NEWS-Liberation Sociology

In 1954 my first academic mentor, social psychologist Gordon Allport, summed up the human situation: “[We] have gained notable mastery over energy, matter, and inanimate nature generally, and are rapidly learning to control physical suffering and premature death. But, by contrast, we appear to be living in the Stone Age so far as our handling of human relationships is concerned” (Allport, 1958, p. ix). This assessment is still correct. While progress has been made in some areas, humanity is still living in the Stone Age in terms of its ability to substantially reduce or eliminate racial and ethnic oppression, in the United States and globally.

The year 1954 was important not only because of the pathbreaking Brown decision but also because that was the year in which the influential book, The Nature of Prejudice, from which this quote was drawn, was published. Re-reading Allport’s perceptive book and studying the context of the Brown decision, one sees that a significant factor in bringing these writing projects to fruition was the civil rights movement of the 1930s-1960s era. That movement had a major impact on leading judges and scholars working on racial issues.

Civil Rights and Social Science The civil rights movement was substantially responsible for the Brown decision and other desegregation decisions, as well as state and federal civil rights laws from the 1940s to the 1960s. The NAACP provided legal aid for parents of black children challenging school segregation in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware—the four cases grouped under Brown. Significantly, social science was used in these Brown cases, and that use of social science was an intentional NAACP strategy. Brown marked perhaps the first serious recognition of the importance of social science research for social policy in U.S. history. In the 1950s social science research began to be taken seriously by policymakers and the public, in part because of Brown. Writing in Brown, Earl Warren focuses on the harm that legal segregation does to the self-esteem and achievement of black children. Notably, Warren and colleagues relied on social science data about the experiences of black children—for example, on Kenneth Clark’s interviews with black children (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954). In part because of this social science, nine white Supreme Court justices took seriously the black perspective on racism in primary and secondary schools for the first time.

The Brown decision has been hailed as a pioneering effort by courageous Supreme Court justices out in front of the country’s leadership and citizenry. By no means was the high court in advance of black Americans and their leaders on matters of desegregation. Black Americans not only were ahead in thought and action of almost all of the white public and leadership, but black organizing and voting were responsible for the increasing desire among white policy makers, by the 1930s and 1940s, to take some action against segregation (Newman, 2002). Though not pioneering, Brown was viewed by most Americans as a significant moral and legal attack on segregation. Federal judges used it as legal authority to end state-created segregation in many areas, and civil rights activists cited it as moral and legal authority for protests (Tushnet, 1995).

The Broad Impact Especially significant is the fact that the civil rights movement liberated the entire society from a racially totalitarian system in southern and border states—a system that most whites in the country supported or tolerated. Prior to that movement and the liberalization it forced, a racial totalitarianism legally shaped most major aspects of black lives in southern and border states, and informally shaped black lives elsewhere. While not in the same league with the racist totalitarianism oppressing black Americans, a semi-totalitarianism limited significantly what whites in many areas, especially liberal whites, could say or do on matters of "race." The dead hand of socio-political repression, seen in McCarthyism, limited what Americans of all backgrounds could say and do on an extensive range of social and political topics. When many black Americans risked their well-being in civil rights lawsuits, protests, and movements, they opened up much room for progressive discussion and change for all Americans. That movement not only liberated African Americans from much social oppression, but also the society generally.

The Brown decision, and the civil rights movement lying behind it, not only made use of social science but also opened up new room for a reinvigorated, and more critical, social science. Without that movement there would likely have been much less research on racism and related racial matters since the 1960s. Historically, the development of social science research on racial matters has lagged behind the conceptual and empirical understandings about racism of many involved in the civil rights movement. Thus, no white social scientist foresaw the emergence of large-scale black protests in the 1950s and 1960s. The mainstream social science perspective on racial matters was framed from within existing white conceptualizations about the place of white Americans and Americans of color.

Racism and Racial Conservatism in Social Science

In their early stages, the social science disciplines actually developed in part as efforts by white academics to rationalize the oppression of Americans of color, particularly the oppression of African Americans. In the North and South, late 19^th century and early 20^th century social scientists used “graphs, charts, and other paraphernalia to prove the Negro’s biological, psychological, intellectual, and moral inferiority” (Ellison, 1964, p. 305).

Scientific Racism Until the 1930s most white social scientists saw the U.S. racial hierarchy in biologized racial terms, a perspective often called "scientific racism." An intense white obsession with African Americans could be seen in various forms of “race psychology” and "race sociology" that had developed by the mid-19^th century. At that time, the first treatises with sociology in their titles, by George Hughes and Henry Fitzhugh, were aggressive attempts to rationalize southern slavery. By the late 1800s and first decades of the 1900s the growing numbers of psychologists and sociologists mostly assumed white-racist views of newly freed African Americans as well as the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. For example, in 1923 Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychologist who later developed college entrance tests, argued aggressively for the racial inferiority of African Americans and European immigrant groups using psychometric test data from World War I draftees (Brigham, 1923). Almost all social scientists participated actively in the nearly universal racist inclinations of mainstream white thought until the late 1930s (Richards, 1997). For white social scientists, as well as journalists and politicians, African Americans have long been at the core of racist discussions. This preoccupation is seen in literally thousands of articles and books penned over the last 150 years that dissect and denigrate the character and culture of African Americans (Richards, 1997; Tucker, 1994). Given white-scholars' preoccupation with African Americans, it is appropriate to focus heavily here on social science research on African Americans.

