SOC ∙ Wiley ∙ Race Resource Analysis, D___ Name:Definition of Racial Concepts:

Race: “Race is a socially constructed artifact that categorizes people based

on visual differences which are imputed to indicate invisible differences. These categorizations are amorphous [vague, formless] and fluid [changing] over time which reflects their social rather than physical basis. Its significance arises out of the meanings we as societies assign to it, and the way we structure race in our societies.” Dr. Rowan Wolf (sociologist)

“In 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued a statement asserting that all humans belong to the same species and that “race” is not a biological reality but a myth. This was a summary of the findings of an international panel of anthropologists, geneticists, sociologists, and psychologists. . . . Today the vast majority of those involved in research on human variation would agree that biological races do not exist among humans. Among those who study the subject, who use and accept modern scientific techniques and logic, this scientific fact is as valid and true as the fact that the earth is round and revolves around the sun.” Dr. Robert Sussman (biological anthropologist)

“Race refers to a group of people identified as distinct from other groups because of supposed physical and genetic traits shared by the group. Most scientists do not recognize race as a biologically valid classification, in part because there is more genetic variation within such groups than between them.” The American Heritage dictionary

1. Race is a complex social issue that social and biological scientists study in great detail. Do you think that Americans today would define “race” in the same way scholars do (see definitions above)? Is it beneficial to learn about how social and biological scientists define and discuss race? Why or why not?

Racism: “Racism can be defined simply as any policy, belief, attitude, action or inaction, that subordinates [treat or regard as

of lesser importance than something else] individuals or groups based on their race.” Dr. Rowan Wolf (sociologist) “Racism is a doctrine or teaching, without scientific support, that does three things. First, it claims to find racial

differences in things like character and intelligence. Second, racism asserts the superiority of one race over another or others. Finally, it seeks to maintain that dominance through a complex system of beliefs, behaviors, use of language and policies. Racism ranges from the individual to the institutional level and reflects and enforces a pervasive view, in white dominated U.S. culture, that people of color are inferior to whites. Racist beliefs include things like “White people are smarter than people of color,” or “White people make better teachers.” Racism can manifest itself in terms of individual behavior through hate crimes, or in institutional behavior through employment discrimination. Racism might manifest in individual language through the use of slurs, or in institutional policy through a school’s selection of Eurocentric textbooks.” (Southern Poverty Law Center)

2. Do you agree with the scholars from the Southern Poverty Law Center that it would be racist to write a U.S. history textbook designed for public schools that paid very little attention to African American history? Why or why not?

Institutional Racism: 1

“Grades of Intelligence,” circa 1900 American [pseudo] “science”

“Because racism is an ideology that is entwined within the cultural ideology of this society, at some level, everyone who is a cultural member shares many aspects of the ideology of race. That belief system plays out in our day to day interactions with each other and in our institutions (school, media, workplace, justice system, etc.), whether we are consciously aware of it or not, or consciously racist or not. . . . Institutional racism is the structuring of benefit (privilege) for the group with power at the expense of those groups without traditional power in the society.” Dr. Rowan Wolf (sociologist)

“Institutional racism involves policies, practices, and procedures of institutions that have a disproportionately negative effect on racial minorities’ access to and quality of goods, services, and opportunities. . . . [It] establishes separate and independent barriers to access and quality of health care (for example) . . . [but] does not have to result from direct human intention. Thus, racial discrimination an occur in institutions even when the institution does not intend to make distinctions on the basis of race.” Dr. Vernellia Randall (sociologist and legal scholar)

3. Based on the scholars’ definitions of institutional racism, is the fact black students are much more likely to attend underfunded and failing schools with less per pupil spending (as a result of funding schemes involving property taxes) an example of institutional racism? Why or why not?

Many get confused about the difference between “race” and ethnicity: “Ethnicity, refers to cultural factors, including nationality, regional culture, ancestry, and language. An example of “race” might be brown, white, or black skin (all from various parts of the world), while an example of ethnicity is German or Spanish ancestry (regardless of “race”). . . . An ethnic group or ethnicity is a population group whose members identify with each other on the basis of common nationality or shared cultural traditions.” American Sociological Association

The Clark Doll Experiments, excerpted from the NAACP’s “Doll Test” tribute:

In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known as “the doll tests” to study the psychological effects of segregation on African American children. Drs. Clark used dolls, identical except for color, to test children’s racial perceptions. Their subjects, children between the ages of three to nine, were asked to identify both the race of the dolls and which color doll they prefer. The children overwhelmingly preferred the white doll and assigned positive characteristics to it. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” created a feeling of inferiority among African American children and damaged their self-esteem. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, the experiment helped to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court that “separate but equal” was inherently unequal. The Supreme Court acknowledged the experiments implicitly in the following passage: “To separate [African-American children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

In an interview on the award-winning PBS documentary of the Civil Rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize,” Dr. Kenneth Clark recalled: "The Dolls Test was an attempt on the part of my wife and me to study the development of the sense of self-esteem in

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children. We worked with black children to see the extent to which their color, their sense of their own race and status, influenced their judgment about themselves . . . .

