But is it Really Racism?
Substantial
differences
in
racial outcomes is the undeniable reality of contemporary
life in the United States. From health outcomes, to income, joblessness, college graduation
rates, incarceration rates, and housing opportunities, blacks fare worse than whites,
sometimes by a staggering margin (National Research Council 2005). But as noted in the
recent extensive report on the assessment of discrimination conducted by the National
Research Council, “Differences in outcomes by race do not themselves provide direct
evidence for the magnitude or even the presence of racial discrimination in any particular
domain (p.48).” Indeed, it is often exceedingly difficult to demonstrate the existence of
discrimination in a given situation, even for social science researchers, because it depends on
the unique identification of race, and not other idiosyncratic factors, as the reason for a
person’s specific treatment. Moreover, discrimination can occur in different forms, some of
which are more subtle than others, making it even more difficult to prove that differential
treatment was due to race (National Research Council 2004).
If discrimination is difficult for experts to conclusively demonstrate, can we flatly
state that the denial of racial discrimination among ordinary people reflects racial prejudice?
Isn’t it possible that the denial of discrimination is due to the inherent difficulty in affirming
differential racial treatment, especially for individuals unschooled in complex statistical
methods? Some whites may feel they have never witnessed or seen direct evidence of such
categorical discrimination. The denial of discrimination could also arise from ideological
considerations that make it more difficult for political conservatives to accept the existence of
discrimination as a determinant of an individual’s economic and educational outcomes. In the
same way, the willingness to blame black poverty on discrimination could arise from an
equally ideological belief in the pervasiveness of structural inequities in American society. Of
course, a third possibility is that a denial of discrimination conveys racial prejudice as argued
by McConhay and Hough (1976). From this new racism perspective, a denial of
discrimination serves as a convenient way to reject racial policies designed to improve
African Americans’ outcomes. The denial of racial discrimination could thus arise for very
different reasons, and we reserve judgment on its prejudicial underpinnings until we have
further examined its origins and consequences.
In order to better understand the racial nature of perceived discrimination, we take a
step back to consider the broader structure of white racial opinion. In doing so, we argue for
three distinct kinds of racial attitudes, some of which are more clearly racial and prejudicial
than others. A denial of racial discrimination is one of the three essential components of this
2
Convention