thesis statement on racial segregation

The Study Blog :

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.

Are tight deadlines, clashing assignments, and unclear tasks giving you sleepless nights?

Do not panic, hire a professional essay writer today.

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.

Earn Good Grades Without Breaking a Sweat

✔ We've helped over 1000 students earn better grades since 2017. ✔ 98% of our customers are happy with our service

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.

Popular services

The little secret why your friends are earning better grades.

Hire an Expert from our write my essay service and start earning good grades.

Can Someone Write My Paper for Me Online? Yes, We Can!

Research topics

Essay Topics

Popular articles

Six Proven ways to cheat Turnitin with Infographic

Understanding Philosophy of Nursing: Complete Guide With Examples

50+ Collection of the Most Controversial Argumentative Essay Topics

50+ Economics research Topics and Topic Ideas for dissertation

20+ Interesting Sociology research topics and Ideas for Your Next Project

RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU ARE TIRED OF WRITING COLLEGE PAPERS!

Hire a professional academic writer today.

Each paper you order from us is of IMPECCABLE QUALITY and PLAGIARISM FREE

Use code PPH10 to get 10% discount. Terms and condition apply.

Ready to hire a professional essay writer?

Each paper you receive from us is plagiarism-free and will fetch you a good grade. We are proud to have helped 10,000+ students achieve their academic dreams. Enjoy our services by placing your order today.

Write my paper

Do my assignment

Essay writing help

Research paper help

College homework help

Essay writing guide

College admission essay

Writing a research paper

Paper format for writing

Terms & conditions

Privacy Policy

Cookie Policy

Money-Back Guarantee

Our services

Copyright © 2017 Paper Per Hour. All rights reserved.

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.

People Also Read

• Crafting Effective Thesis Statements: A Key to Successful Academic Writing
• Exploring Thesis Statement Examples in Literature Analysis: Unveiling the Central Argument
• How to Cheat with Respondus Lockdown Browser: 5 Hacks to Cheat

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.

I am dedicated to creating engaging blog posts that provide valuable insights and advice to help students excel in their studies. From study tips to time management strategies, my goal is to empower students to reach their full potential.

• The Significance of Strong Thesis Statement Examples Across Various Disciplines
• Tackling Societal Issues: Social Science Thesis Statement Examples

Most Popular Articles

Racism thesis statement example, how to rephrase a thesis statement, capstone project topic suggestions, how to write an abortion essay, should students wear school uniforms essay, list causal essay topics write, respect essay, signal words, great synonyms, informative speech examples, essay writing guide, introduction paragraph for an essay, argumentative essay writing, essay outline templates, write an autobiographical essay, personal narrative essay ideas, descriptive essay writing, how to write a reflective-essay, how to write a lab report abstract, how to write a grant proposal, point of view in an essay, debate topics for youth at church, theatre research paper topics, privacy overview.

• 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

165k Accesses

51 Citations

266 Altmetric

Metrics details

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.

Allport, G. (1954). The nature of prejudice . Addison-Wesley.

Google Scholar  

Ames, D. L., & Fiske, S. T. (2013). Outcome dependency alters the neural substrates of impression formation. NeuroImage, 83 , 599–608. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.07.001

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Bai, X., Ramos, M. R., & Fiske, S. T. (2020). As diversity increases, people paradoxically perceive social groups as more similar. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 (23), 12741–12749.

Article   Google Scholar  

Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (2013). Blindspot: Hidden biases of good people . Random House.

Bauman, J. F. (1987). Public housing, race, and renewal: Urban planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 . Temple University Press.

Bergsieker, H. B., Leslie, L. M., Constantine, V. S., & Fiske, S. T. (2012). Stereotyping by omission: Eliminate the negative, accentuate the positive. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102 (6), 1214–1238. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027717

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94 (4), 991–1013.

Bickford, A., & Massey, D. S. (1991). Segregation in the second ghetto: Racial and ethnic segregation in American public housing, 1977. Social Forces, 69 , 1011–1038.

Blair, I. V., Judd, C. M., & Chapleau, K. M. (2004). The influence of Afrocentric facial features in criminal sentencing. Psychological Science, 15 , 674–679.

Bobo, L. D., Charles, C. Z., Krysan, M., & Simmons, A. D. (2012). The real record on racial attitudes. In P. V. Marsden (Ed.), Social trends in the United States: Evidence from the General Social Survey since, 1972 (pp. 38–93). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Byrne, D. (1971). The attraction paradigm . Academic Press.

Carpusor, A. G., & Loges, W. E. (2006). Rental discrimination and ethnicity in names. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 36 (4), 934–952. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0021-9029.2006.00050.x

Charles, C. Z. (2003). “The dynamics of racial residential segregation. Annual Review of Sociology, 29 , 167–207.

Charles, C. Z., Fischer, M. J., Mooney, M. A., & Massey, D. S. (2009). Taming the river: Negotiating the academic, financial, and social currents in America’s Selective Colleges and Universities . Princeton University Press.

Charles, C. Z., Kramer, R. A., Massey, D. S., & Torres, K. C. (2021). Divergent currents: The diverse origins of the new black elite . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Charlesworth, T. E. S., & Banaji, M. R. (2021). Patterns of implicit and explicit stereotypes III: Long-term change in gender stereotypes. Social Psychological and Personality Science . https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620988425

Charlesworth, T.E.S., & Banaji, M. R. (in press). The relationship of implicit social cognition and discriminatory behavior. In A. Deshpande (Ed.) Handbook on the Economics of Discrimination and Affirmative Action . Edward Elgar.

Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Jones, M. R., & Porter, S. R. (2020). Race and economic opportunity in the United States: An intergenerational perspective. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135 (2), 711–783. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjz042

Correll, J., Wittenbrink, B., Park, B., Judd, C. M., & Goyle, A. (2010). Dangerous enough: Moderating racial bias with contextual threat cues. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47 , 184–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.08.017

Craig, M. A., & Richeson, J. A. (2014). More diverse yet less tolerant? How the increasingly diverse racial landscape affects Americans’ racial attitudes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40 (6), 750–761. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214524993

Devine, P. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56 (1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.56.1.5

Dickinson Jr., W. B. (1963). Urban renewal under fire. Editorial Research Reports , 1963 (Vol. II). Available at http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre1963082100

Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (Eds.). (1986). Prejudice, discrimination, and racism . Academic Press.

Dovidio, J. F., Kawakami, K., & Gaertner, S. L. (2002). Implicit and explicit prejudice and interracial interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82 (1), 62–68. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.1.62

DuBois, W. E. B. (1925). Worlds of color. Foreign Affairs, 3 (3), 423–444.

Duncan, O. D. (1969). Inheritance of poverty or inheritance of race? In D. P. Moynihan (Ed.), On understanding poverty: Perspectives from the social sciences (pp. 85–110). Basic Books.

Dupree, C. H., & Fiske, S. T. (2019). Self-presentation in interracial settings: The competence downshift by white liberals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117 (3), 579–604. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000166

Dupree, C. H., Torrez, B., Obioha, O. A., & Fiske, S. T. (2021). Race-status associations: Distinct effects of three novel measures among white and black perceivers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120 (3), 601–625. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000257

Eberhardt, J. L. (2019). Biased: Uncovering the hidden prejudice that shapes what we see, think, and do . New York: Viking.

Emerson, M. O., Chai, K. J., & Yancey, G. (2001). Does race matter in residential segregation? Exploring the preferences of white Americans. American Sociological Review, 66 (6), 922–935. https://doi.org/10.2307/3088879

Erber, R., & Fiske, S. T. (1984). Outcome dependency and attention to inconsistent information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 47 , 709–726.

Fairlie, H. 1985. The art of revival: Washington diarist-ex-presidents. The New Republic , May 6.

Farley, R., & Allen, W. R. (1987). The color line and the quality of life in America . Russell Sage Foundation.

Feagin, J. R. (1999). Excluding blacks and others from housing: The foundation of white racism. Cityscape, 4 (3), 79–91.

Feagin, J. R. (2006). Systemic racism: A theory of oppression . Routledge.

Fiske, S. T. (1989). Examining the role of intent: Toward understanding its role in stereotyping and prejudice. In J. Uleman & J. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended thought: The limits of awareness, intention, and control (pp. 253–283). Guilford.

Fiske, S. T. (1993). Controlling other people: The impact of power on stereotyping. American Psychologist , 48 , 621–628.

Fiske, S. T. (1998). Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. In The handbook of social psychology, Vols. 1–2, 4th ed (pp. 357–411). McGraw-Hill.

Fiske, S. T. (2018). Stereotype content: Warmth and competence endure. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 27 (2), 67–73.

Fiske, S. T., Bergsieker, H., Russell, A. M., & Williams, L. (2009). Images of Black Americans: Then, “them” and now, “Obama!” DuBois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 6 , 83–101. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X0909002X

Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82 , 878–902. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.6.878

Fiske, S. T., Dupree, C. H., Nicolas, G., & Swencionis, J. K. (2016). Status, power, and intergroup relations: The personal is the societal. Current Opinion in Psychology, 11 , 44–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.05.012

Fiske, S. T., & Durante, F. (2016). Stereotype content across cultures: Variations on a few themes. In M. J. Gelfand, C.-Y. Chiu, & Y.-Y. Hong (Eds.), Handbook of advances in culture and psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 209–258). Oxford University Press.

