older Americans, suggesting that the world they inhabit is signaling a less biased set of attitudes.

Together, these data point to the individual manifestation of systemic racial bias, hidden from view but robustly present. However, psychologists have also gone beyond such demonstrations of basic cognitive associations as markers of implicit mental content to show that individual and institutional change is possible if the will to create change exists.

Socially motivated (mis)perception

The idea of motivated reasoning or motivated cognition gathers several useful ideas to understand how individual humans shape and even distort perception to deal with real or perceived threats to self. Kunda ( 1990 ), for example, posited that the individual need for accuracy is thwarted by the demand to reach a conclusion prior to the evidence being satisfactorily in place and that one’s goals and motives often drive decisions. These decisions reveal many identifiable biases that emerge to weaken the orientation toward accuracy (see Fiske & Taylor, 2021 ).

With more direct focus on motivated reasoning as it concerns social change, Kay et al., ( 2009 ) presented empirical evidence for a motivated tendency to view things as they are and conclude that such a state of affairs exists because it is reasonable and even representative of how things ought to be. The connection to systemic racism is quite clear, as the authors further demonstrate that motivated cognition exists in the interest of justifying sociopolitical systems that maintain inequality and resist change. People justify the status quo, preferring stability especially if they are privileged, but even if not (Jost & Banaji, 1994 ). Groups in a secure position show the cultural equivalent of inertia, seeking stability, but groups on the move express inertia as continuing to move (e.g., acquiring mainstream standing) (Zárate et al., 2019 ).

Two substantive theoretical accounts undergird these ideas as they concern complex interactions of within-person and across-person phenomena such as systemic racism. First, Sidanius and Pratto’s ( 1999 ) Theory of Social Dominance offers evolutionary and cultural evidence to support the idea that hierarchies are an almost obligatory feature of human social groups. A related but independent idea may be found in Jost’s System Justification Theory (Jost, 2020 ), which explicitly makes the case that individuals will sacrifice self and group interest in order to maintain larger “systems” of social arrangements and work to keep them in place. The reason, Jost argues, is that such a motivation serves to meet deep psychological needs for certainty, security, and acceptance by others. The overarching social structure is important to protect because if it is stable, then all within it will be safe, including those disadvantaged by established hierarchies.

Perception of phenotypes, deadly associations, and system-maintaining behavior

With regard to perceptions of race, the mere categorization of someone as Black shifts perceptions of their phenotype. For example, a series of experiments documented that people’s knowledge about race phenotypes drives perception of lightness of the skin tone (Levin & Banaji, 2006 ). In other words, experiments held skin-tone constant and varied only the features, from Afrocentric to Eurocentric; this variation in features shifts perception of skin tone, such that Afrocentric faces are viewed to be darker skinned than Eurocentric ones, despite the same gray-scale tone.

Skin tone and features are critical cues to make life and death decisions, especially in ambiguous situations that are often present in so many interactions between police and Black citizens. In simulations of police-citizen encounters, people are more likely to “shoot” unarmed Black men than otherwise equally unarmed White men (Correll, Wittenbrink, Park, Judd, & Goyle, 2010 ). Black men with more phenotypically Black features are more likely to receive the death penalty for murdering a White person, holding constant the features of the crime (Eberhardt, 2019 ). The phenotypicality effect extends even to Whites with Afrocentric features (Blair, Judd, & Chapleau, 2004 ). Judgments of criminality can be primed by a Black face (Eberhardt, 2019 ).

And there’s more: the race–crime association overlaps the dehumanizing association of Black faces with great ape faces, that Staples ( 2018 ) called the “racist trope that won’t die”; Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson ( 2008 ) provide evidence from policing that links apes and Black people, from the first moments of perception to the radio dispatch and other media, with systemic implications. In more recent work, Morehouse et al., ( 2021 ) have shown that White Americans associate White with human and Black, Asian, and Latinx with animal with greater ease than the opposite pairing (White with animal), regardless of the category of animal (generic or specific). Implicit racial biases (Whites favoring Whites) are consequential, correlating with judged trustworthiness and economic investment (Stanley, Sokol-Hessner, Banaji & Phelps, 2011 ).

More recently, Kurdi et al., ( 2021 ) measured attitudes toward a phenotypic feature that happens to be a dominant perceptual marker of race, Afrocentric and Eurocentric types of hair. First participants took an IAT measuring their implicit attitude toward Black women with natural or straightened hair. Then, subjects read a summary of a real legal case involving a corporation that fired a Black employee for refusing to change her natural hair ( Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Catastrophe Management Solutions , 2016). The more negative the implicit attitude toward Afrocentric hair, the greater the sympathy with the corporation’s position rather than the plaintiff’s position in the legal case.

A relatively new approach to racial associations comes with the promise of epitomizing the term “systemic” in systemic racism. These are studies of large language corpora that are now possible using machine learning approaches to natural language. With the increasing availability of trained datasets—including large samples of the language of the Internet (content archives continuously collected by the nonprofit Common Crawl) or specific trained datasets of media such as books, TV shows, etc.—allow measuring the extent to which language contains attitudes and beliefs about Black and White Americans across time. Charlesworth and Banaji (in preparation) analyzed data from Google Books from 1800 to 1990. Setting aside the data from older books to focus on whether bias is present in the language today, these are the traits most associated with Black Americans (and not with White Americans) in the late twentieth century: earthy, lonely, sensual, cruel, lifeless, deceitful, meek, rebellious, headstrong, lazy . By contrast, these are the traits associated with White Americans (and not with Black Americans): critical, decisive, hostile, friendly, polite, able, diplomatic, belligerent, understanding, confident . Other work in natural language processing (NLP) sorts adjectives into 13 stereotype-content dictionaries (Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, 2021 ). The above adjectives convey ambivalent reactions to Black Americans on several dimensions, but notably neglect competence; Whites in contrast feature several competence adjectives. NLP allows efficient analysis of language in the culture or in spontaneous, open-ended descriptions (Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, under review). Footnote 4

Words have an important role to play. People often express surprise about implicit biases in the minds of individuals who have no intent to harbor them. Considering how and why it occurs—plausible mechanisms—may prove convincing. One causal candidate is language , the predominant way humans communicate and express themselves. Words undertake much of the labor of creating racism in thoughts and feelings that are reflected in speech. Machine learning approaches to understanding racial bias in language will likely be a critical method to objectively uncover how words, spoken and written, create systemic racism. That is, linguistic patterns connect groups with valenced concepts, and the repeated pairings create associations. Without awareness, language produces the inbuilt in the architecture of social cognition (as an example, the NLP stereotype-dimensions dictionaries capture more than 80% of spontaneous stereotype content; Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, under review).

From cognitive racial bias to aggregate racialized behavior

Individual implicit attitudes have been repeatedly shown to predict behavior; Kurdi et al. ( 2019 ) offer the largest number of studies included in a meta-analysis to date. However, as the authors note, the actual attitude–behavior relationship is marred by the poor quality of many studies, especially given the lack of psychometric control over the predicted behavior. Among the controversies that have marked this work is an intriguing idea put forth by Payne, Vuletich and Lundberg ( 2017 ), who proposed that the small correlations between individual attitude and behavior must be acknowledged as a function of what they call the “bias of crowds,” the idea that an individual’s behavior is determined by the larger social context in which that individual exists. A number of studies have appeared recently to challenge the idea that individual attitude–behavior correlations is the right place to be looking. That the actual correlation between implicit attitude and behavior is larger than it may have appeared has been revealed in a series of studies that predict behavior at the aggregate level by using aggregate IAT scores by region, such as metropolitan areas, counties, and states. Charlesworth and Banaji ( 2021 ) reviewed these studies to demonstrate more substantive relationships between IAT racial bias and consequential social outcomes.

For example, the studies reviewed reveal that the greater the implicit bias against Blacks in a region (using average IAT scores of a region) the greater is the lethal use of force by police, the greater the Black American deaths from circulatory diseases, the lower is spending on Medicaid disability programs (more likely to assist Black Americans), the greater the Black–White gap in infant low birth weight and preterm births, the greater the Black–White gap in school disciplining (suspension, law enforcement referrals, expulsions, in-school arrests), the Black–White gap in standardized testing scores (3rd–8th grade for math and English), and lower upward mobility.

