hi and uh welcome back this is our second lecture on Race for sociology 100 and in this lecture we're going to focus on racism prejudice and discrimination so I want to start with again definitions um your textbook definition um I don't really like this definition very much it's capturing some of the same things but I think that it focuses entirely too much on uh internal um beliefs and attitudes rather than the structure that produces racial inequality right um so your textbook definition is that racism is a set of beliefs ideologies or institutional practices that are based on the idea that one racial group is biologically or culturally inferior to another group that reproduces racial domination and exploitation he uses the term racial domination here um this is a term that Desmond and Emery came up with in in um the early 2000s uh but I think that that the Desmond and emer's definition of racial domination is actually a better definition of racism which is that racial domination or racism is the arrangement of racial life in such a way that its ordinary everyday workings benefit Cal certain racial groups at the expense of others so in other words we're not necessarily saying that anybody's got to have sort of racial animus in their heart uh or engage in discrimin discriminatory practices but any system that reproduces racial inequality is racism right and so I want to make that distinction here because I think that distinction is important um this distinguishes racism from two other things that are actually quite important right we're not saying they're not important um but that aren't quite the same thing right and that is prejudice and discrimination so Prejudice is the holding of preconceived IDE ideas about an individual or group um ideas that are resistant to change even in the face of new information right so if you believe for instance that uh that um that people on welfare right are lazy right that is a Prejudice um regardless of what you do with that information that's a Prejudice if you believe that all black women who are on welfare are lazy that's a racial Prejudice right right um so Prejudice is the beliefs that one holds about a particular group discrimination is behavior that denies to members of one group resources or rewards that can be obtained by others so discrimination is saying this group can have this thing and this other group cannot right um and that could be like physical resources like you know like money or it could be um uh less tangible resources like safety right this group deserves to be protected and this group doesn't um this is essentially treating two different groups differently um racial discrimination then is treating them differently based on race right um now you can have Prejudice without acting on it right so you can be Prejudice towards a group and never act on it and so never engage in discrimination I think that makes a lot of sense uh to most people but you can also act in ways are that are discriminatory without being Prejudice so think for example if a company has a rule that um that we're only going to hire people with bachelor's degrees right um even though it is not necessary for to have a bachelor's degree to perform this job right um if in your population that you're drawing workers from white people are much more likely to have bachelor's degrees then the result of that um the result of that decision although not necessarily based on racial Prejudice can be racially discriminating right right so prejudice and discrimination are sometimes go together but they don't always go together so to kind of sum up right um I would say that this is what you should keep in mind that prejudice is about beliefs discrimination is about particular action well racism is about structures in society the way that structures are built in in unbalanced ways right that tip the playing field towards one side or the other right so I'm going to start by talking a little bit about prejudices and um some of the ways in which we see prej racial Prejudice come out in in the United States um so sometimes prejudices are come from stereotypes stereotypes are widely shared perceptions about the personal characteristics Tendencies or abilities of a members of a particular group right so Prejudice is internal to a person it's a thing that I believe and even if nobody else in the world believes that I still have that that's still a Prejudice right um stereotypes have to be shared acoss across across multiple people right it has to be something out there in the world right something cultural something uh something shared uh and so the example that this little coffee this little um comic strip gives here is uh there's a stereotype that people of color are more likely to have children particularly at a young age right and so uh this man enacts The Stereotype by asking uh the white woman do you have any kids versus the uh the black woman how many kids do you have right this hooks into a stereotype a common widely held um perception about about a particular group and stereotypes are important right uh when things rise out of the the um the category of individual prejudices and become stereotypes because when those stereotypes are shared across multiple domains people are more likely to be um subjected to them right so if everybody believes that black women are more likely to have kids young right or that all black women have kids young uh right then they that might result in a change in Behavior towards black women which may be disadv disadvantageous to black women right um the second question we might ask about stereotypes is where do they come from uh and sociologists and social psychologists have a couple theories right one is the group threat Theory which says that precies originate in um inequalities essentially uh that