In the experiment, the psychologists would show the black children two dolls, one white and one black, and then ask these questions in this order:

a) “Show me the doll that you like best or that you’d like to play with,”b) “Show me the doll that is the ‘nice’ doll,”c) “Show me the doll that looks ‘bad’,”d) “Give me the doll that looks like a white child,”e) “Give me the doll that looks like a colored child,”f) “Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child,” g) “Give me the doll that looks like you,”h) “Show me the pretty doll.”

The last two questions were often the most difficult, since by that point, most black children had picked the black doll as the bad one. In 1950, 44% said the white doll looked like them! In past tests, however, many children would refuse to pick either doll or just start crying and run away.

The Clarks conducted their studies across the country; they found that black children who went to segregated schools, those separated by race, were more likely to pick the white doll as the nice one. Clark also asked children to color a picture of themselves. Most chose a shade of brown markedly lighter than themselves.

4. Why were these doll tests conducted in the 1940s? What is your reaction to the Clark study?

5. Record findings and your reactions to the recent doll tests conducted by CNN (see video). What do you think accounts for these results? What can/should be done about this issue?

New Study Confirms Depressing Truth About Names and Racial Bias, by Jacqueline Howard in The Huffington Post, senior science editor at Huffpost Science (2015)

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Students with stereotypically “black”-sounding names tend to be labeled as troublemakers by teachers. Job applicants with such names are less likely than their white-sounding counterparts to get called in for interviews. When residents with “black”-sounding names contact their local government for information about schools or libraries, they are less likely to receive a response.

Adding to this troubling compendium of results is a disturbing new study, published Thursday in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. The study of mostly white participants shows that men with black-sounding names are more likely to be imagined as physically large, dangerous and violent than those with stereotypically white-sounding names.

Dr. Colin Holbrook, a research scientist at the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture and lead author of the study, said that he has “never been so disgusted” by his own data. “The participant sample, despite being slightly left of center politically, automatically attributed violence to individuals based solely on having names like Darnell or Juan; whereas names such as Connor automatically led to expectations of prestige and status,” Holbrook told The Huffington Post in an email. “This seems to clearly echo the fear of black and Latino men in our society, which is ironic and disturbing as they are often the victims of violence—precisely because people are afraid of them.”

For the study, the researchers conducted a series of experiments involving about 1,500 mostly white adults. In the first experiment, participants were asked to read one of two nearly identical stories about a main character who bumped into a man at a bar, and the man angrily responded “Watch where you’re going, a—hole!” In one version of the story, the character’s name was either Jamal, DeShawn or Darnell. In another version, the character’s name was either Connor, Wyatt or Garrett.

In the second experiment, the same story was read, but this time the main character was described as either a successful college graduate or business owner, or as someone who had been convicted of assault. In both experiments, the participants were asked to report their impressions of the main character’s height, build, status and aggressiveness, among other characteristics. Jamal, DeShawn or Darnell were invariably considered to be larger in size and more aggressive than Connor, Wyatt or Garrett, the researchers found.

“In essence, the brain’s representational system has a toggle switch, such that size can be used to represent either threat or status,” Dr. Daniel Fessler, director of the UCLA center and a co-author of the study, said in a written statement. “However, apparently because stereotypes of black men as dangerous are deeply entrenched, it is very difficult for our participants to flip this switch when thinking about black men. For study participants evaluating black protagonists, dangerous equals big and big equals dangerous, period.”

In fact, the larger in size the “black-sounding” character was imagined to be, the lower was his imagined financial success and social status. He was also deemed to be more violent. In contrast, for characters with white-sounding names, larger size corresponded with higher status. “The surprising finding was the difference between the white and black characters with respect to violence and status,” Holbrook said in the email.

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“Put simply, white characters with names like Connor or Garrett could be imagined as somewhat violent, but this did not lower (or affect) the amount of social prestige that they were imagined to have,” he said. “By contrast, if black characters with names like Darnell or DeShawn were imagined as having a temper, this was strongly incompatible with the amount of status that they were imagined to have in society. We initially expected tendencies toward violence to lower the status attributed to the white characters, too, but this was not the case.”

In a third experiment, the researchers performed similar comparisons with Latino and East Asian-sounding names. Most participants imagined members of the former group to be larger, more violent and lower in socioeconomic status, the New York Post reported.

As study after study seems to show that people with names that sound Latino or black are often the subjects of discrimination, what can be done to combat these racist stereotypes?

“The first step is to become aware of the prejudices we hold,” Holbrook said. “We should accept that, in all likelihood, largely unconscious and unfounded negative stereotypes are patterned in our minds. Knowing that prejudicial stereotypes are embedded within us can help us to control whether we allow them to affect the way we treat people who we may view as different.”

6. Summarize the key findings regarding race discussed in this article:

Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions, by Dr. Senhil Mullainathan in The New York Times, sociologist and professor of economics at Harvard University (2015)

The deaths of African-Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Cleveland and on Staten Island have reignited a debate about race. Some argue that these events are isolated and that racism is a thing of the past. Others contend that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, highlighting that skin color still has a huge effect on how people are treated.