To grasp the meaning of systemic racism as it exists at the individual level within larger society, not just in a single moment by across time, a study by Payne, Vuletich and Brown-Iannuzzi ( 2019 ) is illustrative. Their analysis of IAT data today yields strong correlations with the ratio of enslaved to free people in the southern US in 1860. States with a larger ratio in 1860 are the states with greater race bias today, 160 years later (r = 0.64). This correlation is much larger in magnitude than even the correlation between regional IAT race bias and Black American representation across the US (r = 0.32). As Charlesworth and Banaji ( 2021 ) note, “the result also suggests that today’s Americans who live in regions with greater historical legacies of slavery must be acquiring the particles of race bias embedded in the social atmosphere. Systemic discrimination is a useful term in this case as it helps capture the pervasiveness of race bias as it extends across both space and time.”

Summary. As explicit bias decreased, measured forms of implicit bias have persisted, potentially attributable to racial segregation. White Americans have limited direct experience with Black Americans, so cultural associations substitute for more individuated impressions. Implicit associations of “Black-bad” and “White-good” are weakening, but far from neutral. Meanwhile, socially motivated (mis)perception favors these system-justifying biases. Together, they support a syndrome linking racial phenotypes, deadly associations, and system-maintaining behavior. Further, cognitive racial biases underpin aggregate racialized behavior. These are some cognitive-motivational mechanisms of systemic racism. Other mechanisms involve everyday interactions that perpetuate bias. In particular, predictable patterns of disrespect and distrust maintain the interpersonal racial divide.

Racialized social interactions

Face-to-face behavior propagates bias. Individuals carry racial biases into their social settings largely by interacting with others. Repeated patterns of behavior that differ by race are, at a minimum, racialized (defined by race) and often experienced as racist. Individual racial biases, enacted in daily life, perpetuate bias, which then links the individual to the norms, scripts, and habits that constitute the social system. Interpersonal interaction conveys bias, intentionally or not. In scores of studies, White Americans distance themselves from Black interaction partners, express non-verbal discomfort, and avoid them (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami & Gaertner, 2002 ; Richeson & Shelton, 2007 ; Word, Zanna & Cooper, 1974 ). In the aggregate, these patterns constitute the concrete manifestations of a racially biased social system.

We have already seen White people’s generically negative default associations with Black Americans, linking them to crime (untrustworthy) and to animals (incompetent). These reflect the two key stereotype dimensions in intergroup perception (Fiske, 2018 ): warmth and competence. These dimensions organize people’s perceptions of social systems: perceived competence reflects groups’ stereotypic status in society. The hierarchy supposedly reflects merit, so rank predicts their supposed competence and evokes respect—or supposed incompetence and disrespect. Besides groups’ status (competence), the other aspect of social structure is groups’ apparent cooperative or competitive goals, interdependencies that stereotypically predict warmth and trustworthiness. Cooperators on our side are nice; competitors are not. Stereotypes derive from social structural perceptions (status and interdependence), especially when people learn about others they might encounter (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002 ; Nicolas et al., 2021 ). Black Americans do not get a break on either dimension. And because these racialized perceptions derive from social structure, they pave the way for systemic racism. Consider the evidence for these two dimensions: competence and warmth in racialized perceptions and behavior.

Disrespect communicates Whites’ view of Blacks as low status and incompetent

The default representation of Black Americans is low status (Dupree, Torrez, Obioha & Fiske, 2021 ). Whites spontaneously associate Black faces with low-status jobs, compared to Whites. The structural belief that Blacks are low status appears in associating them with jobs such as janitor, dishwasher, garbage collector, taxi driver, cashier, maid, prostitute. This race–status association correlates with endorsing social dominance (believing that some groups inevitably dominate others, and it is better that way) and with meritocracy (group get what they deserve). All these judgments share a common element of disrespect and assumed incompetence.

Race–status associations emerge in behavior that maintains Black people at the bottom of the hierarchy. Respondents endorsed Black applicants for lower status jobs and withheld support for organizations and government policies aiding minorities. Thus, racialized associations, assumptions, and preferences all identify a view of Black people's structural position as low status, on average. Behavior communicates these attitudes, whether examined or not. Thus, race–status associations imply Black incompetence, covarying with feeling-thermometer (0–100) ratings of interracial bias, social dominance orientation, meritocracy beliefs, as well as hierarchy-maintaining hiring and policy preferences.

Disrespectful behavior that presumes incompetence of Blacks appears in another series of studies. Well-meaning liberals, expected to introduce themselves to a Black partner, dumbed-down their speech, as they did in vocabulary for a task assignment (Dupree & Fiske, 2019 ). Similarly, White Democratic presidential candidates also showed a competence downshift in speeches to minority audiences only (Dupree & Fiske, 2019 ).

This pattern reproduces itself when respondents imagine introducing themselves to a lower-status person (race unspecified) at work (Swencionis & Fiske, 2016 ). They claim their goal is to communicate their own warmth (as they downplay their competence), but this rests on the presumption of the other’s incompetence. Trying to be folksy does not communicate respect.

The presumption that structural status predicts competence is widespread (averaging r > 0.80 across US and international samples; Fiske & Durante, 2016 ). The implication is that for most White Americans, the association that pops into their minds will link a Black person with incompetence. People communicate such disrespect by failing to bet on or invest in the other’s performance (Walsh, Vaida, & Fiske, under review).

Structurally, this amounts to racism. Black people are widely perceived as inferior in these ways, which are baked into the social hierarchy, reflecting disrespectful patterns of interpersonal behavior. All of this perpetuates the social hierarchy and the image of Blacks as incompetent.

Worse yet, disrespect surfaces in police encountering Black drivers. From the first moment (“Hey” instead of “Sir” or “Ma’am”), police officer language shows computationally derived, measurably lower respect (Voigt et al., 2017 ). Given the already fraught relationships between police and Black community members, this worsens an already dangerous encounter and undermines the chances to create trust.

Distrust communicates Whites’ views of Blacks as uncooperative and not warm

Besides incompetence, the other major dimension of social cognition is warmth (trustworthy, friendly), as noted. The default stereotype of a Black person is probably also untrustworthy, but the data on this point are surprisingly indirect. Whites can be expected to distrust Blacks as part of the larger principle that, categorically, people mistrust outgroups. More specifically, as noted, Whites associate Blacks with crime, which certainly undermines trust. Footnote 5 This configuration fits survey data showing that ratings of poor (i.e., explicitly low-status) Black people allege incompetence (disrespecting them) but also lack of warmth (distrusting them).

Plotting these ratings in a warmth x competence space, poor Blacks are frequently judged as low on both. Because White Americans link race and status, the low-income Black person is the default Black person, allegedly incompetent, but also untrustworthy. Mistrust is indicated by excessive surveillance of Black Americans (driving while Black, shopping while Black, false accusations of theft or assault, police shootings…). Footnote 6

Distrust can be operationalized as behavior: In the economic Trust Game, a player must decide how much of their starting endowment to share, on the knowledge that it will be tripled, and on the hope that their partner will share back, generously. Incentivized trust-game behavior closely tracks warmth ratings; that is, societal groups rated as low warmth and untrustworthy receive less shared endowment, presumably because they are not trusted to share it back. In nationally representative samples, people of color do not fare well in the Trust Game (Walsh et al., under review). In more prosaic settings, non-verbal behavior reveals unmonitored dislike (if not specifically mistrust), as noted.

Black Americans experience repeated treatment as incompetent and untrustworthy. Because this stereotype and ensuing behavior is racially category-based and negative, as well as potentially controllable, it is racist. Because the behavior comes from societal stereotypes, which come from social structure, Footnote 7 it is systemic.

Whites’ potential control implies responsibility for reinforcing system racism

Racialized interactions could also be termed racist, in the sense that White people could potentially observe their own inequitable behavior if they chose (Fiske, 1989 ). People rarely examine these unwritten rules, typical behaviors, but conceivably they could, so “unexamined” bias captures the higher potential control for behavior than for implicit associations. Control implies responsibility in the minds of lay people and the law, so this interpretation of “racialized” as “racist” creates concern and is likely to be contested. But the science makes the empirical point here that racialized social behavior is demonstrably controllable, given sufficient incentive (Monteith, Lybarger & Woodcock, 2009 ; Sinclair, Lowery, Hardin & Colangelo, 2005 ). So systematically different behavior by race reflects a racist habit, script, or norm, the components of a system from the bottom up.

