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Chapter 3
Discrimination
Understanding Discrimination
• Relative Deprivation
– Conscious experience of a negative
discrepancy
• Between legitimate expectation & present actuality
• Absolute Deprivation
– Standard minimum level of subsistence below
which families should not be expected to exist
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Understanding Discrimination
• Discrimination
– Denial of opportunities & equal rights to
individuals and groups
• Because of prejudice or for other arbitrary reasons
• Total Discrimination
– Combination of current discrimination with
past discrimination
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Hate Crimes
• Race apparent motivation for the bias in
approximately 51 percent of the reports,
– Religion, sexual orientation, & ethnicity
accounted for 11–20% each
• Vandalism & intimidation most common crimes
• Crime against people: 58 percent of
incidents involved assault, rape, or murder
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Institutional Discrimination
• The denial of opportunities and equal
rights to individuals and groups
– Results from normal operations of a society
– Institutional forms of discrimination are
committed collectively against a group
– May be unconscious - it is not a function of
awareness of discrimination
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Examples of Institutional
Discrimination
• Standards for assessing credit risks do not
work for Hispanics and African Americans
• IQ testing favors middle-class children
• Many jobs eliminate a person with felony
records or past drug offenses,
– Which disproportionately reduces
employment opportunities for people of color
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Examples of Institutional
Discrimination
• The criminal justice system is dominated
by Whites
– Find it difficult to understand life in poverty
• Hiring practices often require several
years of experience at jobs
– Only recently opened to members of
subordinate groups
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Discrimination Hits the Wallet
• Informal Economy (Irregular/Underground
Economy)
– Transfers of money, goods, or services that
are not reported to the government
– Irregular economy - operates outside the
boundaries of the regular economy
• Job stability, wages, working conditions or benefits
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Discrimination Hits the Wallet
– Regular labor market operates according to
the principles of the conventional labor market
• Dual Labor Market Model
– According to this model, minorities have been
relegated to the informal economy
– Informal economy offers few safeguards
against fraud or malpractice
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Discrimination Hits the Wallet
– Few fringe benefits such as stability, wages,
health insurance, and pension
– Criticized for promoting unfair and dangerous
working conditions
– Workers are ill prepared to enter the regular
economy permanently
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Discrimination Today
• Discrimination is widespread in the U.S.
• Sometimes results from prejudices held by
individuals, but more significantly:
– Is found in institutional discrimination and the
presence of the informal economy
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Discrimination Today
• Quantifying discrimination is problematic
– 1. Identifying the different treatment of
minorities
– 2. Determining the cost of discrimination
• Distribution of income as a measure of
discrimination
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Eliminating Discrimination
• Two major sources for the elimination of
discrimination:
– Governmental agencies and policies
• Roosevelt’s 1943 and the Fair Employment
Practices Commission (FEPC)
• Supreme court decision - 1954 Brown v. Board of
Education
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Eliminating Discrimination
– Voluntary associations
• State’s Rights
– Each state is sovereign in most of its affairs
• And has the right to order them without
interference from the federal government
– Since 1964, several acts and amendments
have been made to the Civil Rights Act
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Eliminating Discrimination
– To cover the many areas of discrimination left
untouched; Criminal Justice and Housing
• Redlining
– The pattern of discrimination against people:
• Trying to buy homes in minority and racially
changing neighborhoods
– Applied to areas other than housing
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Wealth Inequality: Discrimination’s
Legacy
• Past discrimination carries into the present
and future
– No inherited wealth is element of the past
– Less opportunity of Blacks to accumulate
assets
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Wealth Inequality: Discrimination’s
Legacy
• Income
– Salaries and wages
• Wealth
– Encompasses all a person’s assets, land,
stocks, and other types of property
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Environmental Justice
• Efforts to ensure that hazardous
substances are controlled so that:
– All communities receive protection regardless
of race or socioeconomic circumstance
• Issues of environmental justice not limited
to metropolitan areas
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Environmental Justice
– Abuse of Native American reservation land
– Tribal lands regarded as dumping grounds for
toxic waste that go to the highest bidder
• Controversy within the scientific
community over potential hazards
– Complexity of the issues in terms of social
class and race are apparent
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Environmental Justice
• Executive order (1994)
– Requires all federal agencies to ensure that
low-income and minority communities have:
• Access to better information about their
environment and have an opportunity in shaping:
– Government policies that affect their community’s health
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Affirmative Action
• Positive effort to recruit subordinate-group
members, including women
– Jobs, promotions, & educational opportunities
– Today, has become a catchall term for racial
preference programs and goals
– Lightning rod for opposition to programs that
suggest consideration of women/minorities
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Affirmative Action Explained
• Has been viewed as an important tool for
reducing institutional discrimination
• Federal measures aimed at procedures
that deny equal opportunities, even if:
– Not intended to be overtly discriminatory
• Lack of minority-group/female employees
may in itself represent unlawful exclusion
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Examples of Affirmative Action and
Institutional Discrimination
• Height & weight requirements that are:
– Unnecessarily geared to the physical
proportions of White males
• Seniority rules, when applied to jobs
historically held only by white males
• Nepotism-based membership policies
• Restrictive employment leave policies
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Examples of Affirmative Action and
Institutional Discrimination
• Rules requiring only English be spoken at
the workplace
• Standardized academic tests or criteria
• Preferences shown by law and medical
schools
• Credit policies of banks and lending
institutions
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The Legal Debate
• In the 1978 Bakke case (Regents of the
University of California v Bakke)
– By a narrow 5-4 vote, ordered the medical
school of the University of California at Davis
• To admit Allan Bakke, a qualified White engineer
who had originally been denied admission
– Solely on the basis of his race
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Reverse Discrimination
• An emotional term because it conjures up
the notion that somehow:
– Women and minorities will subject White men
in the U.S. to the same treatment received by:
• Minorities during the last three centuries
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Reverse Discrimination
• Supporters of affirmative action
– Informal social networks, personal
recommendations & family ties
• White men will have a distinct advantage built on
generations of being in positions of power
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The Glass Ceiling
• Barrier that blocks the promotion of a
qualified worker
– Because of gender or minority membership
• Block lateral moves to areas from which
executives are promoted
– Contribute to women not moving to decisionmaking positions in nation’s corp. giants
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The Glass Ceiling
• Determinants of the Glass Ceiling
– Lack of management commitment to
establishing system, policies, and practices
• For achieving workplace diversity and upward
mobility
– Pay inequities for work of equal or
comparable value
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The Glass Ceiling
– Sex, race, and ethnic-based stereotyping and
harassment
– Unfair recruitment practices
– Lack of family-friendly workplace policies
– “Parent-track” policies
– Limited opportunities for advancement to
decision-making positions
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The Glass Ceiling
• Glass Escalator
– Refers to the male advantage experienced in
occupations dominated by women
– Men who chose to enter female-dominated
occupations are often rewarded with
• Promotions and positions of responsibility coveted
by their fellow female workers
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