Structural Racial Inequalities Research Articles

Holier Than Thou: Discussion of Hoard and Bland’s “How Am I Responsible?”: Evangelical White Rage and the Interpassive Perpetration of White-Body Supremacy

ABSTRACT This paper presents a brief sociocultural review of the development of the twentieth-century American Christian evangelical movement and its relationship to racism and structural racial inequality. It traces the evangelical movement’s hostility toward the organized civil rights movement, which it linked with the Soviet communist threat to Christianity and to American democracy; its organized legal opposition to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s which challenged its racist and discriminatory policies; and its increasingly powerful and organized political alliance with a Republican Party eager to harness white resentment of Black advancement, in order to gain and maintain power. Against the backdrop of this history, I critique Hoard and Bland’s mischaracterization of Carol Anderson’s (2016) concept of “white rage” as a symptom of Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress and their formulation of interpassivity as perpetration.

Pandemic and Race: Un(fore)seen Circumstances, Same Old Biopolitics of Extraction and Use?

In the article, I suggest that the interplay between pandemic and race, instead of opening paths towards an understanding of mutual interconnectedness and vulnerability, deepens the existing structural racial inequality by reinforcing the existing necropolitical regimes of exclusion and amplifying the importance of race in biopolitics. First, I question the biopolitical uses of race, discern the general capitalization of life and highlight the colonial nature of epidemiology. Further, I focus on the neoliberal subjectivity of the new working class and argue that the Foucauldian imperative “make live or let die” gave way to the differentiation between lives to be saved and lives to be risked. Then, I claim that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the race-based necropolitics of usable bodies and the biopolitics based on the distribution of differential vulnerability. Finally, I analyse decolonial, politico-economic, ecological, and solidary remedies that might help to find a way out of the current necropolitical condition.

Black‐Asian solidarity through collective racial socialization

AbstractIn the past few years, incidents of anti‐Black and anti‐Asian discrimination have proliferated. Some of these incidents have involved perpetrators from other racially minoritized groups. Historically, this has led to increased tensions between racially minoritized groups and inhibited progress towards racial equity for all groups. To foster coalitions between Black and Asian communities instead of repeating historical tensions, the present article suggests that parents might lay the foundation for racial solidarity by engaging in collective racial socialization. Collective racial socialization is a new direction for racial‐ethnic socialization that focuses on similarities across groups that are the result of White supremacy. Although there are hurdles to collective racial socialization, it may nonetheless be one way minoritized parents can help create awareness of structural racial inequality.

Generations of Criminalization: Resistance to Desegregation and School Punishment

Objectives: In this paper we refocus discussions of criminalization of students on structural racial inequality. We help explain racially disproportionate school punishments, while demonstrating the necessity for criminologists to examine how a historic legacy of racial oppression shapes contemporary punishments. More specifically, we explore the extent to which contemporary school punishment reflects a legacy of racial oppression and educational exclusion of Black students. Methods: Using nationwide data from multiple sources, we analyze how resistance to school desegregation, measured by the number of court cases contesting school segregation from 1952 − 2002, relates to suspensions from school and days missed due to suspension. Results: Our analyses show that schools in districts marked by resistance to school desegregation have significantly and substantially higher rates of suspensions for Black students and days missed by Black students due to suspension. Conclusions: Contemporary school suspension is shaped by a legacy of racial oppression and educational exclusion. Our results confirm the importance of using a racialized social systems approach to understand and begin to remedy the criminalization of Black students.

A extensão universitária na Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ): no combate às desigualdades sociais e raciais

O presente artigo tem como objetivo descrever as primeiras ações extensionistas, iniciadas na década de 1980, na UFRJ, focadas no atendimento das comunidades carentes no entorno do campus do Fundão até o desenvolvimento de ações de combate às desigualdades raciais a partir dos anos 2000. Durante a década de 1980, a extensão buscou um diálogo que visava o atendimento das demandas das classes populares apesar da sobrerrepresentação dos negros em situação de pobreza. Estimulada pelas políticas de ação afirmativa, nos anos 2000, a extensão passa a desenvolver projetos que atendam às demandas da população negra reconhecendo as desigualdades raciais estruturais presentes na sociedade brasileira.