The challenge in controlling racist habits is that they are the cultural default. Much of this systematic behavior results from White Americans’ inexperience with Black Americans, thereby substituting societal representations for individuating information about the unique human (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990 ). People use especially those default representations that fit their natural human tendency to detect and prefer people they view as similar to themselves. To unpack this, consider some basic principles of affiliation that would predispose Whites to favor other Whites and exclude Black people. First is the basic tendency to categorize others and to favor those of the ingroup. For decades, principles of attraction have established its foundations in similarity (Byrne, 1971 ; Montoya & Horton, 2013 ) or homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook, 2001 ). And mere categorization suffices to produce ingroup favoritism (Tajfel & Turner, 1979 ). No animus is necessary, although it easily develops. As a basis for categorization, race is arbitrary (more so than gender and age; Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides, 2001 ) but common (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999 ). Thus, race-based ingroup favoritism is a default, in the absence of other experience. Footnote 8 This makes it hard to over-ride.

Societal segregation by race makes difficulties for overcoming the racial default. Segregation limits White exposure to Blacks, undermining their direct experience, leaving Whites to rely on cognitive shortcuts to represent Blacks as a group. Indeed, the less exposure people have to outgroups, the more clearly they differentiate among them–stereotypically. That is, White Americans who know the least about other races have the clearest stereotypes about them; the less diversity, the more differentiated their cognitive representations (Bai, Ramos & Fiske, 2020 ).

What’s wrong with that?

As a scientific question, a skeptic might ask, what’s wrong with differentiating by stereotypes? One set of answers concerns the demeaning individual and face-to-face interaction, just addressed. The other answers pertain to sheer demographic diversity of Black Americans, covered next.

Given its racial history and ongoing systems, societal patterns and cultural stereotypes prevailing in the US tend to associate Blacks with low status and Whites with high status as noted. To the extent this race–status association has a kernel of statistical accuracy (Blacks are over-represented in low-status jobs), it fails several tests as an argument for using stereotypes as a constructive strategy of intergroup relations. First, it ignores variability, individuality, and (especially) Black diversity. Second, category-based thinking exaggerates perceived between-group variability and minimizes perceived within-group variability (Tajfel & Turner 1979 ; Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff & Ruderman, 1978 ). So “nouns that cut slices” (Allport’s, 1954 felicitous phrase for category labels) do violence to the human data. What’s more, society has civil rights laws protecting people from being judged by their group membership, so the consensus is that this is not only wrong, but illegal.

Race–status associations, in practice, ignore all the structural contributors to race–status associations, such as the neighborhood effects, already described. Whites assume meritocracy, believing that status accurately reflects individual competence (Fiske, Dupree, Nicolas & Swencionis, 2016 ); globally, the perceived status—perceived competence correlation hovers around 0.80. (The only countries where people are more cynical about the status-merit link are former Communist ones; Grigoryan et al., 2020 .) The point here is that status has many antecedents, and not all of them are merit (or other personal, stereotypical explanations, e.g., innately good/bad at math). Systemic factors such as neighborhood, school, family resources, connections, and especially race all receive no mention in the meritocracy account.

Whites do differentiate Black Americans by subcategories, e.g., by status, specifically social class, viewing low-income Black people as incompetent and untrustworthy, but Black professionals as competent and trustworthy (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002 ). Black Americans themselves differentiate several subtypes of Blacks likewise along a social-class dimension (Fiske, Bergsieker, Russell & Williams, 2009 ).

Status-keeping shortcuts are easier to maintain without information to the contrary, such as experiencing human variability. Whites with less exposure to Blacks are more overtly prejudiced as a function of structural features such as rural residence, where they encounter less diversity (Bai et al., 2020 ), and lack of education, where they experience less variability of ideas. As a structural matter, segregated White rural residence also predicts lower school quality partly because of the American policy of locally funding schools; this creates an association between a weaker tax base, rural location, ethnic homogeneity, and overt bias. These systemic factors interact to produce prejudice. As an earlier section shows, the social structure permeates American arrangements since the arrival of Whites on native lands.

Nevertheless, for most Whites, their isolated lives make them inexperienced about their Black fellow citizens. Housing segregation disfavors most Whites in experience with diversity, making them often inept and naïve when speaking about issues that are facts of Black lives. This means that Whites rely on cultural shortcuts to understand the Black people whose life experience they do not know. These cognitive representations derive from perceived structural patterns such as race–status associations and race-resource unfairness (Krysan & Crowder, 2017 ).

We have seen that Whites’ racial beliefs are relatively automatic (implicit bias) and ambivalent (warmth/competence). The resulting associations (stereotypes) are more subtle than most people believe. They are consequently hard for anyone to detect in themselves (unexamined) or in any one person (under the radar), but the patterns appear systemically as aggregate biases. Supposing the aggregate biases are problematic, at least because they ignore variability, examine that more closely.

Aggregate bias ignores diversity

So far, this review has described the relentless systems of racism that limit opportunity and outcomes by race. Many Black Americans nevertheless succeed despite the rigged system. Black diversity thus results from those who escape the system, but also from African and Caribbean immigration, and from intermarriage. For Black students enrolled at selective colleges, especially, the diversity of their backgrounds is the main fact that underscores their success (Charles, Kramer, Massey & Torres, 2021 ). Any given White student’s background is far more predictable than any given Black student’s, which potentially ranges from extreme disadvantage to extreme wealth. For that minority (a third) of Black students whose segregated neighborhoods entail underfunded schools, gang violence, and concentrated police violence, their presence in college testifies to extraordinary resilience (Charles, Fischer, Mooney & Massey, 2009 ).

Most non-Black people do not realize that Black Americans are more diverse than most American ethnic groups. Underestimating their variety allows an oversimplified image to dominate every level, from mind to society, making it a systemic racism. This section describes diversity based on place, intermarriage, immigrant experience, parent education, and sheer escape.

A century ago, most Black Americans lived in the rural South, but after the Great Migration, most lived in cities, often in the North, usually hyper-segregated, but with family roots in both the North and South. By the turn of the current century, Black American student bodies at selective colleges were the most diverse in history, more biracial, more immigrant, more middle or upper class, and equally identifying themselves as both American and as Black (Charles et al., 2021 ). Black students, even as elites, show “unprecedented variation in terms of racial origins, skin tone, nativity, generation, class, and segregation” (Charles et al., 2021 , Ch. 10).

Clusters of characteristics and attitudes illustrate the variety. Mixed-race students identify less with being Black, are comfortable with both Blacks and Whites, see Whites as less discriminatory, and report deep parental involvement in their schooling and cultural experiences. Mixed race students also have more White friends and fewer Black friends than their monoracial peers and are more likely to date outside the group, especially with Whites. In addition, mixed-race students are less likely to join majority-Black organizations on campus, and thus report less intense interaction with Blacks . Psychologically, the White view of biracial individuals continues to demonstrate hypodescent, i.e., the view that biracial individuals belong to the less advantaged group, or the cognitive expression of the “one drop rule.” Combining the sociological and psychological angle demonstrates the lack of consistency between how biracial Americans are viewed and the way they see themselves.

Black students with an immigrant background are most comfortable with other Black students, and report having strict parents who expect obedience, respect, hard work, and family loyalty without hands-on, hovering involvement. First-generation immigrants, especially African immigrants (versus Caribbean ones), believe in meritocracy and see Whites as not so discriminatory. After a generation, idealism gives way to pragmatism: Hard work pays off. African immigrant origins predict reliably higher grades.

As for segregation, Black students growing up with more exposure to Whites feel closer to them but also view Whites as more discriminatory, a psychologically complex mental state to manage. In contrast, living in segregated neighborhoods especially exposes Black students to higher (the top third) levels of disorder and violence, leading them to view Whites as more distant and discriminatory. But parents are more protective, relying on strict discipline but not trying to use shame or guilt as an influence strategy (more frequent in Asian families).

As with all students, high-school GPA predicts college GPA. Besides that, again as with all students, Black women do better than Black men, as do those with educated parents . Differences in academic preparation vary by segregation in two ways: the more White students in their schools, the worse Black students’ grades but the higher their SATs, suggesting more rigorous standards. Thus, the portraits of Black college students are diverse; generalizations are unreliable, except perhaps for one: resilience in the face of systemic bias and a diversity of adaptations to a variety of challenges.

