Learners will deepen their understanding and appreciation of ways in which race, ethnicity and cultural diversity have shaped American institutions, ideology, law, and social relationships from the colonial era to the present. Race and ethnicity are ideological and cultural categories that include all groups and individuals. Hence, this course is designed in significant part to take a broad look at the ideology of race and cultural diversity in America’s past and present. The primary focus is on the historical and social relationships among European Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, Latino/as, and Asian/Pacific Americans. Issues of race and ethnicity are examined across different ethno-cultural traditions in order to interweave diverse experiences into a larger synthesis of the meaning of race and ethnicity in American life. In this course, we conceive of “race” and “diversity” as references to the entire American population, even as we recognize that different groups have unique historical experiences resulting in distinctive and even fundamental cultural differences. We treat race and ethnicity as dynamic, complex ideological and cultural processes that shape all social institutions, belief systems, inter-group relationships, and individual experiences.
4.3 Identifying Discrimination in Everyday Social Practice
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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Race and Cultural Diversity in American Life and History
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
14 ratings
From the lesson
Race and Ethnicity in American Social Institutions
The course concludes in this fourth module with an investigation of institutional racism, systemic social inequalities, and patterns of discrimination.
Meet the Instructors
James D. AndersonEdward William and Jane Marr Gutsgell Professor of Education
Education Policy, Organization and Leadership
We seldom get a chance to see this in action.
But there is one video documentary that gives us a very,
very good up close and personal view of how this operates.
It was done in 1991 on Primetime ABC with the title True Colors.
And it's an up close and personal view of discrimination via test audit.
And that is one of the things that is often used and
an examination of institutional racism
in any aspect of our society is to do a test audit.
And you can do a test audit in a number of ways.
For instance in home buying or rental properties you
can pair up a white person and
a black person or white person and a Latino or Asian Americans,
send them to a real estate agent and then to see how they're treated.
Are they shown the same rental properties,
are they shown the same homes to buy,
are they shown the same neighborhoods,
is there a difference based upon their ethnicity?
And they also do that in job applications as well.
But in this case what they did with
the ABC Primetime True Colors was to take two individuals from Chicago.
They both were graduates of big ten universities.
And to take them, they took them to St. Louis.
One was African-American male,
the other was a white male and they followed them for days to see
how their skin color makes a difference in terms of how they are treated.
And so there are a number of incidents where
it's so explicit as to differential treatment based on race.
I will sort of highlight a couple of them.
One of them was the search for a job.
And this was important because it's consistent with some of
the other studies and it's also important because that's a person's livelihood.
And so they have them to go and apply for a job.
Both of these big ten graduates so they're highly educated.
They were working in good jobs in Chicago but in St. Louis they
were not applying for jobs that require a college education.
They were applying for common labor jobs in dry cleaners and places like that.
In one instance the African-American was told that there were no jobs,
even though there was an advertisement for jobs,
that the jobs had been taken.
And then they would send the white applicant after that and the same business would say,
"Yes, we have a job," and give him an application to fill out.
And they were simply thinking that at one point that well maybe they were getting
different individuals who had
a different understanding of the availability of a job in this place.
And so they sent them back a second time to get the same individuals.
And again the African-American college graduate
was told that there were no jobs in this dry cleaning that they'd been taken.
And they sent the white applicant in later and they were told,
"Well, we do have a job.
Do you want to fill out an application?".
Another incident in True Colors was simply shopping and
businesses the things that we do on a day to day
basis with organizations and to see if that made a difference.
And so one of the things they did was to shop for a used car.
And they went to this used car dealer,
the white applicant went in first and they asked about the initial payment,
the down payment, the interest rates and the total cost of the car.
And in each instance the white applicant was given a down payment that was
low and interest rate that was low and the total cost of the car was given a lower price.
The African-American went in after with the same salesman and
the same car and asked the same questions and got a higher down payment,
a higher interest rate,
as well as a higher total cost of the car.
And at the end of this particular scene they put up on the screen that
annually African-Americans pay 150 million dollars more as a skin tax.
Because the car was a used car or a new car the dealers that they deal with
assume that they need to charge them more or that they don't
understand as much and so rather than getting a fair deal,
they get a very uneven deal at the cost of
150 million dollars to the population of African-Americans in general.
A third example in a family there was more than three,
was a search for an apartment to rent.
And that was interesting because there was two different places that they went to.
The first place is where the white applicant tester,
they really are testers because they're doing an audit,
went in and asked if the apartment was available and the manager said,
"Yes," gave him the keys to look at it.
And then they sent in the African-American after that and the same manager said,
"No, the apartment had been taken."
A woman had called that morning and it was already rented.
And then they sent the white applicant in after that and the same manager said," Oh,
the apartment is available.".
And so then the news crew went in and asked him well why would he tell them
a different answers and he found it very difficult to explain his responses.
But what was clear was that he was making a decision that he wanted to rent to
the white applicant and he did not want
the black applicant to live in that apartment building,
and actually said to the crew that at that time
there were no African-Americans living in the apartment building.
And then the other one was in some ways different
because this was the case in which they went to rent an apartment.
The African-American walked in and the apartment manager was
pretty straightforward saying there was an apartment available and that he could rent it.
And he was a bit strict about his rules making it clear
to him that he would hold his feet to the fire and if he failed to pay his rent or if he,
in some ways, did not keep the place clean,
he was going to be very strict on him.
But he didn't deny him the opportunity to rent the apartment.
Then after that, they sent in the white tester to rent the same apartment,
to rent apartment in the same building.
And the white tester asked the question,
"What kind of neighborhood is this, how's the neighborhood?"
And at that point the apartment manager said, "Well,
it's a good neighborhood but he didn't know how long it would be a good neighborhood."
And then he said, "One of them was just here.".
Now, that was a code, a racial code.
I don't know how he knew or whether he simply anticipated that
the white applicant would know what he was talking
about when he said one of them was just here.
But it was clear in his response that he was
trying to tell the white applicant that an African-American had come in to
rent the apartment and that he didn't know how long it would
remain a good neighborhood if more people like that came in.
He didn't know this individual.
He didn't know that he was a graduate of a big ten university,
that he was well employed and that he was a person of good character.
He only knew the color of his skin.
He could only see the color of his skin and his response was based on that.
And these kinds of studies where we have a test audit gives
us a clearer picture as to how organizations or businesses,
whether it's housing or whether it's employment, health care,
and on and on, how on a day to day basis individuals actually face discrimination.
They also remind us that for
most individuals I would suspect for a large percentage of time,
that you don't know when you're being discriminated
against because you don't have a tester you.
You go on to ask for a job and someone say,
"There are no jobs here."
You're likely to assume that they mean just that,
there are no jobs.
You have no way of knowing that they're really
saying there are no jobs to people like you.
There are no jobs for members of your ethnic group.
The same is true of apartment.
You go in to rent an apartment and they say the apartment is already to rented.
You don't have any way of knowing that actually there are apartments
available but they're not available for people
like you because of your membership in a particular ethnic group.
And that's what comes through in the documentary True Colors.
It's not a long documentary,
quite around 20 minutes.
And I would encourage people to really take a look at it because it's one of
the few examples where you have testers that go into the same situation,
one black, one white,
and you can see how they're treated differently based upon skin color.
I wish that they would do this kind of testing beyond black and white.
That they would do it with Latinos,
that they would do it with Asian Americans and Native Americans,
that they would do it with men and women.
Because it's one way of getting a sense of how
people are treated differently because of their gender,
because of their race or ethnicity,
and actually gives us a great insight as to what we need to do
to rectify situations that
have a fundamental and very powerful impact on a person's livelihood.
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