STRUCTURAL RACISM AND YOUTH DEVELOPMENTISSUES, CHALLENGES, AND IMPLICATIONS

February, 2004

Roundtable on Community Change

Working Paper Series

STRUCTURAL RACISM AND YOUTH DEVELOPMENTISSUES, CHALLENGES, AND IMPLICATIONS

February, 2004

Roundtable on Community Change

Working Paper Series

CONTENTS

iv Background

1 Executive Summary

2 Introduction

8 The Meaning of Race

9 Structural Racism

10 The Legacy and Enduring Power of Our Racial History: White Privilege

13 National Values

14 Contemporary Culture

16 The Processes That Maintain the Racial Status Quo

18 Institutional Policies and Practices

25 What Does a Structural Racism Perspective Imply for the Youth Field?

29 Conclusion

31 Notes

35 Selected Bibliography

iv

The Aspen Institute Roundtable on CommunityChange (formerly the Aspen Institute Roundtable onComprehensive Community Initiatives) is a forumin which leaders working on some of the country’smost innovative and promising efforts to revitalizedistressed inner city neighborhoods can meet, sharelessons they are learning, and identify and seek solu-tions to common challenges.

Since 1997, the Roundtable has been focusingon how the problems associated with race andracism in America affect initiatives aimed at povertyreduction in distressed urban neighborhoods. TheRoundtable’s work has had a theoretical dimensionthat has explored how race shapes the social, politi-cal, economic and cultural institutions of our society,and how those dynamics produce significant andongoing racial disparities in the well being of chil-dren, families and communities. It has also had amore applied dimension that describes how to applya racial equity “lens” to social and economic devel-opment work.

The premise behind all of the Roundtable’s workon race is that adopting a more race-conscious

approach to community building and social justicework will:

• Broaden our understanding of the causesof the problems of poverty, inequity, andcommunity distress in America

• Clarify our understanding of the forcesthat maintain the racial disparity statusquo and limit the success of strategies forchange

• Identify how and why an emphasis onracial equity might enhance the possibilityof success in current and future socialchange efforts, and

• Highlight new approaches that could complement and reinforce existing activities.

This publication represents an effort to applythe Roundtable’s perspective on racial equity to theyouth field.

This publication is the result of collective learningby staff of the Aspen Institute Roundtable onCommunity Change and advisors to the Project onStructural Racism and Community Revitalization.The authors are Karen Fulbright-Anderson, KeithLawrence, Stacey Sutton, Gretchen Susi, and AnneKubisch. The framework on which this publicationis based is presented in a forthcoming Roundtablepublication, Structural Racism and CommunityBuilding. The staff and co-chairs of the Roundtable

thank the Ford Foundation for its financial andintellectual support of this document. We thank theWilliam T. Grant Foundation for its support of ourwork on public youth systems, which contributed tothe development of this document. We also thankthe Annie Casey Foundation, the Mott Foundation,the Kellogg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation,and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, whichhave provided support for the development of theframework that is applied in this document.

AUTHORS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BACKGROUND

1

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Youth of color have experienced poor outcomes rela-tive to their white counterparts historically and thesedisparities persist today. Researchers have offered anumber of explanations for these disparities, some of the more popular of which have focused on indi-vidual deficiencies. If one elucidates the underlyingtheories of change of dominant practices and publicpolicies in the youth field it appears that, despitevariation in approach and emphasis, they too havefocused on individual behavior.

While behavior is clearly an important contribu-tor to the outcomes that individuals experience, it isnot the sole determinant. Rather, we contend thatthere are larger, structural factors that contribute tothe racial disparities between youth of color andtheir white counterparts that deserve systematic andsustained attention.

We use the term structural racism to define themany factors that contribute to and facilitate themaintenance of racial inequities in the United Statestoday. A structural racism analytical framework iden-tifies aspects of our history and culture that haveallowed the privileges associated with “whiteness”and the disadvantages associated with “color” toendure and adapt over time. It points out the waysin which public policies and institutional practicescontribute to inequitable racial outcomes. It lays outassumptions and stereotypes that are embedded inour culture that, in effect, legitimize racial dispari-ties, and it illuminates the ways in which progresstoward racial equity is undermined.

We apply a structural racism framework to theyouth field, paying particular attention to the local,institutional, and cultural contexts in which youthdevelop. We consider the ways in which policies andpractices in education, juvenile justice, and the labormarket, contribute to racially disparate outcomesamong youth.

Based on this analysis, we recommend that thosein the youth field:

• Adopt racially equitable outcomes as anexplicit part of their mission and vision

• Work through uncomfortable issues that oftenarise when dealing with race and racism

• Identify their civic capacity to address thischallenge, given resources and position

• Distinguish racial equity outcomes that theycan affect or control from those that requireallies and collaboration, and

• Recognize that racially explicit issues may ormay not imply racially explicit interventions.

These suggestions are not intended to imply thatthe youth field has completely ignored racial equity.On the contrary, there are a number of youthfocused organizations, several of which are run byyoung people, that have engaged in efforts to addressthis challenge. Nor are we suggesting that the youth field needs to take on vast new agendas. Rather, wewrite this paper with the hope that it will facilitatediscussions about the range of roles and activities thediverse set of actors that comprise the youth fieldcan adopt to address structural racism as it relates tothe healthy development of young people.

Unless we identify and address the manifesta-tions of structural racism, we may help youth dobetter in spite of a set of pernicious mechanisms thatsort them by race, but we will not change the funda-mental conditions that help produce and maintainracially disparate outcomes. Moreover, the depth,breadth, and enduring nature of structural racismrequire sustained attention from many actors on several fronts. There is a role for every actor. A majorchallenge is to carve out feasible and meaningfulroles in the face of a complex situation that canappear to be overwhelming. Current efforts toaddress structural racism need to be amplified. Thestrategies and tools used in this work need to beexamined systematically, made more widely avail-able, and used as a foundation for building thecapacity of a broader group of actors in the youthfield and in allied fields to address this fundamentalsocietal problem.

2

INTRODUCTION

disparate outcomes among youth that have receivedwidespread attention, analysts suggest that individualbehavior is a significant contributor to such out-comes.1 Similarly, if one elucidates the underlyingtheories of change of dominant practices and publicpolicies in the youth field it appears that, despitevariation in approach and emphasis, they too havefocused on the individual. Public investments inprograms charged with improving outcomes foryouth have traditionally focused on changing youthbehavior. Thus, funding has been targeted to teenagepregnancy prevention, school dropout prevention,juvenile delinquency prevention, and so on.

Many adolescent development specialists have

advocated the need to look beyond fixing youthproblems to developing in youth the broad range ofcapacities they need to transition successfully intoproductive adulthood, and to actively engage youthin this process. Youth development specialists haveidentified several areas in which youth need to devel-op and be engaged, including social/emotional,moral/spiritual, civic, vocational, physical, cognitive,and personal/cultural. The chart below, developed byKaren Pittman and her colleagues provides a concisesummary of these areas, while a more elaborated ver-sion can be found in Chapter Three of the NationalResearch Council’s book, Community Programs toPromote Youth Development.

There has been much attention focused on the fact that far too many youth in this

country fail to make a successful transition into adulthood. Researchers and analysts

have offered a number of explanations for this phenomenon, many of which have

focused on individual deficiencies. Indeed, in several examinations of racially

3

• Social/emotional development and engagement—the ability to respond to and cope with positive andadverse situations, reflect on one’s emotions and surroundings, engage in leisure and fun, and sustaincaring friendships and relationships with others.

• Moral/spiritual development and engagement—the exploration of one’s assumptions, beliefs, and val-ues in an ongoing process of understanding how one relates to others and to the larger world, anddeveloping a sense of purpose and meaning in life.

• Civic development and engagement—the growing recognition of one’s impact on one’s surroundingsand responsibility to others, as well as the ability and opportunity to work collaboratively with othersfor a common goal.

• Vocational development and engagement—acquiring the functional and organizational skills necessaryfor employment, including an understanding of careers and options and pathways to reach these goals.

• Physical development and engagement—biological maturation and the developing ability to act inways that best ensure current and future physical health for self and others.

• Cognitive development and engagement—the ability to gain basic knowledge, learn in school andother settings, use critical thinking, creative, problem solving and expressive skills and conduct inde-pendent study.

• Personal/cultural development and engagement—young peoples’ increasing awareness of their ownidentity, including an awareness of the differences between and among individuals with different back-grounds, interests and traditions.

Development happens across a number of areas—not just academic and cognitive, but moral, cultural,physical, and many others. While development and engagement happen within a variety of domains orareas, this doesn’t mean that these areas are distinct or unrelated. In fact, they are interdependent andoverlapping. This list is meant only to give a sense of the range of tasks in which young people areinvolved as they grow and learn.

AREAS OF DEVELOPMENT AND ENGAGEMENT

Source: Reprinted from Karen Pittman, Merita Irby, et al. “Preventing Problems, Promoting Development, Encouraging EngagementCompeting Priorities or Inseparable Goals?” The Forum for Youth Investment, Impact Strategies, Inc. (2001): p. 9. Based upon K.Pittman and M. Irby. “Preventing Problems or Promoting Development?” (1996). Available online at www.forumforyouthinvestment.org.

Although widespread adoption of this approachremains an elusive goal, this shift in focus helpedmove the youth field forward in important ways.One outcome of this work has been increased attention to features in programs and communitiesthat create positive developmental settings.

A youth development approach is certainly morepromising than the problem-oriented approach ofmany youth services. It is not, however, without lim-itations. Youth development operates from a focus

on individual behavior, albeit with an asset-drivenorientation. As the National Research Councildescribes this approach:

All are part of a new direction in public policy that places children and adolescentsonce again at the center of neighborhoodand community life, where they can engagewith caring adults inside and outside theirfamilies, develop a sense of security and

4

personal identity, and learn rules of behavior,expectations, values, morals, and skills neededto move into healthy and productive adult-hood (our emphasis).2

Clearly, attending to the developmental needs ofyoung people is critically important, as is the focuson the community context within which develop-ment takes place. Numerous studies have demon-strated the benefits that young people gain from participating in developmentally focused activities.

Human ecology theory, however, suggests thatattention to the immediate contexts of young peo-ples’ lives is necessary, but not sufficient. This theo-retical framework recognizes the nested contextswithin which youth development takes place. Thesecontexts include the family and other local institu-tions and social systems such as community-basedprograms, schools, communities, and so on. Localcontexts are subsumed within broader, often less tan-gible, political, cultural, and moral contexts thatpowerfully shape their features and boundaries.

