Racial prejudices and their societal impacts

Racial Prejudice

The Creation and Perpetuation of racial Prejudice: The automatic Response of a Racial Society

Most societies today are multicultural and multiethnic, containing individuals with different geographic, historic, and religious backgrounds as well as different skin colors. This does not mean that most societies are "racial," however, that is dominated or typified by different stratifications dependent on these different backgrounds, and more specifically on the skin colors that accompany them. The United States, however, is in many ways still very much a racist society. Though the so-called Jim Crow laws of the South have been formally and officially abolished, racist attitudes and practices still persist explicitly in many regions, and implicitly in the national psyche and political systems.

Albert Einstein once said, "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment." As the social environment of the United States is a decidedly racial one, this statement of Einstein's leads to the logical conclusion that societal racism in this country is largely self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling; the opinions of individuals within United States society regarding race will necessarily by justified by their perceptions, as the prejudices are endemic to the entire social environment. That is, society is constructed -- consciously or not -- in a way that encourages the continuation of white dominance and the lack of opportunities for and direct degradation of racial minorities, and this state is seen as fair and natural precisely because people's opinion's, as Einstein put it, are necessarily colored by the prejudices inherent to the system.

The Perpetuation of Racism and Racialization in America

The origins of racism in this country clearly demonstrate the inevitability of the perpetuation and acceptance of racist attitudes and practice. As Lui et al. note in "Policy Steps toward Closing the Gap," educating slaves and even freed African-Americans was a criminal offense for much of this country's history. The rationale for this leads to -- and is a part of -- a type of circular logic that can be explained by Einstein's statement. The concept that the dominant white majority was more intelligent than their non-white slaves was taken for granted for centuries, and the idea of African-American and other minorities as intellectually inferior allowed for laws to be passed forbidding their education, as knowledge in the hands of those who don't know how to use it is a dangerous thing. The lack of literacy and education amongst the slave population, of course, perpetuated the idea that they were unintelligent, and thus reinforced the notions behind the law.

Things did change significantly for a time, with the rise of public education especially at the university level, as Lui et al. are careful to note. The underlying attitudes, however, did not, as funding and respect for institutions of higher learning (and indeed, for public education at all levels) has shown a definite racial bias in this country's history as a whole. Current policies reflect the lasting presence of the prejudiced racial attitudes that have been perpetuated in this country for centuries; the reduction of available student aid and the increasing use of loans rather than grants has had a disproportionate effect on minority students, and will further perpetuate the under-education and thus appearance (or perception) of unintelligence of these non-white minorities.

One of the primary reasons that non-white minorities are so disproportionately affected by the reduction in federal aid for higher education expenses, and/or the availability of affordable programs and institutions, is that they have not had equal economic access, either. This is something else that Lui et al. note in their description of the development of American culture and society. A lack of education as well as a prejudiced belief in the abilities of minorities often relegates them into manual labor occupations, where potentials for earning and advancement are limited. This creates a perpetual cycle of poverty, or at least of lower-middle-class status (which can often be worse in terms of receiving aid for higher education) leading to a lack of education and advancement, which in turn reinforces the idea that education is not meant for minorities, which reduces funding, etc.

There have, of course, been many attempts to address this imbalance and the perpetuation of such prejudices in the country's policies and psyche. In "The Ideology of Colorblindness," Guinier and Torres examine the impact of an attempt to consciously manipulate individual perceptions as a way of eliminating racism. One of the essential problems with the concept of racial "colorblindness," as these authors see it, is that it perpetuates an incorrect framework that essentially denies racism a platform of existence, despite the unreality of this situation. In linking racism solely to skin color, biological falsities, and a lack of official power structure, the idea that one can and even should be racially colorblind is a point-of-view that can really only be held by someone who has never experienced or witnessed racism -- it is essentially a dominant and white point-of-view.