Fiske, S. T., & Neuberg, S. L. (1990). A continuum model of impression formation, from category-based to individuating processes: Influence of information and motivation on attention and interpretation. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 23, pp. 1–74). Academic Press.

Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2021). Social cognition: From brains to culture (4/e) . London: Sage.

Foner, E. (1990). A short history of reconstruction, 1863–1877 . Harper & Row.

Goff, P. A., Eberhardt, J. L., Williams, M. J., & Jackson, M. C. (2008). Not yet human: Implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94 (2), 292–306. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.292

Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological Review , 102 (1), 4–27.

Greenwald, A. G., & Pettigrew, T. F. (2014). With malice toward none and charity for some: Ingroup favoritism enables discrimination. American Psychologist, 69 (7), 669–684. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036056

Greenwald, A. G., Brendl, M., Cai, H., Cvencek, D., Dovidio, J., Friese, M., Hahn, A., Hehman, E., Hofmann, W., Hughes, S., Hussey, I., Jordan, C. H., Jost, J., Kirby, T. A., Lai, C. K., Lang, J. W. B., Lindgren, K. P., Maison, D., Ostafin, B., Rae, J. R., ... Wiers, R. (2020). The implicit association test at age 20: What is known and what is not known about implicit bias. https://psyarxiv.com/bf97c .

Grigoryan, L., Bai, X., Durante, F., Fiske, S. T., Berdyna, E. M., Fabrykant, M., Hakobjanyan, K. A., Kotova, M., Makashvili, A., Morozova-Larina, O., Mullabaeva, N., Samekin, A., Verbilovich, V., & Yahiiaiev, I. (2020). Stereotypes as Historical Accidents: Images of Social Class Stereotypes in Postcommunist Versus Capitalist Societies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46 (6), 927–943. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219881434

Guthrie, R. V. (2004). Even the rat was white: A historical view of psychology (Classic ed., 2nd ed). Allyn and Bacon.

Hanson, A., & Hawley, Z. (2011). Do landlords discriminate in the rental housing market? Evidence from an internet field experiment in US Cities. Journal of Urban Economics, 70 (2), 99–114.

Helper, R. (1969). Racial policies and practices of real estate brokers . University of Minnesota Press.

Higginbotham, A. L. (1998). Shades of freedom: Racial politics and presumptions of the American legal process . Oxford University Press.

Hirsch, A. R. (1983). Making the second ghetto: Race and housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 . Cambridge University Press.

Intrator, J., Tannen, J., & Massey, D. S. (2016). Segregation by Race and Income in the United States, 1970–2010. Social Science Research, 60 (1), 45–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2016.08.003

Jackson, K. T. (1985). Crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jones, J. M. (1971). The political dimensions of black liberation. The Black Scholar, 3 (1), 67–75.

Jones, J. M. (1972). Prejudice and racism . Addison-Wesley.

Jones, J. M. (1997). Prejudice and racism (2nd ed). McGraw-Hill Companies.

Jost, J. T. (2020). A theory of system justification . Harvard University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Jost, J. T., & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology, 33 (1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.1994.tb01008.x

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47 (4), 263–291. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185

Katznelson, I. (2006). When affirmative action was white: An untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America . W. W. Norton.

Kay, A. C., Gaucher, D., Peach, J. M., Laurin, K., Friesen, J., Zanna, M. P., & Spencer, S. J. (2009). Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97 (3), 421–434. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015997

Krysan, M., Couper, M. P., Farley, R., & Forman, T. (2009). Does race matter in neighborhood preferences? Results from a video experiment. AJS; American Journal of Sociology, 115 (2), 527–559.

Krysan, M., & Crowder, K. (2017). Cycle of segregation: Social processes and residential stratification . Russell Sage Foundation.

Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108 (3), 480–498. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.108.3.480

Kurdi, B., Carroll, T. J., & Banaji, M. R. (2021). Specificity and incremental predictive validity of implicit attitudes: Studies of a race-based phenotype. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 6 , 61. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00324-y

Kurdi, B., Seitchik, A. E., Axt, J. R., Carroll, T. J., Karapetyan, A., Kaushik, N., Tomezsko, D., Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (2019). Relationship between the implicit association test and intergroup behavior: A meta-analysis. American Psychologist, 74 (5), 569–586. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000364

Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98 (26), 15387–15392. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.251541498

Lemann, N. (1991). The promised land: The great black migration and how it changed America . Knopf.

Levin, D. T., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Distortions in the perceived lightness of faces: The role of race categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General , 135 (4), 501–512.

Loewen, J. W. (2018). Sundown towns: A hidden dimension of American racism . New Press.

Madigan, T. (2001). The burning: Massacre, destruction, and the Tulsa race riot of, 1921 . Martin’s Press.

Massey, D. S. (2013). Inheritance of poverty or inheritance of place? The emerging consensus on neighborhoods and stratification. Contemporary Sociology, 42 , 690–697.

Massey, D. S. (2016). Residential segregation is the linchpin of racial stratification. City and Community, 15 (1), 4–7. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12145

Massey, D. S. (2018). Segregation in 21st century America. Journal of Catholic Social Thought, 15 (2), 235–260.

Massey, D. S. (2020). Still the linchpin: Segregation and stratification in the USA. Race and Social Problems, 12 (1), 1–12.

Massey, D. S., & Brodmann, S. (2014). Spheres of influence: The social ecology of racial and class inequality . Russell Sage Foundation.

Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1985). Spatial assimilation as a socioeconomic outcome. American Sociological Review, 50 (1), 94–105.

Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1989). Hypersegregation in US metropolitan areas: Black and Hispanic segregation along five dimensions. Demography, 26 (3), 373–393.

Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass . Harvard University Press.

Massey, D. S., & Fischer, M. J. (2004). The ecology of racial discrimination. City and Community, 3 (3), 221–243.

Massey, D. S., & Kanaiaupuni, S. M. (1993). Public housing and the concentration of poverty. Social Science Quarterly, 74 (1), 109–123.

Massey, D. S., & Lundy, G. (2001). Use of black English and racial discrimination in urban housing markets: New methods and findings. Urban Affairs Review, 36 (4), 470–96.

Massey, D. S., & Tannen, J. (2015). A research note on trends in black hypersegregation. Demography, 52 (3), 1025–1034. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0381-6

Massey, D. S., & Tannen, J. (2017). Suburbanization and segregation in the United States: 1970–2010. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41 (9), 1594–1611.

Massey, D. S., & Tannen, J. (2016). Segregation, race, and the social worlds of rich and poor. In H. Braun & I. Kirsch (Eds.), The dynamics of opportunity in America: Evidence and perspectives (pp. 13–33). Springer.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Massey, D. S., & Rugh, J. S. (2018). The intersection of race and class: Zoning, affordable housing, and segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas. In: Gregory Squires (Ed.), The fight for fair housing: Causes, consequences and future implications of the 1968 federal fair housing act (pp. 245–265). Taylor and Francis.

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27 (1), 415–444. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society: from the standpoint of a social behaviorist . University of Chicago Press.

Metcalf, G. R. (1988). Fair housing comes of age . Greenwood Press.

Moberg, S. P., Krysan, M., & Christianson, D. (2019). Racial attitudes in America. Public Opinion Quarterly, 83 (2), 450–471. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfz014

Monteith, M. J., Lybarger, J. E., & Woodcock, A. (2009). Schooling the cognitive monster: the role of motivation in the regulation and control of prejudice. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3 (3), 211–226. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2009.00177.x

Montoya, R. M., & Horton, R. S. (2013). A meta-analytic investigation of the processes underlying the similarity-attraction effect. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30 (1), 64–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407512452989

Morehouse, K., Maddox, K., & Banaji, M. (2021). All human groups are human, but some groups are more human than others. In: Poster presentation at the APS annual convention conference .

Nicolas, G., Fiske, S. T., Koch, A., Imhoff, R., Unkelbach, C., Terache, J., Carrier, A., & Yzerbyt, V. (2021). Relational versus structural goals prioritize different social information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000366

Norton, M. I., & Sommers, S. R. (2011). Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6 (3), 215–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691611406922

Orren, K. (1974). Corporate power and social change: The politics of the life insurance industry . The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Owens, A. (2020). Unequal opportunity: School and neighborhood segregation in the USA. Race and Social Problems, 12 (1), 29–41.

Packard, J. M. (2003). American nightmare: The history of Jim Crow . Martin’s Press.

Pager, D. (2003). The mark of a criminal record. American Journal of Sociology, 108 (5), 937–975.

Pager, D., Western, B., & Bonikowski, B. (2009). Discrimination in a low-wage labor market: A field experiment. American Sociological Review, 74 (5), 777–799. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240907400505

Paluck, E. L., Porat, R., Clark, C. S., & Green, D. P. (2021). Prejudice reduction: Progress and challenges. Annual Review of Psychology, 72 (1), 533–560. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-071620-030619

Parker, C. S. (2021). Status threat: Moving the right further to the right? Daedalus, 150 (2), 56–75.