When we step back and take a look at the contextsin which young people live, we see that they arecharacterized by persistent racial disparities betweenpeople of color and white Americans.

Across neighborhoods, cities and regions, well-documented racial disparity exists in overt and subtleforms in almost every quality of life arena.

EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

Although the number of high school graduates whohave received a bachelor’s degree or higher hasincreased over the past thirty years, the gap betweenwhite, non-Hispanic graduates and those who areblack or Hispanic has remained. In 1971, twenty-three percent of white, non-Hispanic high schoolgraduates between the ages of 25–29 had received abachelor’s degree or higher as compared to twelvepercent of their black and eleven percent of theirHispanic counterparts. In 2001, thirty-five percentof whites had done so, as compared to twenty percent of their black and eighteen percent of their Hispanic counterparts.

Source: Data from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Trends in the Well-Being of America’s Children & Youth. Office of theAssistant for Planning and Evaluation (2002): p. 329.

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

1971 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

White

Black

Hispanic

High School Graduates Ages 25–29 Who Have Received a Bachelor’s Degree or Higher

1971–2001

5

ACCESS TO AND DELIVERY OF HEALTHCARE

Relative to whites, African Americans—and in somecases, Hispanics—are less likely to receive appropri-ate cardiac medication, undergo coronary arterybypass surgery, and receive peritoneal dialysis andkidney transplantation. They are more likely toreceive a lower quality of clinical services such asintensive care, even when variations in such factors asinsurance status, income, age, co-morbid conditions,and symptom expression are taken into account (ouremphasis).3 In addition, as the chart above indicates,these disparities are found in follow-up treatment.Significantly, these differences are associated withgreater mortality among African American patients.

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Black owners in 1992 were less likely than otherowners to have received bank financing for theirbusinesses.4 Those who received financing obtainedsmaller bank loans, on average, than their whitecounterparts. black borrowers received average loansof .92 cents per equity dollar, all factors constant,while whites receive $1.17 per equity dollar in loans.

Prospective lenders were four times more likelyto deny credit to black-owned firms and twice aslikely to deny it to Asian-owned firms than theywere to deny it to firms owned by non-Hispanicwhites.

Instead, black owned firms accessed less-favor-able forms of consumer credit, such as credit cardsand home equity loans (29.6 percent), more oftenthan white borrowers (18.4 percent).

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%

White

Black

Unequal Care

Eye exams for diabetics

Beta blockers after heart attack

Follow-up care after hospitalizationfor mental illness

Source: Data from Eric C. Schneider, MD, MSc, Alan M. Zaslavsky, PhD, et al. “Racial Disparities in the Quality of Care for Enrollees inMedicare Managed Care,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 287:10, March 13 (2002): p. 2.

6

For all educational attainment levels, the earnings ofblack workers who are twenty-five years old and overand work full time, year round were 80 percent of

their non-Hispanic white counterparts. The earningsof Hispanic workers were 66 percent of their non-Hispanic white counterparts.

EARNINGS

Median Annual Earnings by Educational Attainment for Full Time, Year Round Workers 25 Years Old and Over

2001

Not HSGraduate

HSGraduate

Bachelor’sDegree

ProfessionalDegree

AllAttainment

Levels

Black

Non-Hispanic White

Hispanic$0

$20,000

$40,000

$60,000

$80,000

$100,000

Median Household Incomes of Racial and Ethnic Groups

1990 and 2000

Non-Hispanic

Black

Non-HispanicWhite

Hispanic

1990

2000$0

$10,000

$20,000

$30,000

$40,000

$50,000

INCOME

Data from the 1990 and 2000 census show per-sistent disparities between the median householdincomes of Non-Hispanic-white households onthe one hand, and Non-Hispanic black andHispanic households on the other. The gap in income was evident in every region of thiscountry.

Source: John R. Logan, “Separate and Unequal: TheNeighborhood Gap for Blacks and Hispanics in MetropolitanAmerica,” Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban andRegional Research, October 13 (2002): p. 3.

Source: Data From U.S. Census Annual Demographic Survey March Supplement PINC-03 Current Population Survey, March 2002.

In 2000, African Americans represented 12 percentof the overall population, but constituted 46 percentof all prison inmates and 42 percent of all jail inmates.

State and national data show evidence of racialdisparities in the treatment of comparable whites,African Americans, and Hispanics in the criminaljustice system. For example, in a study of sentencingdisparities in the criminal justice system inPennsylvania, John Kramer and Jeffery Ulmer

reported that African American and Hispanic maleswere more likely to be incarcerated and to receivelonger sentences than white males who had similaroffenses and criminal records.

The racial patterns presented above are typical.Any other indicator of social or economic statuswould present a similar picture. In some arenas, the racial disparities have shrunk over time, but thecorrelation between race and well-being in America

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

7

High School Completion Rates for 18–24 Year-Olds1990–2000

1990 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

White

Black

Hispanic0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Source: Data from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Trends in the Well-Being of America’s Children & Youth. Office of theAssistant for Planning and Evaluation (2002): p. 325

remains powerful. A similar pattern of disparity isobvious when we consider indicators of well-beingfor youth of color and their white counterparts inthese and related areas.

Poor outcomes for youth of color relative totheir white peers have been documented in nearlyevery sector. In education, for example, AfricanAmerican and Latino youth are less likely to com-plete high school than white, non-Latino youth.They are also less likely to attend college or toreceive a bachelor’s or higher degree than their whitecounterparts.

Regarding employment outcomes, AfricanAmerican and Latino youth who live in central citiesare more likely to be out-of-school and out-of-work(seventy-one percent) than their white peers (twenty-one percent). Among out-of-school youth who areemployed, with rates averaging fifty-seven percentand sixty-eight percent, respectively, AfricanAmerican and Latino youth are less likely to beemployed than white youth (seventy-five percent).5

When youth of color complete their education andjoin the workforce, their earnings trail behind thoseof their white counterparts.

The disproportionate representation of AfricanAmerican youth in the juvenile justice system hasbeen well documented. At nearly every stage of theirinvolvement with this system, beginning with arrestsand ending with sentencing, African American

youth experience poorer outcomes than their whitecounterparts. For example, in 1997 AfricanAmerican youth were five times more likely to be incustody in a residential facility and, depending onthe state, five to ten times more likely to be commit-ted to a state prison than white youth.6

While there are fewer studies of youths’ access tohealth care than there are for adults, researchers sug-gest that there is a similar pattern of racial disparityin the services that youth receive. In a systematic lit-erature review, Arthur Elster and his colleaguesfound that African American youth—and in somecases, Hispanic youth—received fewer primary care,mental health, and asthma services than their whitecounterparts.7 Like adults, this pattern persists evenwhen family socioeconomic status and health insur-ance status are taken into account.

An examination of the ways in which race hasshaped and continues to shape political, economic,and cultural life in this society—the broadest contextwithin which youth develop—may shed light onthese disparities and have implications for the youthfield and the field of social change.

We believe this examination is important fordeepening our understanding of barriers to thehealthy, productive development of youth of color,and by extension, of barriers to promoting suchdevelopment. White Americans remain significantlymore likely than most racial minorities to have

8

access to the elements that contribute to success, andto be rewarded fairly for their efforts. Without fullyaccounting for the historical and ongoing inequitiesbetween whites and people of color, the youth fieldand its allies in the antipoverty and communitybuilding fields risk pursuing strategies that are mis-guided, incomplete, or inappropriate to the challenge.

We believe this analysis is relevant to the youthfield for at least four reasons.

Race and racism have implications for the areasof engagement and development that youth develop-ment specialists have identified as important. Forexample, identity formation is widely accepted asone of the most critical developmental tasks of ado-lescence. Achieving a well-integrated, solid racialidentity is a key aspect of the developmental process.There are a number of factors that operate explicitlyand implicitly to undermine this process for youthof color.

The disparities in outcomes between youth ofcolor and their white counterparts, not unlike thoseamong adults, are striking, enduring, and pervasive.The racial differences in the outcomes for youth ofcolor and their white counterparts call for a deeper,more nuanced examination of broader societal, sys-temic factors that reach beyond individual assets,deficits, and behavior. This is not to suggest thatindividual behavior is unimportant. Rather, we assertthat individual behavior is only one piece of a muchlarger picture.

In nearly every system that touches the lives of young people there are formal and informal policies and practices as well as cultural norms andstereotypes that contribute to racial disparities. Astructural racism lens helps identify factors, eventhose that may appear neutral at face value, that

contribute to racially disparate outcomes. Finally, resiliency research has shown us that

some young people are able to succeed even underthe most devastating circumstances. Yet, the success-es of a few individuals of color cannot obscure theoverall pattern of opportunities and benefits that isdefined by race.

There is an opportunity cost associated withhaving generations of youth growing up with thehandicap of the racial disparities that currentlydefines their lives. We contend that unless the broader structural factors that contribute to racialinequities are identified and addressed, youth devel-opment approaches may help youth “do better” inspite of a set of pernicious mechanisms that sortthem by race, but will not change the fundamentalconditions that help produce and maintain raciallydisparate outcomes.

The pages that follow review some of the waysin which race shapes political, economic and culturallife in the United States. We begin with a discussionof the meaning of race. We then turn attention tostructural racism, which refers to the factors thatcontribute to and facilitate the maintenance of racialinequities. It identifies aspects of our history andculture that allow privileges associated with “white-ness” and disadvantages associated with “color” toendure and adapt over time. We consider the legacyand enduring power of the racial history of thiscountry, and characteristics of our national values,contemporary culture and social processes. Followingthis we examine institutional policies and practicesin education, juvenile justice, and employment. Weconclude with an exploration of the implications ofa structural racism perspective for the youth field.

Scientific studies conclude that race has no biologi-cal meaning or significance. The gene for skin coloris linked with no other human trait. The genes thataccount for intelligence, athletic ability, personalitytype, and even hair and eye color are independent ofthe gene for skin color. Humans are far more alikethan they are different, and share 99.9 percent of

their genetic material. Race does, however, have social and political

significance. Social scientists call the term “race” asocial construct, that is, it was invented and givenmeaning by humans. Why? Answering that questionrequires looking historically at the creation of racialcategories, and what these categories have produced.