Workforce ethnic diversity in older people’s care services: thinking back and thinking ahead in COVID-19 times

PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on long-standing, structural race inequality in Britain. This paper aims to review historic patterns of ethnic diversity among the workforce employed in services for older people to present some of the lessons that can be learned from the pandemic.Design/methodology/approachA historical overview was undertaken of research about ethnic diversity in the social care workforce.FindingsToo often, the ethnic diversity of the social care workforce has been taken as evidence that structural racial inequalities do not exist. Early evidence about the impact of coronavirus on workers from black and minority ethnic groups has led to initiatives aimed at reducing risk among social care employers in the independent sector and in local government. This offers a blueprint for further initiatives aimed at reducing ethnic inequalities and promoting ethnic diversity among the workforce supporting older people.Research limitations/implicationsThe increasing ethnic diversity of the older population and the UK labour force highlights the importance of efforts to address what is effective in reducing ethnic inequalities and what works in improving ethnic diversity within the social care workforce and among those using social care services for older people.Originality/valueThe ethnic makeup of the workforce reflects a complex reality based on multiple factors, including historical patterns of migration and gender and ethnic inequalities in the UK labour market.

All Wealth Is Not Created Equal: Race, Parental Net Worth, and Children’s Achievement

Using data from the children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, spanning 1986 to 2014, we investigated whether White, Black, and Hispanic children whose parents had the same wealth, measured as net worth, have equal math and reading achievement trajectories from age five through fourteen. Black and Hispanic children often had significantly worse scores than same-wealth Whites. We also found racial variation, to the disadvantage of Blacks and Hispanics relative to same-wealth Whites, in measures of family demographic context and financial portfolio composition, both of which research has linked to children’s achievement. Whereas previous research has found that structural racial inequality contributes to racial differences in wealth, we find evidence of similar processes in same-wealth comparisons that have potential implications for children’s academic success.

Confronting Whiteness in Kansas City's Local Food Movement: Diversity Work and Discourse on Privilege and Power

In recent years, the whiteness of the local food movement has been an increasingly popular topic in both academic and popular discourse. In what ways have those within this movement responded to critiques of exclusionary whiteness and privilege? Drawing on interviews with local food advocates in Kansas City (KC), this article explores the discourses and practices used within the movement in response to questions of equity and racial justice. It argues that in KC, one way that local food movement advocates react to these critiques is by discursively celebrating “diversity”—a response that actually works to further conceal racialized inequality and to maintain systemic white privilege. Within this case study, this “diversity work” took the form of counting and celebrating phenotypic diversity in local food spaces. In KC, this manifests as a celebration of new U.S. immigrants—a form of diversity work that is easier to engage in than calls for deeper, structural changes in the food system. This diversity work, whether intentionally or not, depoliticizes discussions of food systems reform and distances local food advocates from the responsibility to address deeper inequities. Such findings illustrate some of the narratives and practices that help sustain structural racial inequality in local food systems amidst a shifting broader discourse that calls for the dismantling of white privilege within many social movements.

The color of fat: racializing obesity, recuperating whiteness, and reproducing injustice

ABSTRACT I argue here that even sympathetic representations of obesity as a pathology most prevalent among black and Latina/o women and children can help reproduce racial injustice. At a time when fatness is deeply stigmatizing, fat bodies denote civic unfitness, and high white obesity rates jeopardize whiteness, raced and gendered obesity discourses effectively reify white superiority and maintain white dominance. They function as a racial project in two ways. First, they fortify white normativity by associating nonwhiteness with fatness and pathology and by exalting “white” consumption practices. Second, because they unfold in a political context pervaded by welfare-queen imagery, these discourses forge a new public identity of black womanhood, the obese black woman, which revives tropes of black women as insatiable, lazy bad mothers who deplete the state and economy. This imagery invites and justifies discriminatory and exclusionary practices that sustain structural racial inequality. To combat rather than reproduce racial inequality, anti-racist anti-obesity discourses must expose obesity as an embodiment of structural racism and promote structural transformation.