Payne, B. K., Vuletich, H. A., & Brown-Iannuzzi, J. L. (2019). Historical roots of implicit bias in slavery. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 , 11693–11698. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1818816116

Payne, B. K., Vuletich, H. A., & Lundberg, K. B. (2017). The bias of crowds: How implicit bias bridges personal and systemic prejudice. Psychological Inquiry, 28 , 233–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2017.1335568

Peterson, R. D., & Krivo, L. J. (2010). Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide . Russell Sage Foundation.

Pettigrew, T. (1979). Racial change and social policy. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 441 , 114–131.

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90 (5), 751–783. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751

Philpott, T. (1978). The slum and the ghetto: Neighborhood deterioration and middle class reform, Chicago 1880–1930 . Oxford University Press.

Putnam, R. (2007). E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and community in the twenty-first century: The 2006 Johan Skytte prize lecture. Scandinavian Political Studies, 30 (2), 137–174. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x

Quillian, L., Lee, J. J., & Honoré, B. (2020). Racial discrimination in the U.S. housing and mortgage lending markets: a quantitative review of trends, 1976–2016. Race and Social Problems, 12 (1), 13–28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-019-09276-x

Quillian, L., & Pager, D. (2001). Black neighbors, higher crime? The role of racial stereotypes in evaluations of neighborhood crime. American Journal of Sociology, 107 (3), 717–767. https://doi.org/10.1086/338938

Quillian, L., & Pager, D. (2010). Estimating risk: Stereotype Amplification and the perceived risk of criminal victimization. Social Psychology Quarterly, 73 (1), 79–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/0190272509360763

Ramos, M. R., Bennett, M. R., Massey, D. S., & Hewstone, M. (2019). Humans adapt to social diversity over time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (25), 12244–12249. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1818884116

Richeson, J. A., & Shelton, J. N. (2007). Negotiating interracial interactions: Costs, consequences, and possibilities. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16 (6), 316–320. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00528.x

Ross, S. L., & Yinger, J. (2002). The color of credit: Mortgage discrimination, research methodology, and fair-lending enforcement . MIT Press.

Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America . Liveright.

Rothwell, J., & Massey, D. S. (2009). The effect of density zoning on racial segregation in U.S. Urban areas. Urban Affairs Review, 44 (6), 779–806. https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087409334163

Rothwell, J. T., & Massey, D. S. (2010). Density zoning and class segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas. Social Science Quarterly, 91 (5), 1123–1143.

Rugh, J. S., & Massey, D. S. (2014). Segregation in post-civil rights America: Stalled integration or end of the segregated century? The DuBois Review , 11 (2), 202–232.

Salter, P. S., Adams, G., & Perez, M. J. (2018). Racism in the structure of everyday worlds: A cultural-psychological perspective. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27 (3), 150–155. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417724239

Sampson, R. J. (2012). Great American City: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect . University of Chicago Press.

Satter, B. (2009). Family properties: How the struggle over race and real estate transformed Chicago and Urban America . Picador.

Sharkey, P. (2013). Stuck in Place: Urban neighborhoods and the end of progress toward racial equality . University of Chicago Press.

Schuman, H., Steeh, C., Bobo, L. D., & Krysan, M. (1998). Racial attitudes in America: Trends and interpretations (Revised ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and Oppression . Cambridge University Press.

Sinclair, S., Lowery, B. S., Hardin, C. D., & Colangelo, A. (2005). Social tuning of automatic racial attitudes: The role of affiliative motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89 (4), 583–592. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.89.4.583

Stanley, D. A., Sokol-Hessner, P., Banaji, M. R., & Phelps, E. A. (2011). Implicit race attitudes predict trustworthiness judgments and economic trust decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (19), 7710–7715. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1014345108

Staples, B. (2018, June 17). Opinion | The racist trope that won’t die. The New York Times . https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/opinion/roseanne-racism-blacks-apes.html .

Sugrue, T. (2008). Sweet land of liberty: The forgotten struggle for civil rights in the north . Random House.

Swencionis, J. K., & Fiske, S. T. (2016). Promote up, ingratiate down: Status comparisons drive warmth-competence tradeoffs in impression management. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 64 , 27–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.01.004

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of inter-group relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

Talaska, C. A., Fiske, S. T., & Chaiken, S. (2008). Legitimating racial discrimination: A meta-analysis of the racial attitude-behavior literature shows that emotions, not beliefs, best predict discrimination. Social Justice Research: Social Power in Action , 21 , 263–296.

Taylor, S. E., Fiske, S. T., Etcoff, N. L., & Ruderman, A. J. (1978). Categorical and contextual bases of person memory and stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36 , 778–793. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.7.778

Tolnay, S. E., & Beck, E. M. (1995). A festival of violence: An analysis of southern lynchings, 1882–1930 . University of Illinois Press.

Tropp, L. R., & Pettigrew, T. F. (2005). Differential relationships between intergroup contact and affective and cognitive indicators of prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31 , 1145–1158.

Tuttle, W. M. (1970). Race riot: Chicago in the red summer of 1919 . Atheneum.

Voigt, R., Camp, N. P., Prabhakaran, V., Hamilton, W. L., Hetey, R. C., Griffiths, C. M., et al. (2017). Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 114 (25), 6521–6526.

Waldstreicher, D. (2009). Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification . Hill and Wang.

Wallace DF (2009) This is water: Some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion, about living a compassionate life . Little, Brown and Company. (2005 Kenyon College Commencement address). https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ .

Wilkerson, I. (2010). The warmth of other suns: The epic story of America’s great migration . Random House.

Williams, J. C. (2019). White working class: Overcoming class cluelessness in America . Harvard Business Press.

Word, C. O., Zanna, M. P., & Cooper, J. (1974). The nonverbal mediation of self-fulfilling prophecies in interracial interaction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 10 (2), 109–120. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(74)90059-6

Zárate, M. A., Reyna, C., & Alvarez, M. J. (2019). Cultural inertia, identity, and intergroup dynamics in a changing context. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 59, pp. 175–233). Academic Press.

Download references

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the constructive comments of James Jones, Jeremey Wolfe, and Reviewer 1.

No funding and no major differences in the active participation in all phases of planning and producing this paper.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Mahzarin R. Banaji

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Susan T. Fiske & Douglas S. Massey

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

All authors planned, wrote, read, and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Susan T. Fiske .

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate.

Because this is a review of published work, this paper is not itself new human subjects research, so it required no new ethics approval, no consent to participate, and no new data to share.

Consent for publication

The authors do consent to publish this paper in this journal.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

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

Download citation

Received : 09 September 2021

Accepted : 03 December 2021

Published : 20 December 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00349-3

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Racism - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

It is difficult to imagine a more painful topic than racism. Violation of civil rights based on race, racial injustice, and discrimination against African American people are just a small part of issues related to racial inequality in the United States. Such a topical issue was also displayed in the context of school and college education, as students are often asked to write informative and research essays about racial discrimination.

The work on this paper is highly challenging as a student is supposed to study various cruel examples of bad attitudes and consider social questions. One should develop a topic sentence alongside the titles, outline, conclusion for essay on racism. The easiest way is to consult racism essay topics and ideas on our web. Also, we provide an example of a free college essay on racism in America for you to get acquainted with the problem.

Moreover, a hint to writing an excellent essay is good hooks considering the problem. You can find ideas for the thesis statement about racism that may help broaden your comprehension of the theme. It’s crucial to study persuasive and argumentative essay examples about racism in society, as it may help you to compose your paper.

Racism is closer than we think. Unfortunately, this awful social disease is also common for all levels and systems in the US. A student can develop a research paper about systemic racism with the help of the prompts we provide in this section.

Racism in Pop Culture

Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, both names are familiar and quite popular in Hollywood and on television. An emerging actor John Boyega whose name may not be widely known nevertheless impressed the audience with his character Finn from Star Wars. But as popular as these movie actors are, the movie that they all starred in The Circle did not sit well with the audience. In addition to the movie's low rating on film review sites and its abrupt ending that left […]

Appeal to Ethos, Logos and Pathos Racism

Abraham Lincoln once said, Achievement has no color."", but is that really true? In many cases of racism, people have been suppressed and kept from being able to contribute to the society. Racism is a blight and a hindrance to our development. Imagine the many things we could do if people could set aside differences and cooperate meaningfully. Sadly that is not the case. In reality, people are put down because of their heritage and genetics. By no means is […]

Professions for Women by Virginia Woolf

Have you ever asked yourself why people assume something of others by looks? In the chapter, Professions for Women written in 1931 by Virginia Woolf, who talks about her life and the difference she tried to make for all women in that period. She wanted her audience who were professional women to be able to figure out on their own what her story was about. Woolf talks about how she was unmasked and confused as she makes her readers understand […]

We will write an essay sample crafted to your needs.