We document Black diversity here for these reasons: First, to avoid making the litany of systemic Black disadvantages the sole image conveyed here. Second, because of segregation, many White people, including University faculty, see a Black person on campus and—assuming they realize this is a student—they presume the person comes from a low-income background, unprepared for college, with uneducated parents, native born, but with little experience outside the imagined ghetto, etc. This may be true for some small fraction of students, but not just the Black ones, and not true of most Black students on campus today. A third reason to remind the reader of Black diversity on campus is to highlight experiences of inter-racial contact as important one mechanism for overcoming racial bias, and—if scaled up to integrated neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces—for shifting systemic racism.

Contact: exposure to racial diversity

People with least exposure to diversity have the most differentiated images of the outgroups they have never met (Bai et al., 2020 ). And the prospect and first experience of diversity is not salutary; newly diverse contexts show lower well-being (Putnam, 2007 ; Ramos, Bennett, Massey & Hewstone, 2019 ). But over time, people get used to each other: well-being is higher and stereotypes melt into each, forming an undifferentiated cluster of people like us, mostly warm and competent.

Psychology has 70 years of research to explain how this works, following Allport’s ( 1954 ) contact hypothesis. In one meta-analytic perspective (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006 ), intergroup contact reduces prejudice, the more it meets Allport’s conditions: shared goals, non-trivial interactions, authority sanctions, and rewarding results. Much of the process seems to be affect-driven. If the contact setting would afford the opportunity for friendship, the contact effect is stronger (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005 ). This is a useful reminder that much prejudice is emotional, not cognitive. In fact, a meta-analysis of 50 years of research on racist attitudes found that they predict racist behavior the most when they are emotions (“hating them”) rather than stereotypes (“they are lazy”) or even simple evaluations (2 on a 5-point scale) (Talaska et al., 2008 ).

Nevertheless, the core element of successful contact, goal interdependence, does operate via information processing. In laboratory experiments, interdependence makes people attend specifically to unexpected, stereotype-inconsistent information, and they make dispositional inferences, generating an individualized coherent impression of the teammate (Ames & Fiske, 2013 ; Erber & Fiske, 1984 ). Neural signatures of mindreading prominently include the mPFC regions that reliably activate when people are inferring another’s predispositions. The mind-reading mPFC activates most for an interdependent partner’s stereotype-inconsistent attributes. Although supporting evidence includes these mechanisms, a subsequent meta-analysis (Paluck, Porat, Clark & Green, 2021 ) notes that few high-quality intergroup studies have focused on race per se, few look at adults, few are experiments. We have much to learn.

Conclusion: systemic racism is individual/interpersonal and institutional/societal but rarely recognized

Segregated housing disadvantages many Black Americans, and its effects are far-reaching, not only in life opportunities and outcomes (education, employment, health, well-being) but also in the psychology of systemic racism. We have argued that case here. Most Whites fail to recognize and appreciate the growing diversity of America’s Black population, which has arisen from a mixture of Black resilience, a growing middle class, rising intermarriage, and global-South immigration. Generally, White Americans—because of the segregation perpetuated to sustain their advantage—have limited exposure to Black Americans, so their knowledge is indirect, and based on cultural caricatures. Segregation allows White people to be clueless about race, and because racial bias is more automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent than people think, they fail to detect it in themselves and others. As a result, White people have many unexamined biases, undergirded by earlier stages of information processing (e.g., attention, perception, learning, memory, reasoning) that sustain such a lack of awareness. These cognitive errors and biases stem from lack of exposure, lack of the accurate evidence, and a lack of necessary knowledge.

The assumption here is that if people were simply made aware of the facts that have been described in the earlier sections, they would slap their palm to their head and immediately vote for reparations. But as readers may no doubt deduce on their own, confronting accurate data and internalizing it is not a smooth or pretty process. That our minds resist information that challenges certain types of prior beliefs is a fundamental discovery from the mind sciences. Basic cognitive processes such as motivated cognition help to maintain a lack of awareness of racial experiences as they exist on the ground. But no lack of awareness need exist.

The human ability for conscious awareness, deliberate thought, and the motivation to link values to behavior cannot be underestimated as vehicles of change. We have accomplished this regarding how we understand the relationship of Earth to our Sun, so we know it is not as it seems. If we choose, we can similarly put our minds to derive the best evidence to learn about the presence or absence of systemic racism. If we can acquire the appropriate knowledge (often hidden from our conscious perception), we will be more likely to remain open to evidence that shows its presence.

If we do not undertake this effort, it is at our own peril. If, in the twenty-first century, we cannot mount a new struggle to see the social world for what it is, we are by choice dooming ourselves to extended ignorance that will be costly to us, our society, and the world we inevitably leave to our descendants. Earlier we provided evidence about unexpected (by scientists) decreases in implicit sexuality bias (massive drop) and race bias (more modest change) since 2007. These data provide optimism that mental content that we cannot change at will is nonetheless capable of movement toward racial neutrality across the US.

In other words, who-we-have-been need not be the future-selves-we-are-becoming. Here, we demonstrated that grappling with the correct data is a necessary step on the path to understanding our role in the creation of systemic racism. Among the blind spots that we will need to shake off, once and for all, is the belief that racism is the product of a few bad people in our society, and that removing them from power will suffice to deal with the issue.

Space and time preclude our covering the targets’ perspective, identity, resilience. Nor do we cover racial socialization in children.

Through the sensory and perceptual systems granted to our species by evolution, these dyadic and small-group social interactions evolve into larger and larger social units, such as the hundreds of so-called friends or millions of so-called followers on more recent forms of social media. Today we transcend ancestral, small-group interactions to generate larger-scale groups whose interactions occur on an exponential scale. The internet provides avenues for the high-speed transmission of individual attitudes, beliefs, values, as well as for propelling action across communities and nations. These communications have the potential to spread both social good and social harm, with explicit racial animus and implicit prejudicial bias being examples of the latter.

Using the most common measure of segregation (the dissimilarity index), in that year 94% Black metropolitan residents lived under conditions of “high” segregation (an index of 60 or greater on a 0–100 scale), meaning that at least 60% of Blacks would have to exchange neighborhoods with Whites to achieve an even distribution of the races across neighborhoods (Rugh & Massey, 2014 ). Moreover, in a subset of metropolitan areas, not only were Black residents unevenly distributed across neighborhoods, they were also isolated within overwhelmingly Black districts that were themselves densely clustered near the central business district, a geographic pattern that Massey and Denton ( 1989 ) labeled "hypersegregation.”

The NLP fits more traditional findings, a form of cross-validation. Based on content analysis of an 84-adjective checklist, the language describing Black Americans did not change much, across samples from 1933 to 2007 (Bergsieker, Leslie, Constantine, & Fiske, 2012 , Study 4): The most recent data describe ambivalent view of sociality (aggressive, gregarious, passionate), and some specific stereotypes (loud, talkative, religious, loyal to family, sportsmanlike, musical, materialistic), but saying nothing about competence. Neglecting to mention an obvious dimension can reveal taboo topics, stereotyping by omission (Bergsieker et al., 2012 ).

Black people may distrust Whites, too, but they have less standing (status and power) to do damage.

An odd anomaly: Abundant research describes Black people’s generalized trust as lower then Whites’ generalized trust. Also, social science has studied Black Americans’ mistrust of government, business, healthcare, and education systems that have historically abused them (see next section). This would hardly seem puzzling enough to be the lion’s share of the trust literature and to eclipse White Americans’ pockets of mistrust. Specifically, no one seems to study Whites’ mistrust of Black people. Overlooking the obvious is one symptom of a systemic bias.

The combination of status-competence and warmth-trustworthiness creates remarkably stable perceptions of social structure (Durante et al., 2015). In social systems across the globe, middle classes are stereotypically competent and warm (trustworthy) whereas homeless people are neither. And in the mixed quadrants, rich people seem competent but cold, whereas old people seem well-intentioned but incompetent. These class and age patterns are nearly universal. In contrast, ethnic, racial, religious, and other cultural stereotypes are accidents of history, reflecting what subset of a group arrived under what circumstances. Compare stereotypes of Chinese railroad workers in the nineteenth century to stereotypes of Chinese entrepreneurs in the twenty-first century.