Arguments about race are often heated and anecdotal. As a social scientist, I naturally turn to empirical research for answers. As it turns out, an impressive body of research spanning decades addresses just these issues — and leads to some uncomfortable conclusions and makes us look at this debate from a different angle.

The central challenge of such research is isolating the effect of race from other factors. For example, we know African-Americans earn less income, on average, than whites. Maybe that is evidence that employers discriminate against them. But maybe not. We also know African-Americans tend to be stuck in neighborhoods with worse schools, and perhaps that — and not race directly — explains the wage gap. If so, perhaps policy should focus on place rather than race, as some argue.

But we can isolate the effect of race to some degree. A study I conducted in 2003 with Marianne Bertrand, an economist at the University of Chicago, illustrates how. We mailed thousands of résumés to employers with job openings and

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measured which ones were selected for callbacks for interviews. But before sending them, we randomly used stereotypically African-American names (such as “Jamal”) on some and stereotypically white names (like “Brendan”) on others.

The same résumé was roughly 50 percent more likely to result in callback for an interview if it had a “white” name. Because the résumés were statistically identical, any differences in outcomes could be attributed only to the factor we manipulated: the names.

Other studies have also examined race and employment. In a 2009 study, Devah Pager, Bruce Western and Bart Bonikowski, all now sociologists at Harvard, sent actual people to apply for low-wage jobs. They were given identical résumés and similar interview training. Their sobering finding was that African-American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs at a rate as low as white applicants who had criminal records.

These kinds of methods have been used in a variety of research, especially in the last 20 years. Here are just some of the general findings:

When doctors were shown patient histories and asked to make judgments about heart disease, they were much less likely to recommend cardiac catheterization (a helpful procedure) to black patients — even when their medical files were statistically identical to those of white patients.

When whites and blacks were sent to bargain for a used car, blacks were offered initial prices roughly $700 higher, and they received far smaller concessions.

Several studies found that sending emails with stereotypically black names in response to apartment-rental ads on Craigslist elicited fewer responses than sending ones with white names. A regularly repeated study by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development sent African-Americans and whites to look at apartments and found that African-Americans were shown fewer apartments to rent and houses for sale.

White state legislators were found to be less likely to respond to constituents with African-American names. This was true of legislators in both political parties.

Emails sent to faculty members at universities, asking to talk about research opportunities, were more likely to get a reply if a stereotypically white name was used.

Even eBay auctions were not immune. When iPods were auctioned on eBay, researchers randomly varied the skin color on the hand holding the iPod. A white hand holding the iPod received 21 percent more offers than a black hand.

In the criminal justice system, recent studies found that an all-white jury was approximately 20% more likely to convict a black defendant than a white one, but when a jury had one black member, it convicted both at the same rate.

I could go on, but hopefully the sheer breadth of these findings impresses you, as it did me.

There are some counterexamples: Data show that some places, like elite colleges, most likely do favor minority applicants. But this evidence underlies that a helping hand in one area does not preclude harmful shoves in many other areas, including ignored résumés, unhelpful faculty members and reluctant landlords.

But this widespread discrimination is not necessarily a sign of widespread conscious prejudice. When our own résumé study came out, many human-resources managers told us they were stunned. They prized creating diversity in their companies, yet here was evidence that they were doing anything but. How was that possible?

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To use the language of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, we think both fast and slow. When deciding what iPod to buy or which résumé to pursue, we weigh a few factors deliberately (“slow”). But for hundreds of other factors, we must rely on intuitive judgment — and we weigh these unconsciously (“fast”). Even if, in our slow thinking, we work to avoid discrimination, it can easily creep into our fast thinking. Our snap judgments rely on all the associations we have — from fictional television shows to news reports. They use stereotypes, both the accurate and the inaccurate, both those we would want to use and ones we find repulsive.

We can’t articulate why one seller’s iPod photograph looks better; dozens of factors shape this snap judgment — and we might often be distraught to realize some of them. If we could make a slower, deliberate judgment we would use some of these factors (such as the quality of the photo), but ignore others (such as the color of the hand holding the iPod). But many factors escape our consciousness.

This kind of discrimination — crisply articulated in a 1995 article by the psychologists Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard and Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington — has been studied by dozens of researchers who have documented implicit bias outside of our awareness.

The key to “fast thinking” discrimination is that we all share it. Good intentions do not guarantee immunity. One study published in 2007 asked subjects in a video-game simulation to shoot at people who were holding a gun. (Some were criminals; some were innocent bystanders.) African-Americans were shot at a higher rate, even those who were not holding guns.

Ugly pockets of conscious bigotry remain in this country, but most discrimination is more insidious [deceptive, stealth]. The urge to find and call out the bigot is powerful, and doing so is satisfying. But it is also a way to let ourselves off the hook. Rather than point fingers outward, we should look inward — and examine how, despite best intentions, we discriminate in ways big and small.

7. What was the key argument presented by Dr. Mullainathan? Provide three examples to back up his claim:

Racial Disparities Through Charts, by Vox (2014)

8. For what reason do you suspect Vox made this short video? What was their objective? Based on your interpretation of their objective, were they successful in achieving their goal? Why or why not?

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