THE MEANING OF RACE

9

In the particular case of the United States, tworacial groupings—white Europeans and all non-white “others”—emerged as primary categories earlyin our nation’s history. Beginning with the expropri-ation of Native American lands, a racialized systemof power and privilege developed and white domi-nance became the national common sense. Thispoint of view opened the door to slavery, the takingof Mexican lands, and the limits set on Asian immi-grants, and was woven over time into national legaland political doctrine. As a land committed to free-dom, opportunity and democracy, for example,America could justify the importation of slaves fromAfrica by defining them as non-human. This made itpossible to deny Africans rights and freedoms grant-ed to all “men who were created equal.” Yet, whenwhite Southerners wanted to increase their politicalrepresentation in the legislature, they advocated theupgrade of Africans’ legal status to three-fifths of ahuman being. Thus, from the earliest moments inour history, racial group identities granted access toresources and power to those who were “white”while excluding those who were “other” legally,politically, and socially. In the words of historianManning Marable,

When we talk about race, we don’t mean abiological or genetic category, but rather, a

way of interpreting differences between peo-ple which creates or reinforces inequalitiesamong them. In other words, “race” is anunequal relationship between social groups,represented by the privileged access topower and resources by one group overanother. Race is socially constructed, created(and recreated) by how people are perceivedand treated in the normal actions of every-day life.8

Expressions of racism have evolved markedlyover the course of American history, from slaverythrough Jim Crow through the civil rights era totoday. Racism in 21st century America is harder tosee than its previous incarnations because the mostovert and legally sanctioned forms of racial discrimi-nation have been eliminated. Nonetheless, subtlerracialized patterns in policies and practices permeatethe political, economic and socio-cultural structuresof America in ways that generate racialized differ-ences in well-being between blacks (and other peopleof color) and whites. These dynamics work to main-tain the existing racial hierarchy even as they adaptwith the times to accommodate new racial and ethnic groups. This contemporary manifestation ofracism in America can be called structural racism.

STRUCTURAL RACISM

The notion of a structural racism system may notimmediately resonate with everyone in our diversesociety. Most Americans are proud of how far ournation has come on civil rights. Moreover, whenmost of us think of racism in the United States, theimages that first come to mind tend to relate to slav-ery, Jim Crow segregation, and the African Americanexperience in particular. Few readily filter the histo-ries of Native Americans, Chinese, Latino and ethnicEuropean immigrants through a structural racismprism.

Structural racism, however, touches and impli-

cates everyone in our society—whites, blacks,Latinos, Asians and Native Americans—because it isa system for allocating social privilege. The lowerend of the privilege scale, characterized by socioeco-nomic disadvantage and political isolation, has his-torically been associated with “blackness” or “color.”Meanwhile, the upper end of the scale that givesaccess to opportunity, benefits, and power has beenassociated with “whiteness.” Between the fixedextremes of whiteness and blackness there is a fluidhierarchy of social and political “spaces” that areoccupied by different groups of color at various times.

10

Racial status can change. A subordinated groupin one era can move closer to or into the mainstreamin another era through a combination of its ownacculturation efforts and a favorable shift in main-stream public opinion. As we have seen with theIrish, Italians, and Jews in America over the last century, and currently with some “model minorities,”subordinated groups can “become white” given particular opportunity contexts.

It must be stressed that position and mobilitywithin the structural racism system, which in someways resembles a caste system, are never determinedby its subordinated groups. How those who are atthe blackness end of the spectrum perceive them-selves, or how they behave, is less significant to theirracial privilege status than broadly held stereotypesof them. European ethnic immigrants to nineteenth-century America could not “become white” by sim-ply adopting the mainstream habits and declaringthemselves its members. They had to be allowedaccess into occupational, educational, residential,and other settings that had previously excludedthem. Racial group position, in other words, reflectsthe exclusionary or inclusionary exercise of political,economic, and cultural power by those in the domi-nant group.

A structural racism lens allows us to see more

clearly how our nation’s core values—and the poli-cies, institutions and practices that are built onthem—perpetuate social stratifications and outcomesthat all too often reflect racial sorting, rather thanindividual merit and effort. It allows us to see andunderstand:

• The racial legacy of our past• How racism persists in our national

institutions• How racism is transmitted and either

amplified or mitigated through communitylevel institutions, and

• How individuals internalize and respondto racialized structures.

It also allows us to see that, as a society, we moreor less take for granted a context of white leadership,dominance and privilege. This dominant consensuson race is the frame that shapes our attitudes andjudgments about social issues. It has come about as aresult of the way that historically accumulated whiteprivilege, national values, and contemporary culturehave interacted to preserve the gaps between whiteAmericans and Americans of color. We now turn toa discussion of each of these.

Historically accumulated white privilege refers towhites’ historical and contemporary advantage inareas such as:

• Education• Decent jobs and livable wages• Homeownership• Retirement plans and other employment

benefits• Health and access to health care• Control of the media• Political representation and voting, and• Accumulation of wealth.

. . . all of which have helped to create and sustainadvantages in the accumulation of wealth, power,and other dimensions of well-being.

An example of the way in which historical privi-lege has a legacy that carries through to today can befound in average levels of “wealth accumulation”between groups. blacks and whites who earn thesame salaries today have significantly different wealthlevels (savings, investments, capital assets, and soon). As the following chart demonstrates, whitesearning between $50,001 and 75,000 have a wealthlevel that is almost three times as high as their blackcounterparts.

THE LEGACY AND ENDURING POWER OF OUR RACIAL HISTORY: WHITE PRIVILEGE

11

What explains this difference?Significant numbers in the current generation of

white adult Americans, along with their parents,grandparents, and other forebears:

• Benefited from access to good educationalinstitutions

• Had access to decent jobs and fair wages• Accumulated retirement benefits through

union membership and social security,and

• Benefited from homeownership policiesand programs that allowed them to buyproperty in rising neighborhoods.

By contrast, significant numbers in the currentgeneration of adults of color, along with their par-ents, grandparents, and other forebears:

• Came from a background of slavery orlabor exploitation

• Were limited by de jure or de facto segregation

• Were generally confined to jobs in areassuch as agricultural or domestic labor, andexcluded from jobs that allowed them to accumulate savings and retirement benefits, and

• Were discriminated against by lendinginstitutions as individuals and as residentsof neighborhoods of color via redlining,among other policies.

In other words, at pivotal points in US historywhen socio-economic factors produced abundantopportunities for wealth and property accumula-tion—such as the GI Bill and home mortgage subsidies—white Americans were positioned to takeadvantage of them, whereas Americans of color weresystematically prohibited from benefiting fromthem.

Accumulated Wealth

<$15,001

Annual Median Income

Med

ian

Net

Wor

th

$15,001–35,000

$35,001–50,000

$50,001–75,000

>$75,000 Total

Black

White0

$50,000

$100,000

$150,000

$200,000

$250,000

$300,000

$350,000

Source: Data from Dalton Conley. Being Black and Living in the Red. University of California Press (1999): p. 27.

12

Home Purchase Loan Application Denial Rates by Race

2000

Black Latino White0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

Home Ownership Rates 2002

Black Latino White0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

Source: Joint Center for Housing Studies. “State of theNation’s Housing” Joint Center for Housing Studies,Harvard University (2003): p. 16.

Source: Federal Financial Institutions ExaminationsCouncil. Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Data.www.ffiec.gov/hmcrpr/hm00table3.pdf.

We can see how these dynamics play out todayin one of the major avenues for wealth accumula-tion, homeownership.

Statistics about access to credit, a key steppingstone on the path to homeownership indicates thatthese inequities are likely to continue for some time.

As descendants of people who have a legacy ofaccumulated disadvantage, in nearly every aspect of life, youth of color start with an uneven footingrelative to their white counterparts. Youth experiencethe effects of these racial inequities at multiple levels.

Lack of homeownership limits the opportunityfor adults to experience one of the most fundamen-tal sources of wealth accumulation. While the economic ramifications of the racial disparities inhomeownership are borne largely by adults, youth ofcolor are also disadvantaged. Parents who do notown homes lack access to home equity that can betapped to pay for such as things as education fortheir children. They also lack a potentially valuablematerial resource that can be passed on to their chil-dren. Moreover, homeownership has been associatedwith a number of important youth outcomes. Rich-ard Green and Michelle White report that childrenof homeowners, regardless of socioeconomic status,are less likely to drop out of school, get arrested, orbecome teen parents relative to children of familieswho are renters.9

That wealth is most likely to build upon itself,and poverty most likely to undermine those in itsgrip, is well known. These patterns have deep histor-

ical roots in the United States, a fact that is oftenforgotten in the blur of trying to sort out racial dis-parities and contradictions. The American mindset isdeeply invested with strong beliefs about opportunity.As a result, we tend to overlook the built-in advan-tages that whites have in most competitive areas.

In an article entitled “White Privilege:Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peggy McIntoshdescribes how across the board white people benefiton a regular basis from privileges of which they maynot even be conscious. According to McIntosh,white privilege is:

. . . an invisible package of unearned assetswhich I can count on cashing in each day,but about which I was meant to remainoblivious.

. . . It seems to me that obliviousness aboutwhite advantage . . . is kept strongly incul-turated in the United States so as to main-tain the myth of meritocracy, the myth thatdemocratic choice is equally available to all.10

Race has been and continues to be a valuableresource for white Americans of all ages. It grantsthem differential access to and provides them betterinsulation from negative pre-judgments based onphysical features, language, and other cultural fac-tors, relative to their non-white counterparts.

13

The backdrop of core American values also sets thestage for our national consensus on race. We takegreat pride in our national values of personal respon-sibility and individualism, meritocracy, and equalopportunity, and we assume them to be race neutral.We understand these values to have the followingsignificance:

Personal responsibility and individualism:The belief that people control their fatesregardless of social position, and that indi-vidual behaviors and choices determinematerial outcomes.

Meritocracy: The belief that resources andopportunities are distributed according totalent and effort, and that the social compo-nents of “merit”—such as access to insideinformation or powerful social networks—are of lesser importance or do not mattermuch.

Equal opportunity: The belief that theemployment, education and wealth accumu-lation arenas are “level playing fields” andthat race is no longer a barrier to progress inthese areas.

In a perfect world, with all else held equal, ournational values would translate directly into the reality of daily experience for all Americans. In ourimperfect world with its many inequities, however,these values inevitably lead to different outcomes fordifferent individuals.

While we treasure notions of individual accom-plishment, meritocracy and equal opportunity, infact, individuals are members of families, communi-ties and social groups, and their individual trajecto-ries will be affected—though not necessarily totallydetermined—by the overall status of their group.Those born into disadvantaged communities cannotbe blamed for the insufficient education they receive

in their local public schools, and the consequentchallenges they face as unskilled job seekers. Whereone starts out in life affects where one ends up to agreater degree than our national sense of economicmobility would have us believe.