Implicit bias is difficult to monitor, as noted. Yet another way that prejudice goes undetected, is in its modern form, of being exhibited less as outgroup harm and instead as ingroup help (Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014 ). Despite this ambiguity, the net effect is the same—just harder to detect, and even lauded, because helping is a prosocial act that garners praise.

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Banaji, M.R., Fiske, S.T. & Massey, D.S. Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society. Cogn. Research 6 , 82 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00349-3

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Recent Writing on the Causes, Consequences, and Politics of Racial Segregation

• October 31, 2019
• By Stephen Menendian

Three new books tackle the problem of segregation with fresh solutions, deeper insights, and a firmer basis for understanding how this enduring problem polarizes our politics, just in time for the 2020 Presidential campaign.

There has been a remarkable boomlet of scholarly research and extended investigation into the continuing problem of racial residential segregation in the last year or so. Although hardly an original area of inquiry, this recent spate of scholarship has shed much light on the problem of racial segregation—causes, consequences, and what we must do about it

Each generation of scholarship on this subject has precipitated important policy change. The first generation of publications was tipped off by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s The City , a landmark study of Chicago’s demographic patterns and ethnographic trends. But other major publications examining the growing problem of racial residential segregation include Robert Weaver’s The Negro Ghetto (1948), Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), and C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). This research informed both the nascent Civil Rights Movement as well as the legal attack on Jim Crow, culminating in major Supreme Court victories such as Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

A second generation of major publications examining the problems and evolution of racial residential segregation emerged in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, epitomized by Kenneth Clark’s Dark Ghetto in 1965 and the Kerner Commission’s report on Civil Disorders in 1968, which called for a national open housing law. After the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, racial residential segregation declined significantly in most major metropolitan areas the following decade. By the 1980s, racial residential segregation had dropped from the national discourse and the policy agenda. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s landmark book, American Apartheid (1993), systematically and persuasively illustrated the shocking extent of racial residential segregation across the United States and the harms and consequences that resulted.

This formed part of a third generation of scholarship, much of it historical in nature, revealing the evolution of segregation, including Thomas Sugrue’s remarkable Origins of the Urban Crises (1996), which examined postwar Detroit, and Arnold Hirsch’s Making of the Second Ghetto (1993), a similar examination of Chicago. Around the same time, the historian Kenneth Jackson published his remarkable Crabgrass Frontier (1985), which systematically described the pattern of suburbanization that were a concomitant to urbanized racial segregation. 

This scholarship was part of the impetus for both the 1988 amendments to the Fair Housing Act, which strengthened the law, closed loopholes, and expanded enforcement, as well as the congressionally funded “Moving to Opportunity” experiment, which ran in the mid-1990s in five cities and allowed low-income families to receive vouchers to move to low poverty neighborhoods. Despite all this, racial residential segregation has persisted, and deepened, especially in the wake of the 2007 housing crises, which was precipitated, in no small part, by predatory mortgage policies targeting non-white neighborhoods. Although there were many remarkable books in the interim, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) kicked off a fourth generation of high-profile scholarship laser-focused on racial residential segregation. Rothstein masterfully exposing the systematic federal role into the promotion and institutionalization of racial residential segregation. Rothstein, who is a senior fellow at the Haas Institute, documents the under-appreciated and largely forgotten role of the federal government in fostering racial residential segregation. In particular, Rothstein emphasized the role of the federal government in federal mortgage insurance, public housing, and urban renewal, which collectively deepened and extended racial segregation across the country in the post-war period. 

Three more recent and notable entries examining the problem of racial residential segregation and how to address it include Jessica Trounstine’s Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities (2018), Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification (2017) by Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder, and Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing (2018) by Richard Sander, Yana A. Kucheva and Jonathan M. Zasloff. Each of these books provide interesting, and often contrasting, perspectives on the problem of racial residential segregation. Perhaps most remarkably, they offer starkly different explanations for why and how racial residential segregation persists. 

In contrast to Richard Rothstein’s focus on federal policy in deepening and nationalizing racial residential segregation, Jessica Trounstine “argue[s] that local government have generated segregated along race and class lines.” Emphasizing the role of local, rather than national, actors, her thesis is that white homeowners and their political representatives institutionalized segregation, not because of blind race prejudice, but in order to protect their property values, and to secure and access to high-quality public goods and services, generally to the detriment of communities of color. It is this incentive that, according to Trounstine, perpetuated and maintains racial segregation today. A tour de force, she makes this argument in a variety of clever and novel ways. 

The crux of her argument is an empirically rigorous linkage between racial residential segregation, political polarization, and public provision in the form of services and amenities. The first step is to demonstrate a relationship between segregation and prior investment in public goods and high property values. She does this by looking at the first four decades of the Twentieth Century, and in particular the growth of municipal expenditures on city services, such as sanitation, safety, and infrastructure. By her account, “American cities became modern service providers” in this time period. 

To demonstrate the relationship between segregation and public goods, she controls for total population and population density (which might make it more efficient to provide public services). She also controls for the proportion of homeowners and professionals in a city, on the theory that homeowners and professionals demand more services, and controls for wealth, which could make it easier to finance those services. Using Thiel’s H index as her measure of segregation (to overcome problems with more traditional measures described below), she finds that that between 30-40 percent of the variation in levels of city segregation (from 1902 to 1937) can be explained by variation in city budgets. As she notes, “[p]laces with larger budgets were more segregated five years later, compared with cities with smaller budgets up until the Second World War.” 

Another critical feature of her argument is the evolution of residential segregation from neighborhoods to cities, which she argues began to shift after the Second World War. To illustrate this, she develops a separate measure for overall intra-municipal segregation and inter-municipal segregation. As contrasting examples, Chicago is heavily segregated by neighborhood whereas the Detroit metro region is segregated between cities. She shows that inter-municipal segregation has grown tremendously since 1970, even as intra-municipal (or neighborhood) segregation has declined.

Like other scholars, restrictive zoning plays a large part of her story, as it is one of the chief mechanisms by which white and affluent homeowner preferences are used to maintain high-quality public services while excluding higher-need populations. In a chapter that covers the evolution of zoning law and practice, Trounstine demonstrates how zoning policy became disconnected from planning and nuisance avoidance, and became the provenance of property value maintenance and used to control public goods. As she puts it, “zoning was a tool that enabled elected officials to generate segregation, increase property values, and make it easier to target public goods to certain constituencies.” These are more than simply bold claims, they are empirical facts: after controlling for a host of variables, she finds that an increase in public spending increases the probability that a city adopts a zoning ordinance quite significantly, with even greater effects when school spending is involved: “At the minimum educational spending level, cities had a 0 probability of adopting zoning. This rises to a 28% probability at the highest level of school spending.”

She then connects these facts to race: she finds that zoning ordinances were much more likely to be adopted in places that were already segregated. She also finds that zoning had a predictable racial effect of excluding nonwhite families from moving into those neighborhoods or communities. Thus, she is able to show that early adopters of zoning became more segregated cities–even after controlling for the pre-existing level of segregation: “By 1970, cities that had adopted early zoning ordinance had segregation levels about 10 points higher on average.” Contesting the literature that shows that greater levels of diversity are associated with reduced collective investment and public provision (such as a more anemic welfare state), she demonstrates that it is racial segregation, not diversity, that causes this. She does this by examining a large data set, which she compiled, showing that when controlling for level of diversity, cities with greater segregation have less public expenditure than diverse cities with less segregation. 

Specifically, she finds that an increase in the level of segregation from the 25th to the 75th percentile lowers per capita spending by more than $100 per resident per year. Then, looking at specific goods, such as parks, police, welfare, sewers and roads, she finds the same results, regardless of the size of the minority population. In fact, she finds that the most segregated cities spend about $200 less per capita each year on sewer systems, or an average of about $60,000 less per year. It is the distribution of groups, not diversity, that correlates with public spending. In fact, she finds that cities with more non-white residents or greater foreign-born populations (from many different places) were bigger spenders. 

The most important part of her analysis, however, is her theory about the relationship between municipal provision and segregation. The key is local politics. The heart of her argument–and indeed her book–is that segregated cities have more political polarization, pitting neighborhoods and cities against each other, making cooperation more difficult. As she explains, “in segregated cities, local officials have trouble convincing residents to fund public goods. As a result, services were underprovided.” 