Racism in Movie “42”

The movie I chose for this assignment is 42 starring Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford. The movie is about Jackie Robinson, a baseball player who broke the color barrier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. One of the topics we covered in this course was racism. For my generation it is hard to understand how pervasive racism used to be in society. I have three cousins that have a black father. Many of my friends are from different races and […]

Racism and the U.S. Criminal Justice System

Introduction The primary purpose of this report is to explore racism issues in the United States justice system and addressing the solutions to the problem affecting the judicial society. Racism entails social practices that give merits explicitly solely to members of certain racial groups. Racism is attributed to three main aspects such as; personal predisposition, ideologies, and cultural racism, which promotes policies and practices that deepen racial discrimination. Institutional racism is also rife in the US justice system. This entails […]

About Black Lives Matter Movement

The fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution are inherent for all. There is no question that all people (blacks, Latinos, Indians, or white) were created free and equal with certain inalienable rights. This is a universally accepted principle. Segregation and racism against minorities in this country have been widely discussed, and prominent figures have taken a stand asking people to join in the fight for equality. This stand addresses the significance of black lives. However, contrasting opinions on […]

Structural Racism in U.S. Medical Care System Doctor-Patient Relationship

US history is littered with instances of racism and it has creeped into not only social, political, and economic structures of society, but also the US healthcare system. Racism is the belief that one race is superior over others, which leads to discrimination and prejudice against people based on their race or ethnicity (Romano). Centuries of racism in the United States' social structures has led to institutionalized or systemic racism”policies and behaviors adapted into our social, economic, and political systems […]

Slavery and Racism in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is absolutely relating a message to readers about the ills of slavery but this is a complex matter. On the one hand, the only truly good and reliable character is Jim who, a slave, is subhuman. Also, twain wrote this book after slavery had been abolished, therefore, the fact that is significant. There are still several traces of some degree of racism in the novel, including the use of the n word and his tendency […]

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest James Gaines

The author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J. Gaines, is a male African American author who has taken full advantage of his culture by writing about rural Louisiana. His stories mainly tell the struggles of blacks trying to make a living in racist and discriminating lands. Many of his stories are based on his own family experiences. In Ernest J. Gaines’ novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, four themes that are displayed are the nature of […]

History of Racism

Racism started in the 1700s and has still been occuring till this day. From the looks of it, it seems to be that racism would never end. Because of cultural reasons, stereotypes, and economic reasons, it will always be an issue. People teach their kids to be racist, and make racists comments like it's normal. We can't stop people from having their personal opinions on racism, but we can stay aware of how racists others could be, our history of […]

A Simple Introduction to Three Main Types of Racism

Race plays an important role in both personal and social life, and racial issues are some of the most heated debates in the world due to their complexity, involving the diverse historical and cultural backgrounds of different ethnic groups. Consciously or unconsciously, when one race holds prejudice, discrimination, and a sense of superiority to oppress another race, the issue of racism arises. Based on aspects of individual biases, social institutions, and cultural backgrounds, the three most common types of racism […]

Civil Rights Martyrs

Are you willing to give your life for your people? These martyrs of the civil rights movement gave everything for their people. Although some may say their deaths did not have an impact on the civil rights movements. They risked their lives just so African Americans could have the rights they have today. The definition of martyr is a person who is killed because of their religious or other beliefs. They believe that everyone should be equal and have the […]

Making Racism Obsolete

Does racism still exist? Some would say no?, but some would agree that racism is a cut that won't heal. Molefi Kete Asante is a professor at Temple University and has written many books during his career. In this analysis I will dissect Asante's work covering racism from the past, present and the future moving forward. Asante argues that America is divided between two divisions, the Promise and the Wilderness. Historically, African Americans has been at a disadvantage politically, socially, […]

American Rule in the Philippines and Racism

During our almost 50 years of control in the Philippines, many of our law makers and leaders were fueled by debates at home, and also our presence overseas. These two perspectives gave a lot of controversy as to how Americans were taking control, and confusion of what they were actually doing in the Philippines. Many leaders drew from Anglo- Saxon beliefs, which lead to racist ideas and laws. These combined proved unfair treatment of the Filipinos and large amounts of […]

Social Media’s Role in Perceptions of Racism in the USA

Research studies show that racism has been in existence for centuries. Whether this is still an issue, is the question we must ask ourselves. The internet or, social media has become a major part of society over the years and conveys information, news, opinionated posts, and propaganda, as well. There are several factors involved within this topic and a plethora of resources available in search of the answers. We will look at different opinions, research studies, and ideas in relation […]

The Institutional Racism

In today society there is several police brutality against black people, and it is governed by the behavioral norms which defined the social and political institution that support institutional systems. Black people still experience racism from people who think they are superior, it is a major problem in our society which emerged from history till date and it has influences other people mindset towards each other to live their dreams. In the educational system, staffs face several challenges among black […]

Movie Review of Argo with Regards to Geography

The movie "Crash" is set in a geographical setting which clearly helps in building the major themes of racial discrimination and drug trafficking. This is because the movie is set in Los Angeles which is an area of racial discrimination epitome and partially in Mexico, a geographical area well known for drug trafficking (Schneider, 2014). The physical geographical setting where the movie is shot is very crucial as it helps in developing the main themes of the movie. The movie […]

The Development of Cultural Racism Associated with American Politics

Abstract Politics in the United States have always been a heated issue, and never more so than now. The surprising election of Donald Trump has created a clear cultural divide on many levels that continues to cultivate hate, and gifts not just Americans but the entire world with cultural racism that we have not seen for a long time. The political divide in America affects every American, every day, so much so that you would be hard-pressed to find someone […]

Racism and Civil War

One person is all it takes to change the world, for the good or for the bad. In this democratic society, every person is granted the same three unalienable rights: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If the Declaration of Independence stands true, then what’s the difference between a white individual and a black individual? The word “racism” is associated with the idea of one race being superior to the other, most commonly, blacks are “inferior” to whites. No […]

What is Racism?

Racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior and the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or […]

There Will Always be Color Racism is not Dead

Racism is not dead. Equality does not exist. The color of a person's skin still matters. Even in the 21st century, there are flaws within our legal system that has allowed Jim Crow to still exist under a new skin. The United States has used mass incarceration to continually disenfranchise millions of the African American Community. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander reasons that the criminal justice system is faulty and with […]

Discrimination of Races

Discrimination of races is something that is occuring in our society everyday. It still exists today because it started so long ago and once certain races had the hierarchy, some refuse to let go of the idea that they have more power just because they look a certain way and they choose to discriminate the minorities. Discrimination against a person's race occurs when an individual or group of individuals are treated unequally because of their true or perceived race. I […]

Racism and Discrimination: the Influence of Past Sins

Discrimination against black people by white people in the United States had been regarded as a matter of course and justifiable for more than 300 years. Therefore, the problem is far more than whether the laws are prohibited or not, but whether people's mind and concepts are changed or not. The latter is something that everyone understands but is the most difficult to do. While looking at American history, the history of African Americans can be said to be soaked […]

Racism: Unmasking Microaggressions and Discrimination

Reading through the article provided a vivid reflection on how racism becomes a serious issue in the today society. There are various types of racism the article brings out manifested in micro aggression form. The varied opinions in my mind provide a clear picture of the information relayed in the article through the following analysis. Discrimination concerning race will major in my analysis. First, let me talk about the black guy abused in the Saudi Arabia that has sparked public […]

Color Blind Racism

I enjoyed watching this documentary “White Like Me”, by Tim Wise. What I found most surprising was the fact that Tim Wise was a white male and was the individual in the film talking about the discrimination people of color receive. There were a few other things that surprised me, like the fact that there are more African Americans in jail and on probation than the number of those enslaved in 1850. The movie version of Black Like Me was […]

The Acts of Imperialism and Racism in “The Heart of Darkness”

In the novel The Heart of Darkness, the reader is introduced to the acts of imperialism and racism. The story tells of Europeans who have established a colony in Africa that is being used for trade purposes. However, the background of the story is that the Europeans are trying to colonize the Africans and introduce them to the European way of living. The white traders are not only trying to change the Africans way of life, the whites also view […]

Stereotyping and Discrimination

Introduction The movie starts with all the animals living together and happily in the big city. Their peaceful lives are then disturbed by ferocious predators. The case goes to the swindler fox and a bunny cop, those who unintentionally solve many problems related to hidden cases of interspecies.Rhetorical Strategies Few of the negative observers interpret that movie does not openly or directly express the racism. Additionally, the writer named as Nico Lang also asserts that movie does not score much […]

Police Brutality and Racism

The Declaration of Independence was created to protect the inalienable rights that all Americans receive at birth, yet police brutality continues to threaten the rights of African Americans everywhere. Police everywhere need to be given mandatory psychological tests in order to gain awareness of racial bias in law enforcement and allow citizens to slowly gain trust for the officers in law enforcement. No one wants a child to grow up in a world filled with hate. As Martin Luther King […]

Effects of Racism in Desiree’s Baby

As hard as it may be to talk about it, race has found a humble abode in literature. Desiree’s baby revolves around race and how it affects its main characters. A woman by the name of Desiree gives birth to a baby boy who is fathered by cruel slave master Armand Aubigny. Desiree makes a startling discovery when she finds out that her baby is of African heritage and this infuriates her husband who kicks them out causing Desiree to […]

Racism and Slavery

During the colonial period, Americans came up with the idea to bring African men and women overseas and use them as slaves. The effects of slavery on African Americans were enormous, and the white men got higher ranked in the hierarchy than the back men because of the colour of their skin. In order to discuss the impact that slavery has had on today’s society, you need to first address why it actually occurred. During the 17th and 18th century, […]

Related topic

Additional example essays.

