Beyond Discrimination

Racial Inequality in a Post-Racist Era

Fredrick C. Harris, Robert C. Lieberman

• Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780871544551
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610448178
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Nearly a half century after the civil rights movement, racial inequality remains a defining feature of American life. Along a wide range of social and economic dimensions, African Americans consistently lag behind whites. This troubling divide has persisted even as many of the obvious barriers to equality, such as state-sanctioned segregation and overt racial hostility, have markedly declined. How then can we explain the stubborn persistence of racial inequality? In Beyond Discrimination: Racial Inequality in a Post-Racist Era, a diverse group of scholars provides a more precise understanding of when and how racial inequality can occur without its most common antecedents, prejudice and discrimination. Beyond Discrimination focuses on the often hidden political, economic and historical mechanisms that now sustain the black-white divide in America. The first set of chapters examines the historical legacies that have shaped contemporary race relations. Desmond King reviews the civil rights movement to pinpoint why racial inequality became an especially salient issue in American politics. He argues that while the civil rights protests led the federal government to enforce certain political rights, such as the right to vote, addressing racial inequities in housing, education, and income never became a national priority. The volume then considers the impact of racial attitudes in American society and institutions. Phillip Goff outlines promising new collaborations between police departments and social scientists that will improve the measurement of racial bias in policing. The book finally focuses on the structural processes that perpetuate racial inequality. Devin Fergus discusses an obscure set of tax and insurance policies that, without being overtly racially drawn, penalizes residents of minority neighborhoods and imposes an economic handicap on poor blacks and Latinos. Naa Oyo Kwate shows how apparently neutral and apolitical market forces concentrate fast food and alcohol advertising in minority urban neighborhoods to the detriment of the health of the community. As it addresses the most pressing arenas of racial inequality, from education and employment to criminal justice and health, Beyond Discrimination exposes the unequal consequences of the ordinary workings of American society. It offers promising pathways for future research on the growing complexity of race relations in the United States.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Beyond Discrimination: Racial Inequality in the Age of Obama
• Part I: The Political Development of Racial Inequality
• Chapter 1. The End of "Race" as We Know It? Assessing the "Postracial America" Thesis in the Obama Era
• Chapter 2. The American State as an Agent of Race Equity: The Systemic Limits of Shock and Awe in Domestic Policy
• Chapter 3. Racial Inequality and Race-Conscious Affirmative Action in College Admissions: A Historical Perspective on Contemporary Prospects and Future Possibilities
• Chapter 4. Racial Inequality in Employment in Postracial America
• Part II: Attitudes and Individual Behavior
• Chapter 5. A Measure of Justice: What Policing Racial Bias Research Reveals
• Chapter 6. The Social Psychology Of Symbolic Firsts: Effects of Barack Obama's Presidency on Student Achievement and Perceptions of Racial Progress in America
• Part III: Politics and the State
• Chapter 7. Unhappy Harmony: Accounting for Black Mass Incarceration in a "Postracial" America
• Chapter 8. The "Stickiness" of Race in an Era of Mass Incarceration
• Part IV: Economics and Markets
• Chapter 9. The Ghetto Tax: Auto Insurance, Postal Code Profiling, and the Hidden History of Wealth Transfer
• Chapter 10. Racial Segregation and the Marketing of Health Inequality
• Index