This is a bold claim, but Trounstine provides ample and compelling support. She finds that the relationship between segregation and polarization is statistically powerful: A city in the 10th percentile of segregation has a 35 percent point divide in racial support for a political candidate, compared to a 63 percent point divide at the 90th percentile. In other words, the more segregated, the more political polarization. 

One might wonder if the relationship between segregation and polarization isn’t dri ven by some deeper force. After all, what if cities where white voters are more conservative on average have more racial political polarization, more segregation, and less public spending? As usual, however, she controls for this factor, and finds that the relationship between segregation and polarization is unaffected by the conservatism of the local white population. In fact, she found that “cities with more conservative white populations have smaller racial divides.” This is a telling fact for those of us who live in large cities in blue states.

Racial residential segregation makes it easier for municipal governments to target their services to particular populations, and exclude others. Inter-municipal segregation is much more efficient than intra-municipal segregation at accomplishing this, which means that the form of residential segregation that is more prevalent today than a generation ago is much more pernicious and harmful. As she puts it, “when segregation occurs across cities, heavily minority cities have no ability to affect the distribution of public goods from neighboring white towns.” Even worse, affluent white communities exclude the neediest people, shunting them into communities with the least resources to meet those needs. 

Whereas Rothstein and Trounstine focus on policy and policymakers, in the Cycle of Segregation , Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder shift the focus to social networks and background experiences that shape the housing search process as a key driver and cause of racial residential segregation. Rejecting or complicating the three traditional explanations for segregation: 1) discrimination, 2) different group preferences for neighborhood types, or 3) economic differences between racial groups, Kyrson and Crowder show how less visible social forces and background local knowledge shape residential mobility.

Previous research on the housing search process has focused on 1) the communities and neighborhoods under consideration or 2) the identification of housing units within a community. Although forces such as steering (when real estate agents direct homeseekers to demographically similar neighborhoods) and affordability may drive some level of segregation in these steps, Kryson and Crowder try to show how the housing search process is structured to perpetuate segregation even before it has formally begun. Drawing on in-depth survey interviews and secondary data sources, they systematically demonstrate how segregated social networks and different background knowledge infiltrate our “consideration set” of neighborhoods in the “pre-search stage.” As a result, metropolitan residents of different races have very different local information about, and perceptions of, the communities they may consider or rule out at the outset. 

For example, they find that Black residents may rule out far-flung white communities that they know very little about in advance or that have a reputation as unwelcoming to people of color or are unaffordable, even if the community might have much to offer, match their budget, or fit their demographic profile preference. Similarly, white residents may rule out large swaths of communities on the basis of reputation or racial profile without any fact-based assessment or consideration of the communities’ amenities or housing options. As a result, the authors show that residents tend to select housing in communities that are significantly more segregated than their “ideal” community in the abstract. In this way, the authors find that residential moves are structured by race in ways that reproduce racial segregation. 

The authors untangle some of the knottiest matters in the race and mobility literature. For example, they find that “racial composition seems to be an important driver of assumptions about affordability and the value of neighborhoods.” In short, race is a heuristic—a mental shortcut—that signals information about a community, including safety, school quality, affordability and home value appreciation potential. Critically, these assumptions operate even in the absence of racial prejudice. Simple self-interest and ordinary cognitive shortcuts (echoing the Kahneman view that we are all “cognitive misers”) can lead to overreliance on such heuristics, where racial composition is less of a preference than a cue to other neighborhood characteristics. The focus on the search process also helps explain why racial segregation remains stronger than socioeconomic segregation, and how even upper income Black families end up in poorer and more heavily Black neighborhoods, and poor whites end up in low poverty and predominantly white neighborhoods. 

Sander, Kucheva and Zasloff have the largest entry into this body of scholarship, with their tome Moving to Integration . Organized into five parts, the first four parts are a chronology of fair housing and residential segregation in the United States from 1865 to about 2015. Although not without flaws or omissions, this chronology may be the single most comprehensive and detailed account of the level of segregation during that sweep of time. This narrative is punctuated by key events that shaped the evolution of segregation, such as the enactment and implementation of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Supreme Court’s 1948 landmark ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer which declared racially restrictive covenants unenforceable, the Great Recession and the mortgage meltdown, and the gentrification of urban space by young, white professionals in recent years. 

With special access to restricted census data, Sander et al are able to provide more precise measures of segregation than are typically available. This allows them to tell a more nuanced story, and occasionally a contrarian one. For example, drawing on a journal article, Sanders and his co-authors argue that Shelley had a much more substantial desegregative effect than is generally appreciated. Although not entirely persuasive, their arguments are nonetheless intriguing. 

The most significant flaw in the book, however, is the virtually exclusive reliance on the Dissimilarity Index as their measure of segregation, as it measures the percentage of a group that would have to move to create a complete integrated area. The Dissimilarity Index is probably the most widely used measure of segregation, but it suffers from a number of well-known flaws. The Dissimilarity Index can only calculate the level of segregation between two groups at a time, and therefore cannot provide a holistic view of the level of segregation in a multi-racial/multi-ethnic area, like the Bay Area, Seattle, or most parts of the Southwest. If segregation declines between two groups, but increases overall, the Dissimilarity Index is misleading, as we’ve shown in the Bay Area. More importantly, the Dissimilarity Index values masks the average or typical case. Dissimilarity index scores can improve when a small number of members of a different group move into previously homogenous neighborhoods, while the average or typical member of those groups remain stuck in racially segregated neighborhoods. For example, if some middle-class African-Americans move into previously exclusively white neighborhoods, the dissimilarity score will fall, even as the vast majority of black people remain in racially isolated neighborhoods.

Despite fleeting references to a couple of other measures of segregation, Sander et al rely almost entirely on the Dissimilarity Index. Alternative measures of segregation would have greatly illuminated–and likely bolstered–the narrative they developed. At a minimum, the authors should have explained why they relied so heavily on the Dissimilarity Index, especially at a time when so many alternative measures are available. 

Although Moving to Integration lacks an overarching thesis, it is animated by a recognition that racial residential segregation remains a stubborn and deeply consequential problem, and provides an ambitious plan for addressing it. It is Part V, “Solutions,” where the book offers the most important overall contribution to the literature on segregation. Sander et al advance 12 “strategies” for promoting integration. The first six are a complementary set of mobility interventions: 1) mobility grants to subsidize renters and homeowners to make “pro-integrative” moves; 2) mobility counseling to nudge potential movers to consider a larger range of neighborhoods as part of the housing search process (and thereby directly address the problems identified in Kryson and Crowder’s Cycle of Segregation ; 3) the creation of housing trust funds to preserve affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods by purchasing neighborhood housing stock; 4) tax-increment financing in gentrifying neighborhoods that captures increases in the value of housing to finance the housing trust fund and to provide better neighborhood amenities; 5) the creation of community development banks to serve under-banked communities, and provide non-predatory financial services; 6) modifying existing federal programs to make the more integrative, such as by making Section 8 housing choice vouchers portable across jurisdictions, and using small area market subsidies to allow voucher holders a wider range of neighborhood possibilities. 

The next set of strategies are designed to improve our understanding of the problem: 7) task the Current Population Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, with including a housing search component, to gather data on racial differences in the housing search process (again, addressing the problems raised in Cycle of Segregation); 8) task a federal agency with random, full-application testing for discrimination, instead of more limited audits which do not typically include a full credit check, and therefore are of limited insight into the extant problem of housing discrimination. The final set of strategies are policies that could be tried by anhy jurisdiction with salutory effects: 9) Prohibit source-of-income discrimination, which makes it harder for voucher holders or people with other rental subsidies to access integrative housing; 10) reduce regulatory barriers to multi-family housing, such as restrictive zoning and land-use laws (addressing the problems raised in Segregation by Design; 11) Implement quantifiable “fair share” guidelines, which would require jurisdictions within a region to provide their share of affordable housing; 12) bring disparate impact litigation under the Fair Housing Act to challenge exclusionary and restrictive zoning.  

I mention these strategies at length because this program is more than a hodge-podge of ideas or a breezy set of recommendations tacked onto a longer book. It is the heart of the book, and they are comprehensive, clever, and complementary strategies. For example, the housing trust fund proposal, they argue, would “change[] the psychology of gentrification: incumbent residents would have a reason to welcome and seek out gentrification rather than oppose it” because they would improve services and amenities without threatening their displacement. 