. . . a child born in the bottom 10 percentof families ranked by income has a 31 per-cent chance of ending up there as an adultand a 51 percent chance of ending up in thebottom 20 percent, while one born in thetop 10 percent has a 30 percent chance ofstaying there and a 43 percent chance ofbeing in the top 20 percent.11

Ironically, when one member of a minoritygroup “makes it” and manages to make a successfultransition to adulthood—graduating from highschool with honors, attending prominent collegesand universities, getting impressive jobs, and so on,that young person’s success is taken as evidence thatthe system is “working,” that our national values doindeed create an equal playing field and opportuni-ties. But of course, a star performer from any racialor ethnic group is just that: a star performer. Whilewe should applaud the fact that a highly gifted per-son of any racial group should be allowed to succeedin this country, we need to pay attention to the averages. On average, a person with a resource-richbackground has a greater likelihood of succeedingthan one without. Unfortunately, the availability ofmany of those resources is correlated with race inthis country.

A structural racism lens does not call for theabolition of our national values. It calls instead forthe re-articulation of those values in ways that recog-nize where all Americans stand because of their historical group experiences on these shores. Thetension here is that structural racism focuses onunequal group outcomes while our core national values emphasize social, economic and politicalphilosophies that are centered on the individual.

NATIONAL VALUES

14

CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

While national values help to organize broad viewsabout what is fair, just, and equitable, Americansrely on many other common sense cues as they makeeveryday judgments about other individuals andgroups. These cues, which consist of bits of informa-tion about racial, ethnic, gender, immigrant, andother groups, accumulate and become stereotypesthat are reinforced in multiple aspects of the massculture.

Over our nation’s history, many of the negativestereotypes associated with various demographic cat-egories have become dominant and enduring. Theynow operate as the “default” cultural representations,or “frames,” that organize many of our ways ofunderstanding and interpreting individual behaviorand group tendencies. Moreover, whether or notthey are accurate, these cultural representations havebecome integral parts of the societal crucible inwhich public policies and institutional practices arefashioned and refined.

With respect to group attitudes, for instance, the1990 General Social Survey found that 60 percent ofwhites surveyed believed that blacks preferred to “liveoff welfare,” and 46 percent believed that the samewas true for Hispanics. In contrast, only 4 percent ofthe same white survey respondents believed thatother whites preferred to live off welfare. The samesurvey reported that whites were more than twice aslikely as blacks to believe that blacks “lacked com-mitment to strong families.” Similar stereotypes werereported about of the intelligence level of people ofcolor, the tendency of people of color to be violence-prone, and the tendency of people of color to belazy. And, in a finding related to the highly stereo-typical attitudes held about the outcomes of affirma-tive action programs, 77 percent of the whites sur-veyed believed that it was likely that less-qualifiedblacks would be admitted to college at the expenseof their own admission.

Surveys continue to reveal the existence of harmful racial stereotypes.

Percentages Saying . . . Whites Blacks Others

“Blacks tend to be lazy . . . ” 40% 19% 45%

“Blacks tend to be violence-prone . . .” 51% 41% 60%

“Hispanics tend to be violence prone . . .” 40% 41% 40%

“Blacks tend to be intelligent . . .” 27% 46% 29%

“Hispanics tend to be intelligent . . .” 22% 37% 36%

“Asians tend to be intelligent . . .” 46% 54% 50%

“Whites tend to be intelligent . . .” 50% 50% 52%

Percentages saying . . . Whites Blacks

“Welfare makes people work less . . .” 87% 73%

“I enjoy working even if I don’t need the money . . .” 61% 63%

“Socioeconomic success comes from special abilities . . .” 49% 48%

“In our society everyone should look out for himself . . .” 31% 40%

“People get ahead by their own hard work . . .” 66% 60%

In contrast to these popular perceptions, surveys of blacks and whites generally find them equally likely to express strong beliefs in individualism and personal responsibility.

Source: Data from General SocialSurvey Cumulative Data File,(1990). See: http://sda.berkeley.edu:7502/D3/GSS02/Doc/gs02.htm.

Source: Data from General SocialSurvey Cumulative Data File,(1990). See:http://sda.berkeley.edu:7502/D3/GSS02/Doc/gs02.htm.

15

While the information and entertainmentmedia, art, language, religion, and commerce havethe potential to contribute to progressive socialchange, they are too often avenues for stereotype formation and reinforcement. Television and printmedia have a particularly strong influence onAmerican culture and they act both to contribute tonegative generalizations about people of color and toperpetuate the invisibility of people of color in legiti-mate or prestigious venues. Consider how televisioncoverage of crime contributes to stereotypes that areimportant to the maintenance of structural racism.

In a study of local television news crime cover-age, Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki found thatAfrican Americans are depicted as a single, undiffer-entiated and more threatening group relative to theirwhite counterparts. Entman and Rojecki reportedthat news shows are less likely to put on screen thenames of African Americans who are accused of violent crimes than for whites, which the researchersnoted “tends to efface the differences among individ-ual blacks.”12 They also noted a disparity in the por-trayal of physical custody and, although the databasewas small, in the use of mug shots.

While there is substantially less research on theportrayals of youth in the news, it shows evidence ofracial biases in essentially the same pattern as thatcharacterizing adult portrayals. Youth of color aremore likely to be associated with crime and violencethan their white counterparts. A study of news mag-azines found that the first use of the phrase “youngblack male” in a Time or Newsweek cover storyappeared in an article about black crime. Subsequentreferences to young black males and later Hispanicmales were similarly linked to crime such that somenoted that the phrase became “synonymous with theword criminal.”13

Research on speakers and speaking roles in localTV news stories about youth and violence demon-strated that while adult males were the predominantspeakers on such stories, when youth did speak,youth of color were generally represented as victimsor witnesses of violence, as threats, and as criminalsor suspects. Their white counterparts were more like-ly to be portrayed in the more sympathetic role asvictims of unintentional injury.14 Research on youth

images on the news showed a similar pattern. Youthof color appeared in crime news fifty-two percent ofthe time while white youth did so thirty-five percentof the time. In contrast, white youth were more like-ly to appear in health and education stories (13%)than youth of color (2%).15

Racial stereotyping is unhealthy for whites aswell as blacks. Identity formation is one of the mostcritical developmental tasks of adolescence. Thosewho are able to develop a positive racial identity aremore likely to experience positive mental health andpsychological well-being. Negative stereotyping ofpeople of color can produce an unfounded sense ofentitlement and superiority among whites, and aninternalized sense of failure or hopelessness amongpeople of color. Psychological studies of African-American adolescents have demonstrated that consis-tent negative imaging contributes to negative self-acceptance and mental health problems.16

Moreover, the attitudes that manifest themselvesat the individual level can also aggregate all the wayup into a national consensus about race that, inturn, influences policies and practices. There is consensus among social scientists that the kind ofracial stereotyping that undergirds structural racismis virtually automatic, often unconscious and wide-spread.17 Sociologist Lawrence Bobo and colleaguescharacterize national attitudes about race and the

Portrayal of Blacks and Whites in Local Crime News Stories

1993–94

Named MugShots

PhysicalCustody

Black

White0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

Source: Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The BlackImage in the White Mind. University of Chicago Press(2001), pp. 82–83.

16

acceptance of racial inequities as “laissez-faire”racism. They observe that:

. . . in post-World War II U.S. society, theracial attitudes of white Americans involve ashift from Jim Crow racism to laissez-faireracism. As part of this change, we witnessedthe virtual disappearance of overt bigotry, ofdemands for strict segregation, of advocacyof government-mandated discrimination,and of adherence to the belief that blacksare the categorical intellectual inferiors towhites. The decline in full-blown Jim Crowracism, however, has not resulted in itsopposite, a thoroughly antiracist popularideology based on an embracing and demo-cratic vision of the common humanity,worth, dignity, and place in the polity forblacks alongside whites. Instead, the institu-tionalized racial inequalities created by thelong era of slavery followed by Jim Crowracism are now popularly accepted and condoned under a modern free market orlaissez-faire racist ideology. Laissez-faireracism involves persistent negative-stereotyp-ing of African Americans, a tendency to

blame blacks themselves for the black-whitegap in socioeconomic standing, and resist-ance to meaningful political efforts to ameliorate U.S. racist social conditions and institutions.18

Experimental studies of the effects of news stories on the public suggest that television imageshave the potential to catalyze and reinforce publicpolicies and decisions that contribute to racially disparate outcomes. Researchers found a strong association between crime stories that includedyouth of color as offenders and viewer’s fears andpublic policy stances: “a mere five-second exposureto a mug shot of African American and Hispanicyouth offenders (in a 15 minute newscast) raises lev-els of fear among viewers, increases support for ‘gettough’ crime policies, and promotes racial stereotyp-ing.”19

Research has also shown that when studentswere given the same information about black andwhite suspects, they rated the black suspects lessfavorably than the white suspects. Relative to theirwhite counterparts, black suspects were viewed asbeing “more guilty, more likely to commit futureviolence and deserving of punishment.”20

Our history, national values, and culture are thebackdrop for understanding structural racism. But itis important to recognize that the racial status quo ismaintained in part because it adapts and changesover time. Racism in America has its own particulardynamics that sometimes move us forward towardgreater racial equity, sometimes move us backward,and sometimes change the nature of the problemitself. The two most important of these dynamics are“racial sorting” and “progress and retrenchment.”

RACIAL SORTING

Racial sorting refers to both the physical segregationand the psychological sorting of racial and ethnicgroups that occurs through social and culturalprocesses and stereotyping.

Although federal legislation barring racial dis-crimination in key domains such as housing,

employment, and public accommodations waspassed in 1964, racial and ethnic groups are largelyisolated from one another in contemporary America.Analyses of the 2000 census show that, despiteincreasing racial and ethnic diversity in national-levelstatistics, the country remains as segregated as ever.Most visible is the consistent relationship betweenrace and residence: white Americans live in neigh-borhoods that are, on average, more than 80 percentwhite and no more than seven percent black, whilethe average black or Hispanic person lives in aneighborhood that is about one-third white andtwo-thirds non-white.21 Because a person’s place ofresidence is strongly linked to access to schools, business districts, jobs, and so on, this residential“hypersegregation” translates directly into racial sort-ing in education, commerce, employment, and otherpublic venues.

