Forms Of Institutional Racism Research Articles

An Evaluation of the Labor Market Status of Chinese Americans

The persistence of wide disparities in family income by race and the failure of education to raise the wages of the non-white population as a whole’ have long concerned social scientists who study the labor market in the United States. Two major approaches which attempt to explain these phenomena are the human capital school and the radical perspective. The human capital school recognizes the importance of investment in people as an underlying principle in the theoretical and empirical analysis of income distribution. According to this school, differences among individuals in their stock of “human capital” (level of education, years of work experience) explain much of the variation in their earnings.‘ Other socioeconomic factors, such as legislation, housing, and the health and welfare systems are assumed to have no significant impact on occupation and earnings. In contrast, the radical perspective rejects the above assumption made by those of the human capital school as clearly untenable because of the various forms of institutional racism directed against ethnic minorities in the United States. This view questions the existing socioeconomic system and argues that the plight of various

Bushnell in Black and White: Evidences of the "Racism" of Horace Bushnell

AMERICAN historians have reacted to the neo-abolitionists of our second Reconstruction by reexamining the thought, style, and achievements of their predecessors of over a century ago. As the new movement wrestled with social and institutional forms of racism, and as it matured and revealed its own internal cleavages, the historians have sought to understand these same problems in the earlier movement. Some have found within the ranks of the old crusaders a heavy strain of racist thought and attitude, while others have insisted that a racial egalitarianism lay at the heart of the movement against slavery.' Twenty years ago, Charles Cole anticipated this new debate in an examination of the life and thought of Horace Bushnell. With some of these questions in mind, Cole sounded out the Hartford theologian as one of those lesser-known individuals who, though not members of antislavery associations, leaders of Congress or political pamphleteers, nevertheless contributed in no small way to the crystallization of a nation-wide sentiment concerning slavery and its place in American society.2 What Cole found was a series of apparent paradoxes, which may have satisfied the theologian in Bushnell, but which would have gagged a single-minded crusader like William Lloyd Garrison. Appropriately for the advocate of Christian nurture, Bushnell condemned the barbarous institution for its failure to promote the family ties of the slaves, to protect the bondsmen from abuse, and to recognize in them a