• Racism in A Raisin in the Sun
• Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
• War On Drugs and Mass Incarceration
• Racism in Sports Essay
• Social Problems Reflected in Zootopia
• To Kill a Mockingbird Racism
• Socioautobiography Choices and Experiences Growing up
• A Class Divided
• Gender Inequality in Education
• Martin Luther King vs Malcolm X
• Personal Philosophy of Leadership
• Personal Narrative: My Family Genogram

How To Write An Essay On Racism

Introduction to the complexities of racism.

Writing an essay on racism involves delving into a complex and sensitive subject that has deep historical roots and contemporary implications. Begin your essay by defining racism as a system of discrimination based on race, affecting individuals and groups socially, economically, and politically. Highlight the importance of understanding racism not only as overt acts of discrimination but also as institutional and systemic practices. This introduction should lay the groundwork for your exploration, whether it's focused on historical aspects of racism, its manifestations in modern society, or strategies for combating racial prejudice and inequality.

Historical Context and Evolution of Racism

The body of your essay should include a detailed examination of the historical context and evolution of racism. Discuss how racism has been perpetuated and institutionalized over time, highlighting key historical events and policies that have contributed to racial discrimination and segregation. Depending on your essay’s focus, you might explore the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, Jim Crow laws, or apartheid, among other topics. This historical perspective is crucial for understanding how past injustices continue to shape present racial dynamics and attitudes.

Analyzing Modern Manifestations of Racism

Transition to discussing the modern manifestations of racism. Examine how racism operates in current societal structures, such as in the criminal justice system, education, employment, and healthcare. Discuss the concept of systemic racism and how it perpetuates inequality, as well as the impact of racial bias and stereotypes in media representation and everyday interactions. This section should also address the intersectionality of racism, acknowledging how race intersects with other identities like gender, class, and sexuality, contributing to unique experiences of discrimination.

Strategies for Addressing and Combating Racism

Conclude your essay by exploring strategies for addressing and combating racism. Discuss the importance of education, awareness-raising, and open dialogue in challenging racist beliefs and stereotypes. Reflect on the role of policy changes, affirmative action, and reparations in addressing systemic racism. Emphasize the importance of individual and collective action in fostering a more inclusive and equitable society. Your conclusion should not only summarize the key points of your essay but also inspire a sense of hope and commitment to anti-racist efforts, underscoring the ongoing work needed to dismantle racism in all its forms.

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

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?

Learn to build a world where everyone belongs. Take free classes at OBI University.   Start Now

The Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley brings together researchers, organizers, stakeholders, communicators, and policymakers to identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive, just, and sustainable society in order to create transformative change.

• Faculty Clusters

john a. powell is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, structural racism, housing, poverty, and democracy.

Launched in Fall 2018 as the Institute's official podcast, Who Belongs? is an ongoing series that demonstrates our commitment to public dialogue.

• Email Sign Up

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.

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.

• 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/.

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.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Heisenberg

Verified writer

• Expert in: Social Issues

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

9 pages / 4227 words

4 pages / 1749 words

3 pages / 1420 words

3 pages / 1381 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Jim Crow Laws

Jim Crow laws, a system of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination, emerged in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These laws, named after a black minstrel show character, effectively [...]

Racial discrimination against blacks circulated the nowadays American society. This type of marginalization took many forms throughout American history. While civil rights movement has addressed the decades-long struggle of [...]

On August 28,1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a public speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. This speech would go on to be known as the most famous speech in history, the “I Have a Dream” [...]

Upon reading a story in the Guardian, the long read titled; "Black Lives Matter: birth of a movement" by Wesley Lowery, one recognizes the theme of police brutality on the black people. Death of Michael Brown generated black [...]

Underground Airlines traverses many social and political climates, namely, the tension that exists between privileged whites and oppressed blacks. While Ben Winters' novel is set in an imagined future where institutionalized [...]

This study primarily examines the experiences of LGBT workers of color in the workplace. It provides statistics on a wide range of subjects within the overall topic, including unemployment and poverty rates. The report provides [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Follow us on Facebook
• Follow us on Twitter
• Criminal Justice
• Environment
• Politics & Government
• Race & Gender

Expert Commentary

Reparations for slavery and racial segregation in America: 7 papers to know

Reparations have been a topic of national discussion since the end of the Civil War. These seven studies can help inform the debate moving forward.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Clark Merrefield, The Journalist's Resource July 1, 2020

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/economics/reparations-slavery-segregation-7-papers/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

The term ‘reparation’ has its origin in Latin, but reached the English language through Old French. There are a number of meanings or shades of meaning associated with this concept. Its line of development is through one of the meanings of Modern English ‘repair’: to restore to good condition, after damage or wear; to set right, or make amends for (loss, wrong, error). This has come from the Latin reparare via Old French reparer . The Late Latin noun reparatio , from the verb reparare , gives rise, via Old French réparation , to Modern English ‘reparation’: the act, or instance of making amends; compensation. – Kimani Nehusi , “ The Meaning of Reparation ,” presented at the 1993 Birmingham Preparatory Reparation Conference.

Uprisings across America since the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody have refocused national media attention on a range of structural inequalities that make Black men 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men; that have historically tanked the value of Black-owned homes; and that have left Black families with about one-tenth the wealth of white families on average, research shows.

Reparations have been part of the national discussion on structural racial inequality since the end of the Civil War. Last spring, several candidates on the Democratic campaign trail for the presidential nomination indicated support for reparations. Presumptive nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden supports studying reparations. President Donald Trump told The Hill last June that reparations were “a very unusual thing,” and that he doesn’t “see it happening.”

Reparations typically refer to federal financial compensation to descendants of U.S. slaves, to provide some measure of “repair” for slavery — and for economic and social segregation, which was legal until the civil rights acts of the 1960s. In a reported essay last week in the New York Times Magazine , Nikole Hannah-Jones delves into academic work detailing the persistent wealth gap between Black and white people in America, stemming from slavery and segregation. She concludes that “the country must finally take seriously what it owes,” to Black Americans.

Here, we feature seven more studies to know on the topic of reparations. These peer-reviewed papers typically address one of two questions: If reparations were to happen, what should the value of reparations be and for which atrocities? And, what has stalled reparation movements in the past?

Since the 13 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude in 1865 — except for people convicted of a crime — there have been but a handful of reparations settlements for white violence against Black Americans. Descendants of the 1923 Rosewood racial massacre in Florida, for example, received reparations in 1994 in the form of free state college.

It’s unsettled as to what a federal reparations program might look like. Do reparations mean direct payments to descendants of slaves? Do they mean some billions or trillions of dollars toward government programs aimed at advancing Black wealth? For 30 years, the late Rep. John Conyers of Michigan tried to get Congress to pass a bill to study reparations. But federal legislation for reparations has never come close to happening, so the particulars of a national reparations program have never been hashed out. If federal reparations ever do come to pass, they “must include individual cash payments to descendants of the enslaved in order to close the wealth gap,” writes Hannah-Jones, who in May won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for leading the New York Times Magazine’s “ The 1619 Project ,” which explored the legacy of slavery in America.

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, by contrast, argues against cash payments in his 2014 Atlantic essay, “ The Impossibility of Reparations .” Frum writes, “The government of the United States could trace the genealogy of every white family and send a massive bill to the descendants of every slaveholder and every slumlord who did business from 1619 through 1968. It could redistribute that money in a princely lump sum. But that money won’t change unhealthy dietary patterns, or enhance language skills, or teach the habits on which thriving communities are built.”

Americans are divided along racial lines as to whether there should be federal reparations for slavery and segregation. A 2019 Associated Press poll found 15% of white Americans support cash payments, compared with nearly three-quarters of Black Americans. Other recent polls report similar findings .

The studies featured here can help inform the conversation on reparations moving forward — specifically, on considering monetary amounts, why reparations movements have stalled and what a national reparations program might look like. We’ll keep covering what the research says about reparations. If you’re a scholar studying reparations, let us know about your work.

Keep reading to learn more.

From billions to quadrillions: How much for reparations?

Such costs can be found in sociopolitical and economic calculations for the uncompensated and stolen Black labor, the loss of property, the loss of homespace and heritage, forcible rape, lynching, the loss of opportunity, and continued systems and practices of racial capitalism and racial domination. These costs, then, also underscore a myriad of debts the United States owes and that a reparations framework is meant to collect. – Marcus Anthony Hunter , “ Seven Billion Reasons for Reparations .” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, June 2019.