when one group group sees another group doing well um or or um encroaching on one's territory uh that that could be seen as a cultural political or economic threat right so you're doing well you're taking resources away from my group right um and that stereotypes then um either develop or grow stronger as a response to that threat right um a second theory about the origins of stereotype is that it's ultimate attribution error that it's primarily about the ways in which groups separate themselves from each other that I have uh that I believe that my group is a part particular way and your group is a different way and that maybe I can understand the nuances of my ingroup better than I can understand the nuances of an outg group is part part of this um so the ultimate attribution error refers to the fact or the belief that characteristics of an outg group are innate or internal right that there are just things about those groups whereas characteristics of our ingroup are learned or situational we can see this sometimes that we have stereotypes about black criminality which we'll talk talk about a little bit um in the next couple slides um that uh that lead us to believe that the reason a person might engage in violence is because of their racial group versus because of something about themselves whereas when we see a white white shooter uh on the news we often say well maybe that person was mentally ill or um maybe they didn't Get Enough Love from their parents as a child or right or these other things that are either learned from their social context or maybe situational right maybe they were having a bad day or whatever right and so the belief that things about us are variable and internal and in situ situational and things about them are innate stable characteristics is the ultimate attribution error and it is a source of stereotypes um this stereotypes and Prejudice can result in bias right and so the bias is a tendency to favor or disfavor certain things right that's all the bias means um we tend to focus and and we have um both implicit and explicit bias that matter here we tend to focus on explicit bi bias because explicit bias is the open conscious favoring or disfavoring of certain groups right an explicit bias is easy to see when someone uses a slur or comes out and say hey I'm not going to give you this job because you're Latino it's obvious that they're acting in biased ways and uncovering Prejudice or discrimination becomes simply about defining the realized intentions of a person it's fairly cut and dry implicit bias though is the subconscious positive or negative associations that our minds make between seemingly unrelated things implicit bias is probably both harder to measure and understand and more common in fact all of us hold biases that we don't recognize and those biases can affect our Behavior this can be subtle for instance a teacher may call on Latino students less often than white students without realizing it due to biases they've absorbed from their surroundings right stereotypes about Latino students or implicit bias could have pretty de devastating and not very subtle effects consider for instance the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012 George Zimmerman observed Trayvon a 17-year-old black boy wearing a hoodie on a rainy day heading to his father's house and assumed that he didn't belong in this gated community calling 911 and then despite being told not to approached fought with and shot and killed him Zimmerman cited trayvon's hoodie as part of the way he determined that Trayvon didn't belong but hoodies are worn by people all the time of all Races of all ages especially in the rain and while we can never know for sure the association of hoodies with criminality likely had something to do with trayvon's race Zimmerman may have been explicitly biased but it's just as likely that his snap decision about this kid hinged on biases that were not at a conscious level implicit hot bias is hard to combat because we live in a world that is constantly reinforcing stereotypes uh for instance stereotypes of black criminality these biases tend to be resistant to change even after we're made aware of them thus what might seem like an internal individual level thing bias actually has structural social causes and is unlikely to change without structural remedies there is some evidence that contact between people from different groups can reduce Prejudice this is called the contact theory of of prejudice right a guy named Gordon alport talked about it in the 1940s but we've been researching it ever since um and it turns out there are some situations in which contact with people from another group do does tend to reduce prejudices about that group um but the situations in which that contact occur are really important and are actually fairly narrow contact between people from different groups reduces Prejudice only when five characteristics are met number one there's equal status within the context of the Intergroup contact situation so it doesn't have to be equal status in general right so um we know that if we put low-income and and high income people together right um they have they have different statuses outside of that situation but if within the situation they all have the same voice and are all given the same platform Etc that counts as equal status so equal status within the context of Intergroup contact situation secondly if the group is all working towards the same thing right so if group one is working to towards a different goal in group two uh that is unlikely to reduce Prejudice between the groups it's not going to create the kind of interactions where a person's stable beliefs about a person are open to change third there has to be Intergroup cooperation not competition so the groups can't be competing