Their target would be to get every metropolitan area to .60 dissimilarity score, which happens to be the score the divides moderately segregated regions from highly segregated ones. The authors devote an entire chapter to imagining the implementation of this program, with the centerpiece of mobility grants in Buffalo, New York. Although the sticker shock of $285 million over 10 years (including $43 million for administration and to fend off litigation) to desegregate Buffalo may scare off curious policymakers, it is also a testament to the seriousness of the authors’ recommendations that they would take the time to cost-out their ideas. And the benefits are enormous. As they conclude, “We cannot afford not to try.”

I couldn’t agree more.

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Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching about School Segregation and Educational Inequality

By Keith Meatto

• May 2, 2019

Racial segregation in public education has been illegal for 65 years in the United States. Yet American public schools remain largely separate and unequal — with profound consequences for students, especially students of color.

Today’s teachers and students should know that the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional in the landmark 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education . Perhaps less well known is the extent to which American schools are still segregated. According to a recent Times article , “More than half of the nation’s schoolchildren are in racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of students are either white or nonwhite.” In addition, school districts are often segregated by income. The nexus of racial and economic segregation has intensified educational gaps between rich and poor students, and between white students and students of color.

Although many students learn about the historical struggles to desegregate schools in the civil rights era, segregation as a current reality is largely absent from the curriculum.

“No one is really talking about school segregation anymore,” Elise C. Boddie and Dennis D. Parker wrote in this 2018 Op-Ed essay. “That’s a shame because an abundance of research shows that integration is still one of the most effective tools that we have for achieving racial equity.”

The teaching activities below, written directly to students, use recent Times articles as a way to grapple with segregation and educational inequality in the present. This resource considers three essential questions:

• How and why are schools still segregated in 2019? • What repercussions do segregated schools have for students and society? • What are potential remedies to address school segregation?

School segregation and educational inequity may be a sensitive and uncomfortable topic for students and teachers, regardless of their race, ethnicity or economic status. Nevertheless, the topics below offer entry points to an essential conversation, one that affects every American student and raises questions about core American ideals of equality and fairness.

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Origins of Racial Discrimination Thesis

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

The history of racial discrimination should not be determined by slavery only as its origins expand in time and forms, including ancient civilizations’ differences, religious and geographical diversity, and political regimes, affecting American society.

Annotated Bibliography

Bailey, Z. D., Feldman, J. M., & Bassett, M. T. (2021). How structural racism works – Racist policies as a root cause of US racial health inequities. New England Journal of Medicine, 384 (8), 768-773.

In their article published in 2021, Bailey et al. define racism as a durable feature of American society and underline the importance of understanding its structural basis. American police continue killing civilians of the color of their skin more often than in other countries. Racist policies founded in the 18 th century became the root cause of inequalities in health care, education, and other spheres. Despite such limitations as statistical data being left out, I will use this article to support the historical evaluation of racism in the United States and add ineffective policing to the origins of racism.

Bowser, B. P. (2017). Racism: Origin and theory. Journal of Black Studies, 48 (6), 572-590.

In 2017, Bowser introduced a review of racial discrimination as a concept with its specific theoretical development. Being coined at the beginning of the 20 th century, racism was significantly revised in the 1930s (antisemitism) and the 1960s (civil rights activists). Race relations are never simple, and activist movements prove the burden of racism in America. The theory of racism has to be reconsidered from the point of view of European Americans and White elites. I will add this study to my list even if it is limited to theoretical aspects only, as it contains the analysis of historical events that represent institutional and cultural racism.

Hanchard, M. G. (2018). The specter of race: How discrimination haunts western democracy . Princeton University Press.

This book by Hanchard was published in 2018 to examine various democratic institutions that lead to unequal and questionable ideas like slavery or discrimination. Racial hierarchies and social movements were rooted in ancient Greece, the Persian Wars, and Athenian culture and were based on religious beliefs. The author leaves statistics and current examples out but focuses on past political events and racial regimes to define the origins of racial discrimination in America. I will use Hanchard’s findings to strengthen my historical evaluation of the topic.

Mejia, R., Beckermann, K., & Sullivan, C. (2018). White lies A racial history of the (post) truth. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 15 (2), 109-126.

The results of the 2016 presidential elections provoked Mejia et al. to create an article about racial amnesia and publish it in 2018. The authors want to clarify why racial concepts denied years ago become acceptable today and use the post-truth concept. I will rely on the findings of this article to show how general ignorance about black experiences affects American politics and society. Although this work is limited to one election, attention to the Marxist approach and historical materialism reveals critical racial histories.

Rattansi, A. (2021). Racism: A very short introduction (2 nd ed). Oxford University Press.

In 2021, Rattansi published a book to show that racism is not only a social problem with its roots in wrong decisions and injustice. The author explains the origins of racism from biological, cultural, and political perspectives and offers extensive discussions about the topic. I find this book a good source for my study as it discusses cultural and color-blind forms of racism and Islamophobia as reasons for racial discrimination.

Seth, V. (2020). The origins of racism: A critique of the history ideas. History and Theory, 59 (3), 343-368.

In 2020, Seth created the article to criticize the history of racial ideas and the origins of racism globally. The goal is to introduce the analysis of ancient, medieval, and early modern events and show that contemporary politics become the origins of current racial problems. This article will be used in my future project to show that past experiences are not always as critical as current decisions.

Small, M. L., & Pager, D. (2020). Sociological perspectives on racial discrimination. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 34 (2), 49-67.

Small and Pager published their article in 2020 to demonstrate that historic discrimination has serious consequences in today’s society. Although their study is limited to the 19 th century only, the recognition of the real estate and federal law’s impact on race relationships makes this source current and valuable. I will read the article to add several economic factors as the origins of racial discrimination in America.

Bowser, B. P. (2017). Racism: Origin and theory . Journal of Black Studies, 48 (6), 572-590.

Mejia, R., Beckermann, K., & Sullivan, C. (2018). White lies A racial history of the (post) truth . Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 15 (2), 109-126.

Seth, V. (2020). The origins of racism: A critique of the history ideas . History and Theory, 59 (3), 343-368.

Small, M. L., & Pager, D. (2020). Sociological perspectives on racial discrimination . Journal of Economic Perspectives, 34 (2), 49-67.

• Beverly Greene Life and View of Racism
• Racial Inequality and Academic Achievement
• Social Disorganization Theory in Criminology
• Cell Phone Privacy and the Constitution
• Theme of Sex Education in "Superbad" (2007)
• Racial Tensions in the "Crash" Movie
• Capitalism and Racism in Past and Present
• Minstrels' Influence on the Spread of Racism
• Researching of Racial Appearance in Media
• How Parents of Color Transcend Nightmare of Racism
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, January 22). Origins of Racial Discrimination. https://ivypanda.com/essays/origins-of-racial-discrimination/

"Origins of Racial Discrimination." IvyPanda , 22 Jan. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/origins-of-racial-discrimination/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Origins of Racial Discrimination'. 22 January.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Origins of Racial Discrimination." January 22, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/origins-of-racial-discrimination/.

1. IvyPanda . "Origins of Racial Discrimination." January 22, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/origins-of-racial-discrimination/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Origins of Racial Discrimination." January 22, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/origins-of-racial-discrimination/.

Handout A: Background Essay: African Americans in the Gilded Age

Background Essay: African Americans in the Gilded Age

Directions: Read the essay and answer the review questions at the end.

In the late nineteenth century, the promise of emancipation and Reconstruction went largely unfulfilled and was even reversed in the lives of African Americans. Southern blacks suffered from horrific violence, political disfranchisement, economic discrimination, and legal segregation. Ironically, the new wave of racial discrimination that was introduced was part of an attempt to bring harmony between the races and order to American society.

Constitutional amendments were ratified during and after the war to protect the natural and civil rights of African Americans. The Thirteenth Amendment forever banned slavery from the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment protected black citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to African-American males. In addition, a Freedmen’s Bureau was established to help the economic condition of former slaves, and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1875.