In March 1865, one month before his assassination, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation establishing the Freedmen’s Savings Bank. The federal government created the bank to encourage ex-slaves to save money. White bank leaders traveled the country promoting Freedmen’s in Black communities, promising the bank was a safe place to save. By early 1874, Freedmen’s had 34 branches with $3.3 million in deposits from Black customers, or about $73 million in today’s dollars, according to Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Freedmen’s was also on the verge of failure. Trouble began in 1870, when Congress allowed the bank to start making mortgage and business loans. Most were given to white customers, “an important paradox,” Hunter writes. Half of Freedmen’s 34 branches had large deficits by 1872, due to bad loans that weren’t being repaid. The bank survived a run on deposits that year after rumor spread that money Black people had deposited was being used to finance political campaigns for white politicians. When white officials left the bank, they were replaced by Black employees, “inexperienced in the area of banking and unable to shoulder the burden of restructuring a complex and fragile financial institution,” Hunter writes.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a prominent and trusted Black leader, was put in charge in March 1874. But it was too late for the bank. Congress liquidated Freedmen’s in June. Many Black depositors never got their money back. A quarter century after the bank closed, Congress had repaid 62% of deposits — not depositors. Black people lost trust in banking institutions post-Freedmen’s, according to Hunter, especially banks run by white people.

“Despite professed good intentions, racism was still at play,” Hunter writes. “By lending the money of Black depositors to whites with little to no stake in the bank, the risks inherent in lending and loan repayment were not evenly distributed.” Hunter finds the $3.3 million in deposits at Freedmen’s end, as a share of gross domestic product at the time, comes to about $7.5 billion as a share of GDP today.

Hunter concludes that the fate of Freedmen’s represents but a single episode in American history where black people suffered real financial losses because of actions white people took. The $7.5 billion is money that can be “accounted for and put on the table,” he writes, suggesting that “such funds could be allocated in ways that would go a long way toward addressing issues of intergenerational wealth, access to and affordability of homeownership and higher education, and Black entrepreneurship.”

The decision whether to base reparations on the full amount of the debt, or only part of it, using what estimation method, and, crucially, at what interest rate, is not up to us as researchers, but up to negotiations between the parties involved, the federal government on one hand, and the African American descendant community on the other. – Thomas Craemer , Trevor Smith , Brianna Harrison , Trevon Logan , Wesley Bellamy and William Darity Jr. , “ Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved .” The Review of Black Political Economy , June 2020.

The authors describe several ways to calculate reparations for the 41 million Black people in America, “a rough estimate of current descendants of the enslaved in the United States.” They focus on the gap in net worth between black individuals and white individuals as a reparations yardstick. The gap is about $352,000 on average by their calculation of 2016 U.S. Census data, and “can be viewed as embodying all of the effects of past atrocities: colonial slavery, U.S. slavery, post–Civil War massacres, Jim Crow discrimination, New Deal discrimination, segregation during World War II, post-War discrimination, and post-Civil Rights discrimination.”

Their first reparation calculation is based on land, specifically the “ 40 acres and a mule ” derived from a January 1865 order Union General William Tecumseh Sherman developed in consultation with Black religious leaders from Savannah, Georgia. Some 40,000 former slaves did get land, about 400,000 acres in total, until President Andrew Johnson overturned Sherman’s order that fall. The land was returned to its original plantation owners. Based on a price of $10 per acre in 1865, the authors estimate the value of those 400,000 acres at about $3 trillion in today’s dollars. That comes to roughly $73,000 per descendent of the enslaved. The authors note that the Homestead Act of 1862 promised 160 acres to white settlers, four times the amount promised to ex-slaves. If former slaves had been promised 160 acres, it would equate to about $291,000 per descendent today, failing to cover the wealth gap.

Price-based estimation is another way researchers have calculated reparations in other academic work. The authors note this type of estimation is biased toward the slave owner. It’s based on the value of slave labor — what slave owners gained — rather than what slaves lost. The authors prefer a wage-based estimation of slaves’ billable hours using historical data on what free laborers earned from 1776 to 1860. There were about 423,000 slaves in the U.S. in 1776, and 4 million by 1860.

The authors acknowledge that even if Black people had been free laborers, racism might have depressed their wages, but offer that “discrimination cannot be legitimately used to reduce present value reparations estimates because racial discrimination itself is a historical injustice worthy of compensation.”

They include all 24 hours of a slave’s day as billable in their analysis — double the 12 average daylight working hours. This is because time a slave spent not working wasn’t “free time” in the modern sense. “Nonworking hours were not negotiated between free agents, they were determined based on the owner’s self-interest alone and for the owner’s exclusive benefit,” the authors write.

At a 3% compounded interest rate, the authors’ tally for unpaid slave wages comes to $18.6 trillion — about $454,000 per descendent — outpacing the wealth gap even after subtracting the average per-person debt for all Americans of about $57,000. Compound interest means the authors add 3% to each year of wages never paid to the enslaved, then carry over the total each year. In 1776, for example, slaves worked about 3.7 million hours, according to the authors. At the prevailing wage of two cents an hour, that’s about $64 million unpaid. Adding 3% interest brings the total unpaid for 1776 to about $66 million. The next year, unpaid wages amounted to about $73 million. The authors add the $66 million from 1776 to the $73 million from 1777, then add 3% on top of that — and so on through 1860, the last year for which there were reliable estimates of the size of the slave population.

“It should be mentioned that an interest rate of only 3% is extremely conservative and fails to correct for inflation,” the authors write. At 6% interest, the authors find that “the numbers explode” — to $6.2 quadrillion, or about $151 million per descendent. One trillion has 12 zeroes; one quadrillion has 15.

3 analyses of why reparations efforts have stalled

Ask nearly anyone on the street to define genocide, and you will hear that it is an extermination of a group of people that involves the killing of large number of people. Certainly this would in fact be genocide, but the legal definition of genocide is much more general than that and, in fact, does not actually require that anyone die. Genocide denotes an attempt to prevent a group from exercising an ability to maintain a cultural identity rather than a necessary process of losing one’s biological existence. – Allan Cooper , “ From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse .” Journal of Black Studies , June 2012.

Reparations scholarship often calculates and frames reparations as wages unpaid, or as compensation for liberty taken. As a debt owed, in other words. Same goes for influential popular works — such as the 2001 book The Debt: What America Owes Blacks by Randall Robinson , though the 2014 Atlantic essay “ The Case for Reparations ” by Ta-Nehisi Coates broadened the reparations debate beyond debt.

Allan Cooper, a political science professor at North Carolina Central University, offers that the debt framing has failed to hold water legally, with courts dismissing numerous lawsuits filed since 1915 seeking damages.

(University of Pennsylvania constitutional scholar Mary Frances Berry details that seminal 1915 case in “ Taking the United States to Court: Callie House and the 1915 Cotton Tax Reparations Litigation ,” published in the Journal of African American History in 2018.)

Cooper explains, “U.S. courts have consistently ruled that the descendants of slaves have yet to demonstrate ‘standing’ (they have not demonstrated that the defendants personally injured them) and that these descendants have taken too long to file their claims.”

But there’s another framing that could be more legally persuasive, according to Cooper: slavery as genocide. The idea of American slavery as genocide is not new , but Cooper puts a fine point on it from a legal perspective, based on the United Nation’s 1948 Genocide Convention . The convention codified genocide as an international crime following the genocide of Jewish people by Nazi Germany during World War II. The UN defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including, “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Cooper poses the question of whether a party that committed genocide before the UN convention could be held liable for damages. He points to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which, in the early 2000s, dismissed a claim for $2 billion against the German government from the Herero people in Southern Africa, some 65,000 of whom Germany killed from 1904 to 1907. The court, however, didn’t specifically rule on Germany’s claim that it could not be prosecuted for an act committed before the act became criminal, according to Cooper.

The federal government has already determined, implicitly, that the Jim Crow era of segregation and violence against Black Americans — from roughly the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights Act of 1965 — was genocidal. The U.S. Senate didn’t ratify the U.N. Genocide Convention for nearly four decades because of objections from racist senators like Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. “These opponents repeatedly claimed that ratification would threaten Jim Crow laws and undermine states’ rights,” Cooper writes. The Senate ratified the convention in 1986, with reservations — namely that lynching, race riots and segregation did not fall under the Senate’s definition of genocide.

“Certainly opponents of the Genocide Convention would not have expended the time and labor to argue against ratification if they did not seriously believe that the Jim Crow policies of the United States constituted a case of genocide as it is defined in the Genocide Convention,” Cooper writes.

In addition to potential legal standing under international law, framing reparations as compensation for genocide during slavery and the Jim Crow era, rather than as a debt owed, “poses a much more powerful ethical argument,” Cooper writes. “Up until now, the fundamental justification for reparations has been economic: African Americans are owed a debt. Reducing slavery to a cost-benefit analysis connotes that the inherent indignity of being a slave is merely a matter of unfair compensation for labor performed. If this was all it was, then the entire working class of America could demand reparations for their lack of fair pay. But slavery was about much more than economic hardship; slavery related to an assault on the humanity and dignity of African Americans.”

Following the Civil War, Southern whites were in a position to initiate repair with those formerly enslaved. However, they failed to do so; the opportunity was squandered. The possibility for deepening the bond between fellow Americans went deeply awry. – Jeffrey Prager , “ Do Black Lives Matter? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Racism and American Resistance to Reparations .” Political Psychology , June 2017.

UCLA sociologist Jeffrey Prager draws parallels between personal psychological development and white psychological resistance to reparations for Black Americans.

