Racism and Segregation
Look at this analysis (from Patheos 2018) of the racial dot map.
Segregation in rental market This 2018 research by economists Early, Carrillo, and Olsen finds that discrimination causes black renters to pay substantially more than whites for identical homes in identical neighborhoods; the amount of the exploitation is greater the more white the neighborhood.
2. Hypothesize at least one way how segregation might contribute to economic, health or educational disparities.
Choose one of the areas below to focus on: Economics, Medicine or Law
Then examine the evidence and answer the question that follows.
Racism and Economics
As we have mentioned earlier in the semester, there are multiple audit studies that show that race is a factor in preventing some Americans from interviewing for potential jobs.
Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan published a study of implicit bias and the labor market in The American Economic Review (2004) called Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination?
Labor Market and Felonies
From the NY Times, When a Dissertation Makes a Difference shows not only how unconscious bias can play a role in hiring in a most inequitable way, but also how sociology can make a difference that influences policy.
As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Devah Pager studied the difficulties of former prisoners trying to find work and, in the process, came up with a disturbing finding: it is easier for a white person with a felony conviction to get a job than for a black person whose record is clean.
Pager's dissertation is called The Mark of a Criminal Record (2003) was an audit study of the Milwaukee area labor market. She also published in a follow-up study (2010) in the American Sociological Review which was a more qualitative study using fieldwork.
The Economic Policy Institute (2016) found that the wage gap among different races is growing more as the inequality, in general, grows. The report lists key findings as well as policy suggestions.
The Guardian analyzes the EPI report here. Some notable findings include: the wage gap is worse than in 1979, and that college graduation does not mitigate the disparity as black college graduates earn 10% less than their white cohorts.
Inequality.org published a report on racial inequality showing that the disparity is not just income but also wealth and homeownership.
Racism and Health/Medicine
Social factors play an important and well-documented role in health outcomes. Race is especially correlated to health outcomes because racial inequalities are so stark and have persisted for so long. Please examine all of the evidence below that race affects health outcomes.
American Academy of Pediatrics (2019) published this statement about how childrens and teens can be harmed by racism and what doctors and healthcare providers should do to improve health outcomes.
Racism Impacts Your Health, a 2018 article from The Conversation documents a literature review of the myriad ways that racism impacts health outcomes for minorities including: higher systolic blood pressure, increased blood pressure and higher rates of hypertension.
The American Journal of Epidemiology (2007) found a link between racism and breast cancer summarized by the National Institute of Health.
The American Public Health Association study of hypertension/heart disease published a link between racism and heart disease in the American Journal of Public Health (2012)
This study published in the journal of Ethnicity and Disease shows that African-Americans experience worse health outcomes than African immigrants! Lower hypertension among 1st gen African immigrants compared to multigenerational Americans who are black shows that the stress of growing up in the United States where racism against Americans who are black has a real effect - it's not simply genetics (although possibly epigenetics).
This 2010 fact sheet from the Center for American Progress shows disparities in health for all races including who has health coverage, chronic diseases and causes of death for African Americans/Blacks, Hispanics, Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Asian Americans.
A 2016 report on life expectancy from PBS reveals that Americans who are black have a shorter life expectancy from the moment they are born. The disparity continues throughout life so that African Americans live about 4 years shorter than white Americans on average.
NPR reported (2018) on a Center for Disease Control study published in JAMA Pediatrics of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the effects on health. Those identifying as black or Latino and those with less than a high school education or an annual income below $15,000 were more likely to have more ACEs.
This article reported in the NY Times (2018) shows that Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery!
Racism and Legal System/Punishment
From Stanford University Press, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve published a scathing account of Racism in Chicago's Cook County Courthouse. Van Cleve is a former SHS student who spent ten years researching the Cook County Courthouse, the largest courthouse in the United States. She is currently a sociology professor at Brown University.
Here is a bookreview from the ASA:
From Amazon,
There are three central aspects to Gonzalez Van Cleve’s argument in Crook County: her focus on professionals, her detailing of racial abuses, and her critical analysis of racism and racial injustice as embedded within court culture. Perhaps the most essential is her inverted lens on the court professionals. Rather than focusing on the impacts of an unjust criminal system on the Black and Brown individuals who pass through it, Gonzalez Van Cleve instead highlights the ways these injustices are carried out by the very professionals tasked with upholding and administering fair and just due process. In turning the lens on criminal justice professionals, Gonzalez Van Cleve articulates how systemic racism is managed, perpetuated, practiced, and understood by those “doing” colorblind racism, particularly in how they carry out unchecked racialized court abuses.