Skills development and structural change: Possibilities for and limitations of redressing structural racial inequalities in South Africa

Improving structural racial equality for historically-disadvantaged Black South Africans, including low-skilled and unemployed adults and youths, is a pertinent challenge for the South African government during the ongoing transition from apartheid capitalism to post-apartheid capitalism. Within the framework of the National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS), the introduction of “learnerships” and “learning programmes”, which include structured learning programmes, learnerships, apprenticeships and skills programmes, has had some impact. But emerging theoretical perspectives assert that apartheid structural racial inequalities persist and that structural reform is imperative. Opposing positions translate into two perspectives on social transition: either capitalism can be de-racialised, or capitalism in South Africa should be dismantled in order to de-racialise it. After a review of relevant literature and governmental documents, the author identifies five structural and pedagogical barriers as likely causes for low completion rates of skills development courses and concludes that structural reform needs more favourable political and economic conditions in order to be successful.

Of individuals and systems: The impact of personal and impersonal factors on learning

Research indicates that non-school factors play as great if not a greater role than teaching or curriculum in a child’s success at school, especially primary school (Berliner 2009). This means that home and family life very often outweighs what occurs in the classroom. Non-school factors include a family’s socioeconomic status, parents’ educational level, family integrity and immigrant status. This issue of the International Review of Education features two articles dealing with the influence of family factors on children’s experience and success in primary school. A further article examines how gender impacts on the learning experience of female secondary students in Tunisia. The fourth article switches from the personal to a broader societal perspective, considering how structural racial inequalities have been redressed by South Africa’s post-Apartheid adult education policies. The issue concludes with a more conceptual paper, an examination of how the theory and practice of systems thinking can help to make school leaders more effective. Our first article looks (in French) at the influence of family status on primary

Bold Policies for Economic Justice

The U.S. is characterized by a longstanding pattern of large structural racial inequality that deepens further as a result of economic downturn. Although there have been some improvements in the income gap up until around the mid 1970s, the employment gap, and the racial wealth gap - two dramatic indicators of economic security - remains exorbitant and stubbornly persistent. We offer two race-neutral programs that could go a long way towards eliminating racial inequality, while at the same time providing economic security, mobility and sustainability for all Americans. The first program, a federal job guarantee, would provide the economic security of a job and the removal of the threat of unemployment for all Americans. The second program, a substantial child development account that rises progressively based on the familial asset positioning of the child's parents, would provide a pathways towards asset security for all Americans regardless of their economic position at birth.

Communication and Beliefs about Racial Equality

In this paper, we examine the effects of location in the social structure and communication processes on whites' responses to societal change conceptions of equality (structural equality): one that entailed beliefs about abstract notions of equality and one that pertained to concrete reference-based (blacks') conception of inequality. A recent national survey provided the data to test eleven hypotheses derived from theorizing in the area of stratification beliefs. Using covariance analysis, all our predictions received at least partial support. We found that those less well placed in the social system were more likely to embrace institutional change solutions to inequality and that those who attend more to television news were more likely to embrace structural racial inequality. On the other hand, while both television news and newspaper exposure had a positive influence on interpersonal discussion, the relationships of this variable with one of the equality measures indicated that engaging in more interpersonal discussion lead to less of an endorsement of structural racial inequality. Finally, those who embraced the general conception of equality were less likely to endorse race-specific structural inequality. We outlined some implications of our findings for social policy with some suggestions for further research.