Racial Discrimination in America: History, Policy, and Impact

Introduction: Defining Racial Discrimination

The social problem examined in this paper is racial discrimination. Racial discrimination is any discriminatory act against a person based on race; a subtype of this broader category is racial harassment. The magnitude of racial discrimination is very high: according to the FBI's Hate Crime Statistics, 51% of reported hate crimes are based on race (Hate Crimes in America, 2015). However, as Blank, Dabady, and Citro (2004) point out, "simply identifying an association with race is not equivalent to measuring the magnitude of racial discrimination or its contribution to differential outcomes by race" (p. 72). In other words, it is not easy to define the precise magnitude of racial discrimination because distilling the cause-and-effect relationship requires careful testing, and in complex socio-economic environments, experiments are difficult to conduct with adequate controls. Nonetheless, a qualitative sense of the problem's magnitude can be discerned in the narratives of men like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose legacies depict a kind of racial discrimination in America that has broad historical associations and deep origins.

Historical Roots of Racial Oppression in America

The problem can best be understood, in causal terms, by identifying the tension in American history between White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites and the disenfranchised, formerly enslaved black population. The history of WASP-based oppression of blacks and other minorities in America can be seen in the American eugenics movement, led by figures like Margaret Sanger, who promoted birth control as a means to control and eventually eliminate the black population (Jones, 2000). Essentially, WASP elites have discriminated against minorities in America based on race — though culture is also a motivating factor, as ethnicity, culture, and race are bound together in the discriminatory outlook of this establishment. The key groups affected by this problem are primarily black Americans, who make up the majority of the incarcerated population. Key figures have risen in the past to lead black movements — men like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. — both of whom were assassinated.