He writes that “reparation is an essential feature of individual development.” Specifically, the phase of psychological development in which a child grows up and becomes less egocentric and has a “need to make amends to the mother for his or her self-centeredness.” The development completes when the mother forgives the child, according to Prager. The psychoanalytical parallel he makes is that white people, broadly speaking, are like the child — except the child remains self-centered. Black society, therefore, has no opportunity to repair, or to forgive.

“Though they are in every other respect dominant, whites continue to possess an emotionally immature relationship to African Americans,” Prager writes. “In failing to acknowledge or act upon any reparative impulse, whites refuse to concede their omnipotent and self-centered conception of themselves or to accept an external reality where they do not occupy its voracious center.”

Movements that seek reparations against racial injustices must confront historic narratives of events and patterns of repression. These injustices are often legitimated through official narratives that discredit and vilify racial groups. – Chris Messer , Thomas Shriver and Krystal Beamon , “ Official Frames and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921: The Struggle for Reparations .” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity , December 2017.

The authors examine how narratives from the news media and government officials can thwart reparations campaigns. They analyzed 124 contemporaneous news articles and 42 government documents about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, when a white mob destroyed a prosperous Black neighborhood called Greenwood in Tulsa. They also looked at how victims framed the riot based on news reports from The Tulsa World starting in 1997, when Oklahoma established a commission to examine the riot. That creation of the commission revived local news coverage of the riot and the push for reparations.

Messer is an associate professor of psychology at Colorado State University-Pueblo. Shriver is a sociology professor at North Carolina State University. Beamon is a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington.

News reports published on May 31, 1921, claimed a Black man, Dick Rowland, assaulted a white woman, Sarah Page, in an elevator the day prior. The commonly accepted story now is that Rowland slipped and grabbed Page’s hand. But, that spring evening, hundreds of white Tulsans gathered at the courthouse where Rowland was being held. Further news coverage and government accounts around the time of the Tulsa riot blamed the appearance of small groups of armed Black men at the courthouse for the white mob that subsequently looted, committed arson and murder, and dropped bombs from planes onto Greenwood.

“In the decades following the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, white history books either glossed over the event or attempted to further bolster the official framing of the riot,” the authors write. “Indeed, some history texts suggested that whites had essentially ‘saved’ the Greenwood district from further destruction, protecting its residents and paying for reconstruction of the neighborhood.”

That official framing shifted following scholarly analyses in the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly following the 2001 report the Oklahoma government commissioned to detail the facts of the riot — and to capture the voices of victims. Despite these accounts, victims or descendants of victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre never received reparations.

“Our findings have particular relevance for reparations cases, where white elites attempt to defend and legitimate the historic repression in order to avoid culpability,” the authors conclude.

‘Baby bonds’ and direct payments: Reparations in practice

Rather than a race-neutral America, the ideal should be a race-fair America. For that to occur the transmission of racial economic advantage or disadvantage across generations would have to cease. – Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. , “ Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America ?” The Review of Black Political Economy , October 2010.

The authors address the Black-white wealth gap exacerbated by centuries of explicit and implicit oppression, and by the main way that American families acquire intergenerational wealth: inheritance.

“These intra-familial transfers, the primary source of wealth for most Americans with positive net worth, are transfers of blatant non-merit resources,” write Hamilton and Darity Jr. Hamilton is a public affairs professor at The Ohio State University and Darity Jr. is a public policy professor at Duke University. “Why do blacks have vastly less resources to transfer to the next generation?”

For starters, the authors point to the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule, along with centuries of Black Americans being systematically barred from loans to buy land, as well as Black property destruction at the hands of white mobs, like in 1921 in Tulsa.

Hamilton and Darity Jr. note that “85% of black and Latino households have a net worth below the median white household,” meaning most, but not all, white households are wealthier than most Black and Latino households. They propose a “baby bond” program that would focus on growing wealth for children in low-income families, regardless of race or ethnicity.

The plan would center on an average $20,000 trust established for every child born into families whose net worth falls below the national median. The authors propose that the trust could go up to $60,000 for families in the lowest wealth quartile. The money would grow at about 2% per year in federally managed accounts, with kids gaining access to their trusts at age 18. Hamilton and Darity Jr. estimate an average yearly cost of about $60 billion. They acknowledge their math doesn’t take into account that baby bonds might incentivize families with low incomes to have more children, but neither does their analysis account for cost savings from federal programs that aim to help Americans with low income that might no longer be necessary.

It’s important to note that Hamilton and Darity Jr. wrote this paper when Barack Obama was president. Many academic researchers and media commentators at the time were talking about a “post-racial” America — an America in which race was no longer a predominant driver of economic and social inequality. As has recently been laid bare, following the killing of George Floyd and subsequent civil rights protest movement , the idea that America had entered a post-racial era was fiction .

Should each eligible African-American receive a check and a letter of apology from the government much like Japanese-Americans received for their internment during World War II? Should there be a trust fund from which eligible African-Americans could apply for business or homebuyer’s grants? Or should every eligible African-American be guaranteed tuition paid in full for college? – William Darity Jr. , Bidisha Lahiri and Dania Frank , “ Reparations for African-Americans as a Transfer Problem: A Cautionary Tale .” Review of Development Economics , April 2010.

The authors explore several hypothetical reparations schemes involving direct payments. Notably, they find a program that incentivizes Black people to spend reparation dollars on goods and services produced by non-Black people would, in fact, increase income for non-Black people while potentially decreasing Black income.

“Both of these results run counter to the goal of closing the racial income gap,” the authors write. Darity Jr. is the Duke public policy professor. Lahiri is an economist at Oklahoma State University and Frank is an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The underlying structural issue, which the authors point out throughout the paper, is that Black people are not proportionately represented as owners or major stakeholders of companies that produce goods and services. (More recent research shows Black-owned small businesses have been shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic at nearly double the rate of overall small business closures.) The takeaway is that any reparations program needs be designed with a holistic approach that considers not only payments themselves, but where that money is likely to be spent, if the goal is to close the income gap.

“We find that reparations payments that provide incentives for Blacks to use the payment toward purchases of goods and services produced by non-Blacks might expand the income gap,” the authors conclude. “Also a reparations payment in the absence of productive capacity owned by Blacks is found to have no final positive impact on black income.”

About The Author

Clark Merrefield

News alert: UC Berkeley has announced its next university librarian

Secondary menu

• Log in to your Library account
• Hours and Maps
• Connect from Off Campus
• UC Berkeley Home

Search form

African american studies: theses and dissertations.

• Theses and Dissertations
• Audio & Video
• Government documents
• Letters, diaries, and papers
• Magazines & Journals
• Oral histories
• Black Panther Party This link opens in a new window
• Business & Labor
• Civil Rights
• Military Service
• Racial Violence
• Reconstruction & Politics
• Segregation and Black Migration
• Slavery This link opens in a new window
• Social/Cultural History
• Women & Gender
• Citation Management
• Lit Review + Methods
• Scavenger Hunt

Bibliography of theses and dissertations on African American topics completed at Berkeley.

• African American Theses and Dissertations 1907-2001. This bibliography lists 600 theses and dissertations on African American topics completed at the University of California, Berkeley. The earliest thesis, by Emmet Gerald Alexander, State Education of the Negro in the South, was completed in 1907 in the Department of Education, while the most recent date from the calendar year 2001. The African experience in the Americas is the connecting thread which links these works completed in thirty three disciplines over the past eight decades. This experience is construed in its widest sense; included therefore are studies of Blacks in the Caribbean and in Central and Latin America as well as in North America. Theses not indubitably on this subject as revealed by their titles have been examined; we have retained only titles either entirely or substantially devoted to this subject. The collection is on microfilm in News/Micro Microfilm 2030.E. The originals have been moved to NRLF.

Find Dissertations

Find Dissertations by searching Dissertations and Theses (Dissertation Abstracts) Full Text , which includes full-text of most dissertations since 1997. It indexes over 1.5 million dissertations completed in North American (including UC) and European universities from 1861 to the present. Listings after 1980 include abstracts, and some feature 24-page excerpts. 

If the dissertation is not available in the database, check UC Library Search . Dissertations completed at other UC campuses prior to 1996 or outside the UC system must be obtained through Interlibrary Loan .

• << Previous: Reference
• Next: Data >>
• Last Updated: May 29, 2024 4:25 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/subject-guide/African-American

• Essay Database
• world trade center
• Greek Food and Culture
• The Future Portrayed I…
• Intercultural Communications
• In Heart of Darkness, …
• Things Fall Apart by C…
• In J.M. Coetzee's Wait…
• The Criminals Of Profe…
• Socialization of Children
• The Poet of Nature, Wi…
• Leonhard Euler
• Articles of Confederat…
• About all Sharks
• Vietnam Poetry

Racial segregation.

What is paper-research.

• Custom Writing Service
• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Biographies

Racism can spark depression and anxiety in Black adolescents, study finds

Studies of brain activity suggest that the way Black youths cope with racial discrimination can affect their mental health.

Black adolescents’ experiences with racial discrimination may put them at higher risk of depression and anxiety, according to a study published this week in JAMA Network Open that sheds light on the long-term impact of racism.