for resources uh in fact because we know from group threat theory that when groups uh groups um groups compete for resources uh we make assumptions about them and that's going to result probably in more Prejudice and stereotype uh than uh than not having the contact at all F fourth support of authorities laws Customs or rules so if this thing this situation for group group Intergroup contact has the support of your culture or of the law or of the way we do business our customs uh then that's more likely to produce a change in uh in Prejudice and finally situations where there's a possib ability to form friendships in other words situations where the um the interaction isn't just limited to this particular context but people can uh extend those relationships out into other contexts much much more likely to reduce Prejudice than when it's just like one thing that you do in one situation so the point here right is that prejudices are fairly sticky and that contact between groups is great um and it can reduce uh reduce Prejudice but it has to happen in really it doesn't always do so and it has to happen in these really narrow situations so the final thing I want to talk about um is is racism itself and as I said I I want to use a definition of racism that really focuses on the structural aspects of racism and so again to repeat that definition racism is the arrangement of racial life in such a way that its ordinary everyday workings benefit certain racial groups at the expense of others um our sort of connected term that the textbook I think does talk about in a smart way uh is institutional racism and this is the idea that institutions have racism baked into them right um that there are a set of rules that benefit one group um at the detriment of another right or a set of or a pattern of social relations that benefit one group at the expense of another right so for instance racial segregation in housing is a pattern right um and racial segregation in housing persists even if people don't have Prejudice or even don't if they don't act in ways that are discriminatory and that segregation um because it lines up with other kinds of inequalities produces inequalities in education and uh class and things like that the important Point here about racism in general enal and about institutional racism in particular is that racism can persist even in the absence of prejudice beliefs or explicitly discriminatory behaviors another way to think about this is that institutional racism doesn't mean an institution full of racists in facts it means an institution that would continue to produce racial inequality even if we threw out all of the so-called racist right and institutional racism is often about imbalances in power and so I think a useful way to think about this for me anyway is to think about four different sources of power or four different types of power in which an imbalance can produce racial inequality um and those four types of power are on the one hand symbolic power so symbolic PO is the power to Define groups um and in the case of um institutional racism it's often about defining some groups as normal and other groups as abnormal so curricula School curricula that um highlight exclusively the achievements of Europeans or european Americans without either without talking about the achievement of non-whites at all or by segregating them to particular months like black history month is an example of um an imbalance in symbolic power political power is the power to withhold basic rights from minorities so this may include things like uh voter suppression either either explicitly aimed at race or maybe implicitly um implicitly aimed at race so for instance the disenfranchisement of felons which of course applies a across all racial groups but because we know that that incarceration is uh is not equally distributed across society that kind of voter suppression tends to uh tends to have a stronger impact uh on uh black men in particular but black men and women U we might also look at access to safety here in political power um the right to safety and the idea that law enforcement tactics are different um when it comes to black and white people in the United States is an example of an imbalance in political power Social Power is the power to exclude people of color or others from membership in associational life so from in groups so for instance if you um if you exclude people of color either explicitly or implicitly um from joining your Country Club right and your country club is a place where all the deals happen um that's a form of social or associational power finally economic power is the power to disadvantage people of color in terms of wealth or property accumulation um so hiring practices that while not discriminatory result in the exclusion of non-whites uh for instance because they may lack the informal networks necessary to get certain jobs uh would be an example of economic power so imbalances in these power within in intitutions we call institutional racism so finally I want you to reflect and this is also partially a preparation for the inclass exercise uh I want you to think about these questions number one we've talked about a number of racial inequalities already in this class and so I want you to just remember what some of those were uh and start to think of them in the context of what we've just learned about about race and racism so we might ask some questions right what EXP ations for these inequalities can we come up with that do not rely on individual motivations attitudes or actions right what way are these part of the structure and thirdly what power imbalances social uh economic political or symbolic which of these power imbalances might underlay these inequalities so think about that uh and I will see you later this week