THE PROCESSES THAT MAINTAIN THE RACIAL STATUS QUO

17

Physical proximity to other racial groups maynot necessarily create social equity, but hypersegrega-tion is clearly problematic. When groups do notinteract, their knowledge of one another is less likelyto be based on personal experience and more likelyto be informed by hearsay, media portrayals and cul-tural stereotypes. Lack of genuine interpersonal con-tact contributes to a psychological distancing fromthose who are perceived as “other” which, in turn,undermines opportunities for trust, empathy, andcommon purpose to develop. This psychologicalsorting reinforces and compounds the physical andgeographic sorting process. Face-to-face interactionamong diverse groups, on the other hand, helps toreduce prejudice.22

In theory, physical and psychological racial seg-regation do not need to equate with advantage anddisadvantage. But in the United States, historicallyand today, racial homogeneity of neighborhoods hasbeen highly correlated with income and overall well-being. For the most part, neighborhoods that arepredominantly white enjoy better schools, lowercrime, better transportation access, better environ-mental conditions and so on. Moreover, this racial-ized “neighborhood gap” in equality actually grew inthe last decade as whites who earned more moved toneighborhoods that matched their own economicstatus while blacks and Hispanics continued to beless able to move to better neighborhoods.23

As a nation, we have not found a way to make“separate but equal” work. In our political economy,groups of color are continually “sorted” and experi-ence marginalization, isolation, exclusion, exploita-tion, and subordination relative to those who arewhite. The link between whiteness and privilege andbetween color and disadvantage is maintained, eventoday, through these sorting processes.

Youth of color experience racial sorting and itsoutcomes on at least two levels, which we refer to asfirst order sorting and second order sorting. The for-mer refers to the sorting youth experience by virtueof the fact that they live with adults who are them-selves subject to racial sorting. Second order sortingrefers to the sorting youth experience directly. Bothforms reinforce the inferior status of youth of colorin society and compromise their ability to make a

successful transition to productive adulthood. First order sorting is reflected in the data about

the type of segregation that adults of color experi-ence. Thus, many youths of color grow up in house-holds that experience restrictions in where they canlive. This sorting in turn affects access to a range ofopportunities, not the least of which includesemployment and high quality education. For exam-ple, data suggest that the geographic racial sortingthat characterizes cities across the country negativelyaffects the employment prospects of youth of color.Katherine O’Regan and John Quigley reported thatthe unemployment rates for black youth are higherin MSAs where the black population is spatially iso-lated. O’Regan and Quigley acknowledge that thediscrepancy in human capital is the largest source ofracial disparities in employment rates for youth, butcontend that youths’ access to information networksand to jobs is a substantial contributor to these dis-parities. The authors conclude that:

Results suggest that the overall effects ofspace on employment outcomes are substan-tial, explaining between ten and forty percent of the observed racial differences inemployment in four urban areas examined.Of this “spatial” effect, the bulk arises fromsocial/informational measures; job accessappears to play a much smaller role.However, when measured more precisely, atthe census tract level, job access does have asignificant effect on youth employment.This effect is less important than other spa-tial influences. Spatial influences are lessimportant in explaining outcomes than aredifferences in human capital.24

Second order sorting occurs in all major systemsin which youth participate. For example, in theschools, youth of color are more likely than theirwhite counterparts to be sorted into special educa-tion, less challenging subjects, and disciplinary programs. In the juvenile justice system, youth ofcolor are more likely than their white counterpartsto be arrested, sent to detention, and sent to adultcourt.

18

PROGRESS AND RETRENCHMENT

Perhaps the most discouraging characteristic ofstructural racism is its adaptability and resilience.The forces that permit structural racism to endureare dynamic and shift with the times. So, as progressis made toward racial equity on a particular policyfront, a backlash may develop on another front thatcould undo or undermine any gains, or powerfulinterests may move to preserve the racial order inother ways. The net effect tends to be a reposition-ing of the color line rather than its erasure.

The clearest examples of this retrenchment havebeen in the consistent challenges to affirmativeaction, but there are many more subtle and lessdirect ways in which equity gains can be counteract-ed. For example, the Fair Housing Act of 1964 guar-anteed equal access to housing for all, but people ofcolor continued to be quietly excluded from highquality suburban housing by discriminatory lendingpractices, zoning regulations that dictated the size of

a house or restricted multi-family dwellings, andpublic underinvestment in mass transportationbetween cities and suburbs. Or, while the historic1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. SupremeCourt decision prohibited racial segregation in public schools, it was undermined by subsequentcourt decisions.25 As a result of this and continuedresidential segregation, across the nation, black andLatino students are more racially isolated fromwhites in their schools today than just 20 yearsago.26

It is helpful here to remind ourselves again thatrace is a social construct. Racial hierarchy preserves asocial order in which power, privilege and resourcesare unequally distributed, and no individual, institu-tion or policy needs to be activated to preserve thecurrent way of operating: it is built in. Structuralracism identifies the ways in which that system ismaintained, even as it is contested, protected, andcontested again.

INSTITUTIONAL POLICIES AND PRACTICES

The backdrop of historically accumulated whiteprivilege, national values, and contemporary cultureis the context within which our major institutions,such as health care, education, the labor market, andthe criminal justice system, operate today. While weexpect the policies and practices of these institutionsto be race neutral, they are inevitably influenced bythis racialized context and, therefore, contribute tothe production of racially disparate outcomes.

If background forces go unrecognized and unex-amined, racial disparities such as those typically seenin the labor market and criminal justice systems areunderstood simply as unintended consequences of“neutral” or, by and large, “fair” industry policiesand practices. Sorting and stereotyping reinforcethis, as they work to legitimize, or at least explain,the inequitable outcomes in employment, housing,healthcare, education, and other opportunity areas.

Following are some examples of how structuralracism operates within the key areas of education,juvenile justice, and the labor market.

EDUCATION

Public education is probably the national system thatholds the greatest potential for reducing racialinequities over time. It is universally available andinvests in children at an early age when, in theory,environmental influences are less deterministic andthey can achieve according to individual talents.However, close examinations of educational systemsacross the nation reveal that black and Latino stu-dents are more segregated now than two decadesago, that the schools they attend are comparativelyunder-resourced, and within the schools they areprovided fewer academic opportunities and are treat-ed more punitively than their white counterparts.

Nationwide, the school districts with the highestminority enrollment have, on average, $902 fewerdollars to spend per student than school districtswith the lowest minority enrollment. This adds upto a difference of $22,550 per class of 25 students.

19

$0

$1,000

$2,000

$3,000

$4,000

$5,000

$6,000

$7,000

$8,000

$6,684

Lowest Minority

Enrollment

$6,349

Next-to-Lowest

Minority Enrollment

$5,953

Next-to-Highest Minority

Enrollment

$5,782

Highest Minority

Enrollment

State and Local Education Tax Revenuesby District Minority Enrollment for the United States

2000

Source: Education Trust. Education Watch On-Line. http://66.43.154.40:8001/projects/edtrust/edtrust.html.Note: Dollars are adjusted for student needs and regional cost differences. Districts are divided into quarters by enrollment.

Looking closely at specific school districts revealseven greater inequities in investments. In the pre-dominately white school district of Manhasset, justoutside New York City, students receive twice as

many resources as their predominately black andLatino counterparts in or close to New York City’surban core.27

Manhasset 80% 20% $20,981 0%

Jericho 85.7% 14.3% $17,255 0%

Great Neck 77.6% 22.4% $18,627 .2%

Mt. Vernon 9.9% 90.1% $11,095 1.8%

Roosevelt 0.3% 99.7% $10,320 4.1%

New York City 15% 85% $10,469 5.3%

Source for spending data: New York State, Statistical Profiles of School Districts, June 2002. Source forracial demographic data: New York State, Statistical Profiles of School Districts, 1997.

School District

Percentage White

Students

Spending per Pupil

PercentageStudentsof Color

PercentageStudents

Dropping Out

SCHOOL FUNDING IN SELECTED SCHOOL DISTRICTS IN THE NEW YORK CITY AREA26

20

These expenditure data are relatively reliableindicators of resources that are needed for schools tocreate settings that promote academic success forstudents: smaller class sizes, experienced teacherstrained in their assigned subjects, high quality aca-demic, social and physical development materialsand infrastructure, up-to-date curricula, enrichmentopportunities, and so on.

Differences in school financing by race are notthe only indicator of unequal educational experi-ences between students of color and white students.Within school districts, schools with high concentra-tions of students of color allocate fewer instructionalresources than schools in the same district that havelower concentrations of such students.28 As oneexample, public schools where white students are inthe majority are more than twice as likely to offer asignificant number of advanced placement classesthan schools where black and Latino students are inthe majority. Moreover, there are racial differencesin the ways in which students are treated within theschools themselves. Studies show that black andLatino students with the same test scores as whiteand Asian students are much less likely to be placedin accelerated courses and much more likely to beplaced in low-track courses.

As a group, African-American and Latinostudents scored lower on achievement teststhan whites and Asians in Rockford and SanJose. However, African American and Latino

students were much less likely than white orAsian students with the same test scores to beplaced in accelerated courses. For example,in San Jose, Latino eighth-graders with“average” scores in mathematics were threetimes less likely than whites with the samescores to be placed in an accelerated mathcourse . . . In a number of cases, Rockford’shigh-track classes included students withexceptionally low scores, but rarely werethese students African Americans.Conversely, quite high scoring AfricanAmericans were enrolled in low-track classes;again, this was seldom the case for high-scoring whites.29

School disciplinary actions also vary by race. In1994 Congress signed into law the Gun Free SchoolsAct. This Act mandates that any student who bringsa firearm to school would be suspended for one year.Several states have extended these laws, which arecommonly referred to as “zero tolerance policies,” to include other weapons, and possession or use ofdrugs. Moreover, numerous school districts haveexpanded them to include a wide variety of behav-iors and infractions.

Youth of color experience first and second orderracial sorting with regard to zero tolerance policies.In the first order, these policies are found more oftenin school districts that are predominantly African-American and Latino.30 In the second order, zero

Public Schools Offering 15 or More AP Classes Public Schools Offering 19 or More AP Classes

Schools with 50% or more Black and Latino Students

Schools with less than 50% Black and Latino Students

Schools with 50% or more Black and Latino Students

Schools with less than 50% Black and Latino Students

35% 29%

65% 71%

Source: Applied Research Center. “46 Years AfterBrown v. Board of Ed.: Still Separate, Still Unequal,”The Applied Research Center. (2000): p. 9.

Source: Applied Research Center. “46 Years AfterBrown v. Board of Ed.: Still Separate, Still Unequal,”The Applied Research Center.” (2000): p. 9.