Roadblocks to Equality

Despite these legal protections, the economic condition of African Americans significantly worsened in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Poor southern black farmers were generally forced into sharecropping whereby they borrowed money to plant a year’s crop, using the future crop as collateral on the loan. Often, they owed so much of the resulting crop that they fell into debt for the following year and eventually into a state of debt peonage. Since 90 percent of African Americans lived in the rural South, most were sharecroppers. The story was not much different as African Americans moved to southern and northern cities. Black women found work as domestic servants and men in urban factories, but they were usually in menial, low-paying jobs because white employers discriminated against African Americans in hiring. Black workers also faced a great deal of racism at the hands of labor unions which severely limited their ability to secure high-paying, skilled jobs. While the Knights of Labor and United Mine Workers were open to blacks, the largest skilled-worker union, the American Federation of Labor, curtailed black membership, thereby limiting them to menial labor.

African Americans throughout the country suffered from violence and intimidation. The most infamous examples of violence were brutal lynchings, or executions without due process, by angry white mobs. These travesties resulted in hangings, burnings, shootings, and mutilations for between 100 and 200 blacks—especially black men falsely accused of raping white women—annually. Race riots broke out in southern and northern cities from New Orleans and Atlanta to New York and Evansville, Indiana, causing dozens of deaths and property damage.

Although African Americans were elected to Congress and state legislatures during Reconstruction, and enjoyed the constitutional right to vote, black civil rights were systematically stripped away in a campaign of disfranchisement. One method was to charge a poll tax to vote, which precious few black sharecroppers could afford to pay. Another strategy was the literacy test which few former slaves could pass. Furthermore, the white clerks at courthouses had already decided that any black applicant would fail, regardless of his true reading ability. Since both of those devices at times excluded poor whites as well, grandfather clauses were introduced to exempt from the literacy test anyone whose father or grandfather had the right to vote before the Civil War. Moreover, the Supreme Court declared the 1875 Civil Rights Act guaranteeing equal access to public facilities and transportation to be unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) because the law regulated the private discriminatory conduct of individuals rather than government discrimination.

Segregation

One of the most pervasive and visible signs of racism was the rise of informal and legal segregation, or separation of the races. In a wholesale violation of liberty and equality, southern state legislatures passed “Jim Crow” segregation laws that denied African Americans equal access to public facilities such as hotels, restaurants, parks, and swimming pools. Southern schools and public transportation had vastly inferior “separate but equal” facilities that left the black minority subject to unjust majority rule. Housing covenants and other devices kept blacks in separate neighborhoods from whites. African Americans in the North also suffered informal residential segregation and economic discrimination in jobs.

In one of its more infamous decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation statutes were legal in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In Plessy, the Court decided that “separate, but equal” public facilities did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or imply the inferiority of African Americans. Justice John Marshall Harlan was one of the two dissenters who wrote, “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”

Progressive and Race Relations

One of the great ironies of the series of reforms instituted in the early twentieth century known as the Progressive Era was that segregation and racism were deeply enshrined in the movement. Progressives were a group of reformers who believed that the industrialized, urbanized United States of the nineteenth century had outgrown its eighteenth-century Constitution. That Constitution did not give government, especially the federal government, enough power to deal with unprecedented problems. Many Progressives embraced Social Darwinism and eugenics which was part of the most advanced science and social science taught in universities and scientific circles. Social Darwinism ranked various groups, which its proponents considered “races,” according to certain characteristics and labelled Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic peoples as superior and Southeastern Europeans, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, and Africans as inferior races. Therefore, there was a supposed scientific basis for segregation as the “higher” races ruled the “lower.” Moreover, Progressives generally endorsed segregation as a means of achieving their central goal of social order and harmony between the races. There were notable exceptions, such as Jane Addams, black Progressives such as W.E.B. DuBois, and the Progressives of both races who founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but Progressive ideology contributed to the growth of segregation.

Progressive Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson generally supported the segregationist order. While Roosevelt courageously invited African-American leader Booker T. Washington to dinner in the White House and condemned lynching, he discharged 170 black soldiers because of a race riot in Brownsville, Texas in 1906. Wilson had perhaps a worse record on civil rights as his administration fired many black federal employees and segregated federal departments.

Black Leadership

Several black leaders advanced the cause of black civil rights and helped organize African Americans to defend their interests through self help. The highly-educated journalist, Ida B. Wells, launched a crusade against lynching by exposing the savage practice. She also challenged segregation by refusing to change her seat on a train because it was in an area reserved for white women. Other African Americans unsuccessfully boycotted segregated streetcars in urban areas but utilized a method that would prove successful in the mid-twentieth century.

A debate took shape between two African-American leaders, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Washington was a former slave who founded the Tuskegee Institute for blacks in the 1880s and wrote Up from Slavery. He advocated that African Americans achieve racial equality slowly by patience and accommodation. Washington thought that blacks should be trained in industrial education and demonstrate the character virtues of hard work, thrift, and self-respect. They would therefore prove that they deserved equal rights and equal opportunity for social mobility. At the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, Washington delivered an address that posited, “In the long run it is the race or individual that exercises the most patience, forbearance, and self-control in the midst of trying conditions that wins…the respect of the world.”

DuBois, on the other hand, was a Harvard and Berlin-educated intellectual who believed that African Americans should win equality through a liberal arts education and fighting for political and civil equality. He wrote the Souls of Black Folk and laid out a vision whereby the “talented tenth” among African Americans would receive an excellent education and become the teachers and other professionals who would uplift fellow members of their race. He and other black leaders organized the Niagara Movement that fought segregation, lynching, and disfranchisement. In 1909 the movement’s leaders founded the NAACP, which fought for black equality and initiated a decades-long legal struggle to end segregation. DuBois edited its journal named The Crisis and wrote about issues affecting African Americans. He had the simple wish to “make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”

Wartime Changes

American participation in the Spanish-American War and World War I initiated a dramatic change in the lives of African Americans and in the demography of American society. In both wars, black soldiers were relegated to segregated units and generally assigned to menial jobs rather than front-line combat. However, black soldiers had opportunities to fight in the charges against the Spanish in Cuba and against the Germans in the trenches of France. They demonstrated that they were just as courageous as white men even as they fought for a country that excluded them from its democracy. Moreover, travel to the North and overseas showed thousands of African Americans the possibility of freedom and equality that would be reinforced in World War II while fighting tyranny abroad.

Wartime America witnessed rapid change in the lives of African Americans especially in the rural South. Hundreds of thousands left southern farms to migrate to cities in the South such as Birmingham or Atlanta, or to northern cities in a mass movement called the Great Migration. This internal migration greatly increased the number of African Americans living in American cities. As a result, tensions grew with whites over jobs and housing that led to deadly race riots during and immediately after the war. However, a thriving black culture in the North also resulted in the Harlem Renaissance and the celebration of black artists.

The Great Migration eventually led to over six million African Americans following these migration patterns and laying the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century. Blacks resisted segregation when it was instituted and continued to organize to challenge its threat to liberty and equality in America.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

• What constitutional protections did the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments give African Americans?
• What economic conditions did African Americans face in the south and north in the late nineteenth century?
• What kinds of violence did African Americans suffer during the late nineteenth century?
• Despite the amendments to the Constitution protecting the rights of African Americans, what discriminatory devices systematically took away these rights?
• What was the ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case? Did the case result in the advance or reversal of the rights of African Americans? Explain your answer.
• Did African Americans make gains or suffer setbacks to their rights during the Progressive Era? Explain your answer.
• Compare and contrast the means and goals of achieving black equality for Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.
• How did World War I and the Great Migration change the lives of African Americans?

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Jim Crow Laws — Jim Crow Laws: A Historical Analysis of Segregation Laws & its Effects

Jim Crow Laws: a Historical Analysis of Segregation Laws & Its Effects

• Categories: Jim Crow Laws

About this sample

Words: 721 |

Published: Feb 12, 2019

Words: 721 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Works Cited

• Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press.
• Flashfocus. (n.d.). Jim Crow. In Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century Five-volume Set (Vol. 2, pp. 75-77). Oxford University Press.
• Pilgrim, D. (n.d.). What was Jim Crow? Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Retrieved from [insert URL]
• Anderson, J. D. (2016). The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. The University of North Carolina Press.
• Ashworth, J., & Palenchar, J. (Eds.). (2018). Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. University of Chicago Press.
• Blackmon, D. A. (2009). Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Anchor Books.
• Dailey, J. (2017). The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States. Routledge.
• Fairclough, A. (2010). Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000. Penguin Books.
• Litwack, L. F. (2009). How Free is Free? The Long Death of Jim Crow. Harvard University Press.
• Woodward, C. V. (2001). The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press.

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