From Amazon,
Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago–Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight. We watch white courtroom professionals classify and deliberate on the fates of mostly black and Latino defendants while racial abuse and due process violations are encouraged and even seen as justified. Judges fall asleep on the bench. Prosecutors hang out like frat boys in the judges' chambers while the fates of defendants hang in the balance. Public defenders make choices about which defendants they will try to ""save"" and which they will sacrifice. Sheriff's officers cruelly mock and abuse defendants' family members. Crook County's powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. Defendants find themselves thrust into a pernicious legal world where courtroom actors live and breathe racism while simultaneously committing themselves to a colorblind ideal. Gonzalez Van Cleve urges all citizens to take a closer look at the way we do justice in America and to hold our arbiters of justice accountable to the highest standards of equality.
And here is an essay that Dr. VanCleve tweeted during the unprecedented pandemic of 2020-21:
A 2016 Yale University study of discipline disparities in preschool found that implicit bias towards preschool students perceived as black resulted in teachers monitoring their behavior more closely and punishing them more often including in expulsion rates!
Vox shows racism at school from preK-12 in 7 charts (2015).
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9646504/discipline-race-charts
This article from the Sociology of Education (2017) shows that implicit bias results in black girls being punished harsher for subjective offenses. In other words, when the offense is subjective, school officials are more likely to perceive black girls as being worthy of punishment. You can read the article and use my annotations to answer questions about it. Then see the data source from the article below to look up data on your own.
US Dept of Education just released data on racial disparities in every school and school district in America (from preK-12). Here’s how you use the data to show if/how your school discriminates against black students and other marginalized groups. First, lookup the most recent year of data available for your school and/or school district. Right now that’s data on the 2015-16 school year. Here’s where you go: https://ocrdata.ed.gov/DistrictSchoolSearch#schoolSearchHere's a link to Samual Sinyangwe's tweet about this.Click on the Discipline Report on the right side and you’ll see which groups of students your school is most likely to suspend, expel, and refer to law enforcement. You can also see who’s more likely to be arrested at school using the “school-related arrests” tab.
Harsher treatment toward Americans who are black does not just occur in schools. This 2019 study from the Proceedings of the National Acdemy of Sciences of the United States of America concludes that, "people of color face a higher likelihood of being killed by police than do white men and women, that risk peaks in young adulthood, and that men of color face a nontrivial lifetime risk of being killed by police." African American men and women ... face higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than do their white peers... Risk is highest for black men, who (at current levels of risk) face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police over the life course. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2,000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.
The American Journal of Preventative Medicine explains thatVictims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites. Most victims were reported to be armed (83%); however, black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) than white (9.4%) or Hispanic (5.8%) victims.So, yes according to this study from 2009-2012, more whites have been killed, but a DISPROPORTIONATE number of blacks have been killed and that disproportionate number was much LESS likely to be armed.
This 2021 Dept. of Justice brief explains that
In 2018, based on data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, black people were overrepresented among persons arrested for nonfatal violent crimes (33%) and for serious nonfatal violent crimes (36%) relative to their representation in the U.S. population (13%) (table 1). White people were underrepresented.
This 2021 Washington Post study has detailed every police shooting since 2015.
Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than White AmericansAlthough half of the people shot and killed by police are White, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.
Although this is a more anecdotal bit of evidence, I saw this video from Youtube (Watch from 2:30-6:15 and 12:50-18:50) and thought what an amazing contrast to the videos of police stopping Philando Castille, Sandra Bland, Terence Crutcher, Levar Jones and the stopping of black men by police.
This 2019 Marshall project study details sentencing disparities in the criminal justice system (2019). Not only are Americans who are black more likely to get stopped by police, they are also more likely to get a harsher punishment than the whites who are convicted of the same crimes.
The Equal Justice Initiative founded by Bryan Stevenson reports on sentencing disparities (2017) as well.
Vox reports (2017) on University of Michigan Law School report on sentencing disparities published by the United States Sentencing Commission. Among the key findings is that, "Black male offenders continued to receive longer sentences than similarly situated White male offenders."
For more on policing and racism, see:
Whose Lives Matter? (A History of Black Lives Matter Movement)A Knee into the Gut of America (Colin Kaepernick)
3. What was some quantitative evidence that racism affects Americans who are identified as black?
4. What was some qualitative evidence that racism affects Ameriocans who are idewntified as black?
6. Any questions about the effects of racism on Americans who are black?
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