21

tolerance policies are applied to youth of color in adecidedly more punitive way than to their whitecounterparts.

Unlike their white counterparts, AfricanAmerican students are suspended from publicschools at rates that far exceed their proportion ofpublic school enrollees. Twenty-five percent of allAfrican-American male students were suspended atleast once over a four-year period.

One recent study examined school discipline statistics in depth and found that black students areidentified as committing proportionately moreinfractions when the misconduct is subjectivelydetermined—that is, when a faculty or administratorjudges that a behavior is disturbing or threatening—than when the misconduct is identified according toa more objective standard such as weapon or drugpossession.

The educational system of the United States has not yet achieved its potential as an “equalizing”institutional investor in our nation’s youth. Instead,many of the system’s policies and practices continueto produce racially disparate educational outcomes.By the end of the public school experience, 7 per-cent of white students have dropped out of schoolcompared with 13 percent of black students and 28percent of Latino students.31

JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM

It is in the juvenile justice system where policies andpractices produce some of the most highly visibleracialized outcomes. Here, there is a cumulativeeffect, where racial inequities at every point alongthe way, beginning with well-known differences inthe racial profiling of suspects, culminate in dramati-cally different incarceration rates by race.

Racial inequities plague every significant decision-point in the juvenile justice system including:

• Suspect profiling• Arrests• Referral to juvenile court• Detention• Formal processing• Waiver to adult court• Disposition• Incarceration in juvenile facilities, and• Incarceration in adult prisons.

At each of these points, youth of color are overrepresented relative to their white counterparts.While one might assume that the commitment ofcriminal acts is the predominant force behind thisoverrepresentation, researchers have found negative“race effects” in studies on race and the juvenile jus-tice system.32 Moreover, research suggests that this

Black White

Public SchoolEnrollment

Suspensions0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

Public School Enrollment and Suspensions by Race

Black

White0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

South Carolina Student Charges of Misconduct by Race

Disturb Threaten Weapons Drugs

Source: Data from The Civil Rights Project Harvard University. “Opportunities Suspended: The Devastating Consequences of Zero Tolerance and School Discipline,” Harvard University.(2000): p. 8.

Source: Data from The Civil Rights Project Harvard University. “Opportunities Suspended: The DevastatingConsequences of Zero Tolerance and School Discipline,”Harvard University (2000): p. 7.

22

disparity between youth of color and their whitecounterparts is quite large during their initial contactwith the juvenile justice system and results in a“cumulative disadvantage” as they are processedthrough the system. In addition, like many educa-tional policies, decisions about how youth are sent toand allocated within the juvenile justice system arebased on the subjective decisions of adults. In writing about the juvenile justice system, RobertSchwartz notes:

Whether a youth enters the juvenile justicesystem is often as much about adult deci-sion-makers—and how much blameworthi-ness they attribute to the youth—as it isabout the youth’s behavior. Many childrenin the four major child serving systems—education, juvenile justice, child welfare,mental health—are remarkably similar, eventhough they wear different labels. Decision-makers allocate them to one of these systemsbased upon the conduct or traits of the chil-dren or of their parents.

For purposes of assigning children into asystem we label them as Bad, Sad, Mad or

Can’t Add. It is like attaching a mailinglabel—the Bad child gets sent to the juve-nile justice system. The Sad child goes intothe child welfare system. The Mad childenters the mental health system. Can’t Addgoes to special education. Sorting oftendepends upon issues of race or class. Minorityand poor children are more likely to be labeledBad. In addition, if one thinks of the foursystems—dependency, special education,mental health and delinquency—as the foursuits in the service delivery deck, one willfind that delinquency is always the trumpsuit. If a juvenile court wants to find a childdelinquent for misbehavior, it always can.33

(our emphasis)

Referrals are made to juvenile court mainly bylaw enforcement officers but also by parents, victims,probation officers, and, increasingly by schools.Black youth are referred to juvenile court at twotimes their proportion in the population.

Once referred to juvenile court, black youth aremore likely to locked in detention facilities thantheir white counterparts. This is true even when theyare charged with the same offense.

Populations

BlackReferrals

White Other

Racial Proportions of the Juvenile Population and of Referrals to Juvenile Court

1997

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

Referred

DetainedBlack White Other

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

Racial Proportions of Referred and Detained Delinquency Cases

1997

Source: Data from Eileen Poe-Yamagata andMichael A. Jones. “And Justice for Some,” BuildingBlocks for Youth, April 2000. p. 8.

Source: Data from Eileen Poe-Yamagata andMichael A. Jones. “And Justice for Some,” BuildingBlocks for Youth, April 2000. p. 9.

23

For some offenses, such as drug charges, the disparity between those referred to the juvenile justice system and those who are detained is evengreater.

Disparities are evident in the racial distributionof youth who are petitioned, that is formallyprocessed, and those who are waived to adult court.

African American and Latino youth are less likely to be placed on probation than their whitecounterparts. They are also more likely to be incar-cerated in public facilities:

When white youth and minority youth werecharged with the same offenses, AfricanAmerican youth with no prior admissionswere six times more likely to be incarceratedin public facilities than white youth with the same background. Latino youth werethree times more likely than white youth tobe incarcerated.34

Once youth enter the juvenile justice system,their ability to re-enter systems that are supposed to facilitate their transition to healthy adulthood istypically blocked. Again, Robert Schwartz notes:

The boundaries between the four child-serving systems are like semi-porous mem-branes through which youth, dollars andservices flow. The trend of recent years hasbeen for education, child welfare and mentalhealth to send increasing numbers of youthinto the juvenile justice system. It has moreand more become a one-way flow: the pathfrom education, child welfare and mentalhealth into the juvenile justice system is like a parking lot exit, where a forked grillprevents re-entry (this is particularly true ofeducation, which sends more youth to juve-nile court, and doesn’t want them back, butit is also difficult for dependent children,after arrest and placement in the delinquencysystem, to return to foster care).35

Referred

DetainedBlack White Other

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

Drug Case Referrals and Detained by Race1997

Petitioned

Waived toAdult CourtBlack White Other

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

Percent of Youth Petitioned and Waived to Adult Court by Race

1997

Source: Data from Eileen Poe-Yamagata and Michael A.Jones. “And Justice for Some,” Building Blocks for Youth,April 2000. p. 9.

Source: Data from Eileen Poe-Yamagata and Michael A.Jones. “And Justice for Some,” Building Blocks for Youth,April 2000. p. 12.

24

Theoretically, the labor market should be race neu-tral: supply and demand are not racialized concepts.Yet, there are innumerable examples of how youth ofcolor are excluded, exploited, and marginalized inthe labor market. Sometimes this occurs as a resultof active or passive discrimination. One example ofactive discrimination is the job market where, in oft-reported experiments, “testers” of color and “testers”who are white apply for the same jobs with unequalresults. Examples of more passive forms of employ-ment discrimination include:

• Zip-code and name-based discrimination: Jobseekers perceived to live in “undesirable” locationsor perceived as people of color based on their

names may be excluded from consideration for jobopportunities by employers.

• Occupational segregation based on race, ethnicityor gender: Racial minorities and young women areover-represented in the lowest paid and least desir-able jobs. Researchers have found that occupation-al segregation has been most pronounced for blackmale youths.36

• Hiring through informal mechanisms such associal networks: These employer practices oftendisadvantage youth who lack inside connections tojob opportunities.37

THE LABOR MARKET

Kristen 13.6% Ebony 10.5%

Carrie 13.1% Latonya 9.1%

Laurie 10.8% Kenya 9.1%

Meredith 10.6% Latoya 8.8%

Sarah 9.8% Tanisha 6.3%

Allison 9.4% Lakisha 5.5%

Jill 9.3% Tamika 5.4%

Anne 9.0% Keisha 3.8%

Emily 8.3% Aisha 2.2%

Average 10.3% Average 6.9%

Source: Alan B. Krueger. “Economic Scene: Sticks and Stones Can Break Bones,But The Wrong Name Can Make A Job Hard To Find,” The New York Times.(December 1, 2002) C2.

EVERYTHING’S IN A NAME

A recent study found that job applicants with common blacknames on their résumés were less likely to be called for aninterview than applicants with common white names and thesame qualifications.

Percentage receiving interview requests:

Based on 3,761 job applications.

Common Black NamesCommon White Names

25

Taken together, racial sorting and institutional policies and practices put youth of color at triplejeopardy, if you will, for experiencing poor out-comes. By and large their parents and hence, theyare also less able than their white peers to move toneighborhoods that provide a higher quality publiceducation and better access to employment. Becauseof school segregation youth of color are likely to find themselves in school districts that are not onlyseparate but are also unequal in a number of dimen-sions. For example, they are more likely than theirwhite counterparts to be in school districts that havepunitive disciplinary policies. Disciplinary policiesare applied in a racially disparate way, such thatyouth of color are more likely to be suspended thantheir white counterparts. Researchers have docu-mented a relationship between suspensions and

school dropouts, noting that one-third of youth whoare suspended from school end up dropping out ofschool. Dropping out of school has been linked to a number of problems including involvement with the justice system, poor employment prospects, andso on.

This is but one example of the manifestations ofstructural racism, using neighborhoods, schools, anda specific institutional policy as the entry points.Clearly, similar patterns could be traced from otherexamples. Structural racism is a multifaceted prob-lem. It manifests itself in ways that can be obviousor subtle, and it serves as a linchpin among many ofthe factors that define and influence the experienceof youth in this country. In the section that followswe consider the implications of this analysis for theyouth field.

When we recognize the fundamental contribution of structural barriers like residential segregation orlabor market discrimination to the proximate prob-lems that the youth field seeks to address, there is astrong temptation to suggest that this field take on abroad agenda that addresses these distal sources. Weare reluctant, however, to add another layer of workon an aspiring field as it struggles to develop a solidinfrastructure, secure scarce resources, and so on.Moreover, we are under no illusion that racial equitycould ever become a guiding principle in housing,employment, or any other key public policy areawithout the sustained, concerted activism of citizensand organizations dedicated to social justice. Indeed,such fundamental change may be unlikely withoutpressure from a new civil rights movement.38 Wetherefore do not presume to recommend or prescribespecific activities for youth field. Rather, we offer amore general discussion of the broad implications ofthis analysis for the youth field, providing examplesto ground our suggestions in ways that we hope willprovide sufficient clarity to provoke rich and pro-ductive discussions about the practical meaning ofthis analysis.