The study from researchers at the University of Georgia calls attention to the complex ways in which Black youths process and respond to discrimination. Its findings can potentially improve the resources designed to help Black adolescents cope with racism.

Assaf Oshri, lead author of the study, is an associate professor whose research focuses on child development. He and his team pulled data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study , a nationwide project funded by the National Institutes of Health that collects data on children’s health and brain development. Oshri and his colleagues analyzed data from more than 1,500 participants, gathered over three years.

“We know discriminatory experiences are associated with a range of negative health outcomes,” Oshri said. “This study is showing that some brain patterns that are trying to process threats … can help [participants] cope with these types of experiences, but there might be an emotional toll.”

By studying the amygdala — the emotion center of the brain — the authors were able to better understand the role it plays in Black youths’ responses to threats such as racism.

The amygdala’s activity was assessed using data collected during functional MRIs, widely known as fMRIs. During fMRI scans, participants were shown neutral and negative facial expressions — a commonly used test in neuroscience known as the Emotional N-Back Task. The test can simulate how participants respond to negative stimuli.

The authors also evaluated surveys in which Black adolescents self-reported experiences with racial discrimination and categorized their behaviors.

If a participant indicated on a survey that they were feeling scared or anxious, or sad or depressed, the researchers noted these feelings as internalizing symptoms, which are inner problems a person can face. If a participant noted they argued frequently or threw temper tantrums, Oshri and his team categorized these behaviors as externalizing symptoms, which are problems that present outwardly and affect the individual and people around them.

Internalizing and externalizing symptoms can tell researchers how participants are responding to stressors in their environment.

Taking the brain and survey data together, Oshri and his team found a correlation between youths whose amygdala shut down in response to negative stimuli and increased reporting of internalizing symptoms — including anxiety and depression.

Many of those adolescents also expressed feelings of marginalization in their surveys and fewer externalizing symptoms. The authors noticed these trends in about 1 in every 5 participants. So, while some youths may be less likely to act out in response to stressors, they might be at a higher risk of internalizing them and feeling sad or anxious as a result.

The amygdala shutting down in response to negative stimuli may be the brain’s way of protecting Black adolescents when they confront discrimination, though it may also be a sign of avoidant coping, which can harm their mental health over time.

“There’s a lot of implications,” Oshri said. He highlighted the importance of using data to document that “discriminatory experiences are harming our children and [their] development.”

Ryan DeLapp agreed. DeLapp, who was not involved in the study, is a psychologist and the creator of the Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Healing program , which is designed to help youths of color navigate and heal from experiences with racial discrimination.

“Looking at biological data can further substantiate what has been shown for decades, [which is] that individuals are significantly impacted by these experiences,” DeLapp said. He added that quantitative studies should not stand alone: “These studies are needed in addition to … anecdotes of people’s lived experiences.”

Howard Stevenson, professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said scientific studies influence and inform intervention strategies all the time, including his own as a leader in the field of intervention work. He spearheads the Racial Empowerment Collaborative , a training and research center that explores how racism affects people’s lives.

Stevenson, who was not involved in the University of Georgia study, said that work such as Oshri’s shows why mindfulness is an important practice to teach youths, especially youths of color who are likely to experience discrimination.

“That’s like vitamins for your amygdala,” Stevenson said. Much like Oshri’s findings, Stevenson emphasized the importance of adolescents acknowledging their feelings rather than constantly suppressing them.

“The practice of noticing what’s happening to your body, thoughts and feelings” is central to intervention work, Stevenson said.

• The Student Experience
• Financial Aid
• Degree Finder
• Undergraduate Arts & Sciences
• Departments and Programs
• Research, Scholarship & Creativity
• Centers & Institutes
• Geisel School of Medicine
• Guarini School of Graduate & Advanced Studies
• Thayer School of Engineering
• Tuck School of Business

Campus Life

• Diversity & Inclusion
• Athletics & Recreation
• Student Groups & Activities
• Residential Life

Department of Economics

• [email protected] Contact & Department Info Mail
• Careers in Economics
• Student Experiences
• Econ Alumni
• Undergraduate
• First Year FAQ
• Modified Major
• Class Schedule
• Transfer Credits
• Honors Theses 2024
• Honors Theses 2023
• Honors Theses 2022
• Fed Challenge
• Jobs, Fellowships and Interships
• Political Economy Project
• Bocconi Exchange Information
• Dartmouth-Oxford Exchange at Keble College
• University College London Exchange
• Faculty by Field
• Faculty Research
• Faculty Spotlight
• Globalization Cluster
• Inclusivity
• Inclusion at Dartmouth
• Resources for Undergraduates
• Statement on Racial Justice
• News & Events
• News & Events

Search form

Class of 2024 graduation.

The Department is honored to celebrate the achievements of the class of 2024. We're grateful for the opportunity to have worked with this talented group of individuals and appreciate the support they've received from family and friends as they endeavored to achieve their degrees.

Dartmouth Economic Research Scholars

Christopher snyder, director.

Selected through an application process, scholars deepen their academic experience by collaborating on faculty research, attending seminars, and undertaking mentored independent study. 

          William S. Bryant           Quentin T. Calhoun           Morgan A. Chamberlin                                                                                                                                                      Adriana Chavira Ochoa                                                              Federico Cigolot                                                               Paul R. Cornell           Julia Cross           Luis F. Cusihuallpa Solorzano                                                                     Caroline E. Domescik           Claire A. Draeger                                                                 Kathryn S. Hahm                                                                        Emma L. Johnson                                                                       Keso Kakachia *                                                            Renesa T. Khanna *                                                            Daniel G. Kotrebai           Alexa V. Lomonaco           Yaro Lototskyy           Sharanya Majumder

* DERS Class Officers

Honors and Awards

Economics department outstanding achievement award.

          Conner D. Boehm           Quentin T. Calhoun                                                 Kira H. Fontaine           Rohit V. Garimella           Itish Goel           Sydney M. Hoffman           Keso Kakachia           Daniel G. Kotrebai                     Yaro Lototskyy            Keren Luo           Hoang T. Nguyen           Allan R. Wang           Yizhen Zhen

Graduating with Honors in Economics

          Lily L. Ding           Claire A. Draeger           Kira H. Fontaine           Wesley B. Liao           Hoang T. Nguyen           Allan R. Wang

Graduating with High Honors in Economics

          Morgan A. Chamberlin           Federico Cigolot           Paul R. Cornell           Luis F. Cusihuallpa Solorzano           Ethan C. Dixon           Rohit V. Garimella           Itish Goel           Amy Halder           Keso Kakachia           Renesa T. Khanna           Keren Luo           Krishnachandra Nair           Tejas J. Parekh

Lewis H. Haney Prize (Outstanding Honors Thesis)

          Paul R. Cornell

Nelson A. Rockefeller Prize (Best Performance in the Major)

          Paul R. Cornell           Keso Kakachia           Renesa T. Khanna           Keren Luo           Hoang T. Nguyen           

Economics Department Service and Leadership Award

          Shandukurai Chiuswa

Lamees Kareem '22 Award (Student Spirit in an Immersion Class)

          Ethan C. Dixon

Thesis Topics

         Morgan A. Chamberlin,          "Farming The Wind: Wind Power and Agriculture."          (Advisor James Feyrer)

         Federico Cigolot,          "Why Join the Belt and Road Initiative? Modeling Trade Dynamics and Welfare Outcomes."          (Advisor Treb Allen)

         Paul R. Cornell,          "House Price Capitalization of School Finance Reform in New Jersey."          (Advisor Elizabeth Cascio)

         Luis F. Cusihuallpa Solorzano,          "Market Response to Presidential Election Results: Evidence from Latin America."          (Advisor Bruce Sacerdote)

         Ethan C. Dixon,          "Morality and Mortality: Churches as Bundles of Spiritual and Secular Capital."          (Advisor Elizabeth Cascio)

         Rohit V. Garimella,          "Does Media Coverage Make Banks More Susceptible to Contagion Effects?          Evidence from the Silicon Valley Banking Crisis."          (Advisors Jonathan Zinman and Bruce Sacerdote)

         Itish Goel,          "Do Futures Bans Make Markets More Local? Evidence from Agricultural 'Mandis' in India."          (Advisor Treb Allen)

         Amy Halder,          "The Impact of Economic Circumstances on Farmer Suicides in India."          (Advisor Treb Allen)

         Keso Kakachia,          "Economic Transformation in Georgia: A Post-Conflict Analysis."          (Advisor Treb Allen)

         Renesa T. Khanna,          "Who You Know vs What You Know:          Exploring the Role of Exam Scores and School District Segregation on Upward Social Mobility in the United States."          (Advisor Douglas Staiger)

         Keren Luo,          "Do M&As Harm Other Firms in the Industry? The Effect of M&A Announcements on Acquirer's Rivals"          (Advisor Bruce Sacerdote)

         Krishnachandra Nair,          "The Real Determinants of National Health Spending: Income Level, Life Expectancy, and Healthcare System."          (Advisors James Feyrer and Douglas Staiger)

         Tejas J. Parekh,          "Medicaid and Mental Health: The Effect of Insurance Coverage on Mental Health Diagnoses Rates Across States."          (Advisor Melinda Petre)