A BROADER VISION FOR THE YOUTH FIELD

With a few exceptions, contemporary youth initia-tives generally derive from the race-neutral premisethat individual-, family-, and neighborhood-levelincapacities and dysfunctions are principal barriersto successful transition from youth to productiveadulthood. Some programs and initiatives seek toimprove youth outcomes by changing youth behav-ior. Others concentrate on developing the range ofcapacities youth need for success in the productivesectors of the economy. Yet others seek mainly tolink disadvantaged youth to services and resourcesthat may not be readily accessible, or to increaselocal supplies of those assets. Generally speaking,these approaches are geared toward enhancingyouth’s capacities to become functional, self-sustain-ing, law-abiding citizens. A structural racism analysissuggests that these strategies are necessary andimportant, but may not be sufficient.

The structural racism framework links racializedlocal outcomes to broader public policies, institu-tional practices, and cultural norms, encompassingthe entire ecology in which youth develop. It lookscritically at the socioeconomic, political, and histori-

RACIAL SORTING + INSTITUTIONAL POLICIES AND PRACTICES = TRIPLE JEOPARDY FOR YOUTH OF COLOR

WHAT DOES A STRUCTURAL RACISM PERSPECTIVE IMPLY FOR THE YOUTH FIELD?

26

cal contexts in which people of color are located anddemonstrates how and why those contexts affectindividual, family and community outcomes. Itreveals the ways in which arenas assumed to provideopportunity and justice in the U.S. in effect guaran-tee racial disparity. Youth of color are so dispropor-tionately constrained by racialized public policies,institutional practices, and cultural representationsthat racial equity itself needs to be a priority objec-tive for all facets of the youth field.

Racial equity can only occur when whites andAmericans of color are equally likely to have positiveor negative experiences in employment, education,homeownership, the justice system, and all the otherarenas that determine progress and upward mobilityin the U.S.

It is important to note here that racial equityawareness is already quite evident among some segments of the youth field, particularly in the youth organizing sector.39 Youth organizers have documented longstanding misrepresentations ofyoung people, particularly those of color, in themedia. They have researched and analyzed theunderlying conditions that contribute to poor youthoutcomes in their communities. They have led campaigns to protest punitive and discriminatorypolicies in school systems and in the juvenile justice system. Youth organizing has the potential to makesignificant progress in this area, but like many evolv-ing fields, there is room for this work to be deep-ened. These groups typically lack the resources andexpertise to meet the developmental needs of youthin a structured and consistent way, and the infra-structure for this groundbreaking work is woefullyunderdeveloped.40

There are also intermediary organizationsengaged in efforts to document and address structural factors that contribute to racial inequities.However, we believe that more of those within theyouth field, and others engaged in community-levelefforts to alleviate poverty and disadvantage, couldhelp lay the groundwork for the type of socialchange that is needed. This could be done, in part,by systematically raising up the work of those in theyouth and allied fields who are engaged in racial

equity efforts, by encouraging others to take upracial equity work that is within their reach, and bypushing the boundaries of current agendas as far aspossible given financial and human resources.

Operationally, convergence of youth practition-ers around racial equity would not compel everyoneto meld their agendas and operations into one.Rather, what it might mean is:

• A shared recognition of the systemicsources of youth disadvantages and disparities

• Identification of the multiple and interre-lated levels—cultural, governmental,regional, local, institutional, individual,and so on—at which racist norms,assumptions, policies, and practices pertinent to youth need to be tackled

• Commitment among the field’s principalactors to working deliberately to disman-tle structures, policies, and practices thatcontribute to racial inequities, and

• Forging alliances with fields that are alsoconcerned about these issues, such ascommunity building, civil rights, socialjustice, and the like.

Convergence around these ideas would suggestthat the youth field is committed as a whole to mak-ing our democracy work for all youth, even as it pur-sues its traditional objectives. Focused attention onthis issue would emphasize the important role thatthe youth field can play in developing and leveragingits civic capacity for engaging influential public andprivate institutions. In concert with communitybuilders and others in allied fields, the youth fieldseems well positioned to harness an array of civicresources that could be used to influence policies ineducation, juvenile justice, youth employment, andother areas that directly shape young people’s lifechances.

27

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN PRACTICALLY?

Structural racism can seem overwhelming, and racialequity, idealistic. It is a challenge to determine howorganizations with limited reach and resources canmake any significant difference. Without question,these are formidable issues that will not be resolvedovernight. These issues deserve focused, sustainedattention within the youth field and between theyouth field and others in the wider community-building arena who are concerned about chronic disadvantages facing youth of color. We offer somegeneral steps that may facilitate such an examina-tion.

Adopt racial equity outcomes as a central part ofthe work.There is no better way to place and keep race “onthe table” organizationally than by integrating it intomission statements and program goals. The structur-al racism perspective suggests that those in the youthfield need to keep focused on racially equitable out-comes in all facets of the field’s work with and onbehalf of young people. Moreover, since the notionof equity is a comparative one, it should be madeclear that the basic commitment is to closing out-comes gaps between youth of color and white youthwithin a specified spatial or jurisdictional setting.The organizational effort required to honor a com-mitment to, say, “reduce high-school dropout rates”may be different from one aiming to “reduce AfricanAmerican high-school dropout rates in Harlem to alevel comparable to those of similar white studentsin New York City.” This level of organizationalvisioning and commitment would have to be accom-panied by a resolve to gather and disaggregate racialdisparity data, set reasonable equity goals, createinterim benchmark indicators, and to do what isnecessary to meet these thresholds.

Be willing to work through uncomfortable organi-zational issues relating to race.It is important for organizations to model racialequity internally if they are to take responsibility forachieving such ends in the wider community.

Working through these issues can be difficult.Staff may resent the implication that they have not

been doing enough. Some whites may perceiveveiled accusations of racism. Staff of color may dispute what they see as their “assigned position” inthe structural racism hierarchy. There may be sur-prise revelations of feelings of racial victimization.Skilled facilitators and presentations of the racialanalysis that reflect organizational and local realitiescan contribute enormously to negotiating thesezones of discomfort. Clear demonstration of thevalue of this exercise to the organizational missionwill go a long way toward easing anxieties that maycome to the surface. The resources that have beendeveloped to guide organizations aiming to improvetheir ability to address racial issues offer strategies forleadership development, staff training, workforcediversification, and so on.

Distinguish between racial equity outcomes that you can effect and those that require allies or collaboration.A central insight of the structural racism analysis isthat racial disadvantage is driven by interrelated poli-cies and systems operating at multiple levels. Thismakes it unlikely that any single organization wouldpossess all the capacities and resources required toachieve most equity outcomes. Reducing raciallybiased outcomes when child welfare workers makedecisions about removing children from their homesmight call for the development of tools that intro-duce a greater degree of objectivity into the decisionmaking process. Getting child welfare systems to utilize these tools may require legal intervention.41

Therefore, we must take into account all that isrequired to reach our objectives, recognize what wecan do effectively, and identify others with capacitieswe lack, who might be potential allies. Addressingthe policy, institutional, and cultural barriers associ-ated with racial inequities may almost invariablyrequire networking, communicative, legislative,research, civic, legal, and other kinds of expertisethat are unlikely to be found in any single organiza-tion. Indeed, an organization’s best role may notnecessarily be substantive; it might instead be that of identifying, assembling and coordinating the individual organizations needed to collectively makeprogress on racial equity issues.

28

Recognize that our organizations are located in thelarger systems, institutions, and processes thatreproduce inequity or injustice. We all participate in the structural racism system,but understanding precisely where and how requirescareful reflection. Demystifying the complex struc-tures and arrangements that are a part of our lives bylocating ourselves in them, is a critical first step inassessing our capabilities. We might start by askingourselves simple questions that focus on differentlevels of intervention such as the following:

• Where do young people and adults fit into,and help sustain, say, a television and filmentertainment industry that continually repro-duces negative images of Americans of color?It may be as consumers of the movies and TVprograms produced by Hollywood, and of thecorporate products advertised through thesevehicles.

• What role do youth employment initiativesplay in a private business sector that keepsAfrican Americans and Latinos at the vulnera-ble end of the workforce? In this case, theconnection might be through seeminglybenign corporate partnerships that fund localyouth initiatives. Or, it may be realizedthrough an act of omission, such as failure tocollect data by race and to compare outcomesfor youth of color with those of white youths.

• What role do philanthropic organizations playin the maintenance of racial inequality? At thislevel it may be through funding priorities thatfocus only on remediating racial inequitiesrather than also addressing the sources of suchinequities, or in funding practices that awardprimarily core support to some organizationsbut only project support to others.

Identify our civic capacities. Civic engagement is critical to taking responsibilityfor racial equity. Racial equity goals would nudge allstrands of the youth field toward a paradigm thatassumes that civic capacities deserve equal priority to

functional ones. Broadly, this means seeking accessto and participating in the policymaking and gover-nance processes that allocate public resources. To dothis, organizations and individuals first must identifytheir actual and potential civic capacities: their abili-ties to gauge the impacts of new policies, to frametheir concerns effectively and get their messages out, to get the attention of policymakers and power-brokers, and to mobilize support among peers andacross other levels.

Indeed, youth organizers, like their counterpartsin the wider social justice arena, already know thatstructural changes—changes at the policy and insti-tutional levels—are unlikely to materialize andendure without the exercise of civic power at thegrassroots level. Hence, they stress civic engagementthrough education, training, analysis, resource mobi-lization, and collective action.

This is not to suggest a single youth organizingmodel for the entire field, but only that all within ithonestly appraise their potential for civic engage-ment. Some of this potential may lie in opportuni-ties to educate and mobilize young citizens for dem-ocratic participation.

Another relevant aspect of civic capacity may bethe power, or influence, that comes with personaland organizational position within our institution,field, or sector. Individuals and organizations in the community building and youth fields differ inproximity to important structural processes andinstitutional actors. Their capacities also vary widely.Those with high national profiles and resources forresearch and analysis might, for example, be moreeffective at defining and promoting policy or regula-tory alternatives to the status quo. Individuals orsmaller organizations with fewer resources, on theother hand, might exercise responsibility by pressur-ing peers, and others within their reach who arepowerful, to act responsibly.

Leverage our positions. Recognize the privileges or benefits that come fromcurrent relationships to dominant structures andarrangements, and the potential multiplier effect thatthese advantages might have on the efforts of peersor colleague organizations that have fewer resources.

29

The structural racism framework offers those in theyouth field and its allies in the community buildingand social justice fields not only a powerful andpromising intellectual tool, but also valuable insightsfor individual and collective action toward racialequity. The framework can be thought of as a lensthat brings into focus new ways of analyzing thecauses of the problems that youth workers areaddressing and suggests new approaches to findingsolutions to those problems. Specifically, the struc-tural racism lens highlights:

• Specific power arrangements that perpetuatechronic disparities, especially as they exist inpublic policies and institutional practices

• General cultural assumptions, values, ideolo-gies, and stereotypes that allow disparities togo unchallenged

• The dynamics of progress and retrenchment,which highlight how gains on some issues canbe undermined by forces operating in otherspheres or by oppositional actors, and

• Political, macroeconomic, regional, and other contextual factors that have enormousinfluences on outcomes for children, youth,families, and communities.

To practitioners in the youth field already hard-pressed by many funding and operational challenges,this call to responsibility for racial equity should notbe perceived as the imposition of an even heavierworkload. Rather, it is a call for reexamination ofcurrent goals and methods from a racial equity van-tage point—one that brings policies, practices, andcultural frames into the foreground. Thus, for exam-ple, at the programmatic level, practitioners couldensure that all youth—whites and youth of color—are engaged in activities and learning processes thatchallenge harmful cultural stereotypes and that helpthem develop healthy, balanced self-identities.

At the organizational and system levels the fieldcould develop tools to replace discretionary decisionswith more objective and fair decision-making crite-ria, and strategies to facilitate the implementation ofsuch tools across the range of settings as needed.Organizational actors could bring added value totheir work by building strategic alliances with otherswhose racial equity efforts may be assumed to bebeyond the youth field’s functional boundaries. Suchalliances are particularly critical for addressing poli-cies and issues that tend to be off practitioners’everyday screens—such as trade policies that affectlocal job creation, or social welfare policies thataffect family formation and cohesion, or transporta-tion investment priorities that perpetuate minoritycommunity isolation. Finally, they might choose towork more directly with the media specifically to

At the same time that structural racism disad-vantages some, it benefits others. Organizations andinstitutions might, for a variety of reasons, occupy aprivileged niche or possess extraordinary social capi-tal in influential circles. They might therefore be in abetter position to advance racial equity than otherorganizations that are in less privileged positions.

Recognize that racially explicit issues may or maynot imply racially explicit interventions.Working to achieve racial equity implies an aware-

ness of the complexities of racial disparity.Disadvantages experienced by youth of color areoften also associated with income, nativity, gender,language, and other factors. While race is inextrica-bly linked to all these, it may sometimes makestrategic sense to craft interventions or buildalliances that do not “lead with race” explicitly.What ought not be negotiable, however, are racialequity outcomes.

CONCLUSION

30

reframe dominant images of youth who are poor anddisadvantaged in America.

In short, we suggest that there are many levels,broad and narrow, deep and shallow, at which theyouth field might amplify its current racial equityefforts, and more broadly incorporate a structuralracism lens into its work. Structural racism presents

challenges to the work of all who are concernedabout inequity and injustice and those most nega-tively affected by them. Time will be the judge ofour ability to make progress on these issues withoutthe usual retrenchment, so that the past ceases to beprologue. We believe that the ability to do so is tiedto our collective efforts.

31

1. See, for example, Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York:Free Press, 1986); John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free Press,2000); Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, eds., Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Raceand Ethnicity in America (Palo Alto, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 2002). Press Publication Number 479.

2. National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, Community Programs to Promote Youth Developmented. Jacquelynne Eccles and Jennifer A. Gootman. Board on Children, Youth, and Families. Division ofBehavioral and Social Sciences and Education (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2002), 3.

3. Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y. Stith, and Alan R. Nelson, eds., Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racialand Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and EthnicDisparities in Health Care. Board on Health Sciences Policy (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press,2003), 2–3.

4. Cassandra Cantave and Roderick Harrison, “Minority Population and Business Trends” (Washington,D.C.: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 2000, fact sheet).

5. Andrew Sum et al., “Left Behind in the Labor Market: Labor Market Problems of Out-of-School, YoungAdult Population” (paper prepared for the Out-of-School Network, Chicago, November 2002).

6. Eileen Poe-Yamagata and Michael A. Jones, “And Justice for Some” (San Francisco: National Council onCrime and Delinquency, 2000, research report).

7. Arthur Elster et al., “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care for Adolescents: A Systematic Reviewof the Literature,” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 157, 9 (2003): 867. Researchers have alsofound that when controlling for important confounders, black children and adolescents were “12% less likelythan white patients to be activated on the kidney transplant waiting list.” See Susan L. Furth, “RacialDifferences in Access to the Kidney Transplant Waiting List for Children and Adolescents with End-StageRenal Disease,” Pediatrics 106, 4 (October 2000): 756–62.

8. Manning Marable, “Structural Racism and American Democracy” (paper presented at the UN WorldConference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, and Related Intolerance, Durban, South Africa, 2000), 2.

9. Richard K. Green and Michelle J. White, “Measuring the Benefits of Homeowning: Effects on Children.”Wisconsin–Madison CULER Working Paper 94-05. (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Center forUrban Land Economic Research, 1994). Cited in William M. Rohe and Leslie S. Stewart, “Homeownershipand Neighborhood Stability,” Housing Policy Debate 7, 1 (1996): 37–81.

10. Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peace and Freedom (July–August1989): 10–12.

11. Alan B. Krueger, “The Apple Falls Close to the Tree,” New York Times, 14 November 2002.

NOTES

32

12. Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in the White Mind (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2001), 82–83.

13. Lori Dorfman and Vincent Schiraldi, “Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News” (prepared forBuilding Blocks for Youth, April 2001, mimeographed) 14.

14. Lori Dorfman, “The Roles of Speakers in Local Television News Stories on Youth and Violence,” Journalof Popular Film and Television Summer 26, 2 (1998): 80–86.

15. Center for Media and Public Affairs, “What’s the Matter with Kids Today? Images of Teenagers on Localand National TV News,” Media Monitor 14, 5 (September/October 2000).

16. Cleopatra Howard Caldwell et al., “Racial Identity, Maternal Support, and Psychological Distress amongAfrican American Adolescents,” Child Development 73, 4 (2002): 1322.

17. Nathalie F. P. Gilfoyle et al., Brief Amicus Curiae of the American Psychological Association in Support ofRespondents in The Supreme Court of the United States, Barbara Grutter, Petitioner v. Lee Bollinger et al.,Respondents, and Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher, Petitioners v. Lee Bollinger et al., Respondents(2003).

18. Lawrence Bobo, James R. Kleugel, and Ryan A. Smith, “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a‘Kinder, Gentler’ Anti-Black Ideology,” in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change, ed. Steven A.Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Greenwood, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), 15–44.

19. F. D. Gilliam Jr. and S. Iyengar, “The Superpredator Script,” Nieman Reports 52 (1998), 46.

20. M. Peffley, T. Shields, and B. Williams, “The Intersection of Race and Crime in Television News Stories:An Experimental Study,” Political Communication 13 (2001): 309–27, as cited in Dorfman and Schiraldi,“Off Balance,” 23.

21. John Logan, “Ethnic Diversity Grows, Neighborhood Integration Lags Behind” (Albany, N.Y.: LewisMumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, 2001).

22. Gilfoyle et al., Brief Amicus Curiae of the American Psychological Association, 14.

23. John Logan, “Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks and Hispanics in MetropolitanAmerica” (Albany, N.Y.: Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, 2002).

24. Katherine O’Regan and John Quigley, “The Effect of Social Networks and Concentrated Poverty onBlack and Hispanic Youth Unemployment,” Annals of Regional Science 27, 4 (December 1993): 327.

25. For a short summary of leading court decisions on desegregation between 1895 and 1995, see AppliedResearch Center, “46 Years after Brown v. Board of Ed: Still Separate, Still Unequal” (Oakland, Calif.:Applied Research Center, 2000, research brief ), 10–11.

33

26. Erica Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee, “Race in American Public Schools: Rapidly Resegregating SchoolDistricts” (Cambridge, Mass.: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, August 2002). John R. Logan,Deirdre Oakley, and Jacob Stowell, “Segregation in Neighborhoods and Schools: Impacts on MinorityChildren in the Boston Region” (paper prepared for presentation at the Harvard Color Lines Conference,Cambridge, Mass., September 2003).

27. This chart is based on the format used in Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), updated with current data.

28. Linda Darlington-Hammond, "Apartheid in American Education: How Opportunity Is Rationed toChildren of Color in the United States," in Racial Profiling and Punishment in U.S. Public Schools: How ZeroTolerance Policies and High Stakes Testing Subvert Academic Excellence and Racial Equity, ed. Tammy Johnson,Jennifer Emiko-Boyden, and William J. Pittz (Oakland, Calif.: Applied Research Center, 2001), 39–44.

29. Jeannie Oakes, “Two Cities’ Tracking and Within-School Segregation,” Teachers College Record 96, 4(Summer 1995): 686.

30. Civil Rights Project, “Opportunities Suspended: The Devastating Consequences of Zero Tolerance andSchool Discipline” (presented at National Summit on Zero Tolerance, Washington, D.C., June 15–16,2000).

31. Phillip Kaufman, Jin Y. Kwon, Steve Klein, and Christopher D. Chapman, “Dropout Rates in theUnited States: 1999,” for National Center for Education Statistics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department ofEducation, 2000), 12.

32. Poe-Yamagata and Jones, “And Justice for Some.”

33. Robert Schwartz, “Opportunities for Juvenile Justice Reform” (paper presented at W. T. Grant Forum onReforming Publicly Funded Youth Systems, New York, March 2003), 2.

34. Poe-Yamagata and Jones, “And Justice for Some,” 3.

35. Schwartz, “Opportunities,” 2–3.

36. Paul E. Gabriel et al., “The Relative Occupational Attainment of Young Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics,”Southern Economic Journal 57, 1 (July 1990): 35–46.

37. O’Regan and Quigley, “Effect of Social Networks,” 327–42.

38. For a powerful statement of this view, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s concluding discussion in RacismWithout Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, Md.:Roman & Littlefield, 2003), 177–85.

39. Jee Kim et al., Future 500: Youth Organizing and Youth Activism in the United States (Chicago: Subwayand Elevated Press, 2002).

34

40. Listen, Inc., An Emerging Model for Working with Youth Community Organizing + Youth Development =Youth Organizing. Occasional Paper Series on Youth Organizing No.1 (New York: Funders’ Collaborative onYouth Organizing, 2003).

41. This example is drawn from the experiences of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, andthe Children’s Rights Institute.

35

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