Sociocultural views of racial differences were becoming more commonplace by the 1930s. Increasingly, black Americans were portrayed by white sociologists and other social scientists as inferior for cultural not biological reasons. Even as these white social scientists broke with an earlier biologized racism, most accented a view of African Americans as culturally inferior (McKie, 1993). The dominant discourse increasingly assumed that assimilation for black Americans was more or less inevitable, for modernity would sweep away elements of traditional society, including segregation. By the 1930s the social science terminology used to discuss racial-ethnic issues accented terms like "assimilation" and "prejudice." Only rarely was the concept of discrimination incorporated into this discourse, likely because racial discrimination was still legal and thus not seen as a problem (McKie, 1993).

New Research So pervasive were conservative views of "race" in U.S. social science in the 1930s and 1940s that few white social scientists were interested in research on racial discrimination. A foreign social scientist, Gunnar Myrdal, led the first major study of antiblack stereotyping and discrimination. Reflecting shifts in social science understandings, Myrdal argued in An American Dilemma (1964/1944) that biological racism was discredited and antiblack discrimination should be researched. Myrdal and colleagues concluded optimistically that whites were under the spell of an American creed that accented the "inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity,” an ethic that put pressure on a society riddled with the contradictions of discrimination for future change (p. 4). An American Dilemma helped to stimulate postwar research on antiblack prejudice and discrimination.

In addition, influential social psychologists and sociologists also began to study the type of personality influenced by fascist movements in Europe and the United States. One major social psychological study, published as The Authoritarian Personality, extensively used new scaling and questionnaire techniques to research issues of individual authoritarianism (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). Influenced in part by that study, by the 1950s the social science study of prejudice had become a major aspect of racial-ethnic research. Numerous studies by sociologists and social psychologists examined an array of racial attitudes, prejudices, and stereotyping, as well as demographic correlates (McKie, 1993).

Since World War II, social science study of racial matters has usually been described by terms like “race relations,” a euphemistic phrase used by many analysts who view all racial groups as responsible for “race problems.” Often the social science focus is on concepts like "assimilation" and "bigotry." Such terminology tends to take the spotlight off the system of racism and structure what is, and is not, important to research. Indeed, one reason for the failure to predict the civil rights movement and the changes it forced in the 1960s was the commitment of most white social scientists to a rosy picture of a society based on consensus and slow and orderly change.

Slowly, and stimulated by the civil rights movement, some social science research and conceptualization expanded to encompass critical research on racial oppression. Some researchers began important studies of discrimination and institutional racism. The civil rights movement generated new theoretical views of racial matters, with a renewed accent on institutional racism. This institutional perspective was pioneered in by W. E. B. Du Bois (2003/1920), Oliver C. Cox (1948), and other black scholars between the 1920s and the 1940s, but their view was not influential in white social science circles until the late 1960s. At that time, black activist-scholars, particularly Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton (1967), brought the concept of institutional racism to the center of conceptual and research attention in their writing. The 1960s civil rights movements had pressed mainstream social science to consider an institutional-racism perspective, and by the 1970s a few white scholars, as well as many scholars of color, were questioning the systemically racist character of society.

The Current Scene: Sociology and Social Psychology

Moving to the present day, let us examine briefly two leading textbooks. In one leading social psychology textbook, Elliott Aronson and colleagues (2002) provide one major chapter dealing with racial and ethnic issues. There they offer substantial and insightful discussions of the affective and cognitive aspects of prejudice and stereotyping, as well as of why and how people use such social categories, how they make attributions, and how interracial contacts might reduce prejudice. There is also a very brief discussion of how conformity to norms might be involved in prejudice and stereotyping. Apart from a cursory data-less paragraph describing institutional racism, in this textbook racism is viewed only in terms of stereotyping and prejudice--with most research cited discussing individual stereotyping and prejudice. There is no significant treatment of racial discrimination. Also missing from the textbook is a serious discussion of the history of racial oppression and of contemporary institutionalized racism. Discussions of racism are mainly framed in terms of individual bigotry and tolerance, and there is no serious discussion of the history or social structure that undergirds and generates racist stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Thus, there is little sense here that individuals are heavily shaped by the vested (e.g., material) interests of the socio-racial groups to which they belong.

The leading introductory sociology textbook by John Macionis (2003) also focuses substantially on theories of prejudice and stereotyping. Yet this textbook does have a substantial discussion of U.S. immigration and of the demographic characteristics of racial and ethnic groups. It also provides short histories of black, Latino, and Asian Americans with brief references to discrimination they have historically faced. There is a brief paragraph on racism, which is interpreted solely in terms of individual attitudes. There is one page that explores briefly the relationship of prejudice and discrimination and that also very briefly notes the idea of institutional discrimination developed by Carmichael and Hamilton--with the major example of institutional racism being in the past (legal segregation). As with the social psychology textbook, there is no sustained discussion of institutional or systemic racism. While there is much more attention to the racialized history of key American groups than in the social psychology textbook, there is no significant discussion of the contemporary discrimination faced by Americans of color, particularly that demonstrated in a growing number of field research studies (Feagin & Sikes, 1994).

We see in both textbooks an emphasis on prejudice, stereotyping, and assimilation, ideas and topics long characteristic of research on racial-ethnic issues in the U.S. Yet, observe relatively little discussion of research on racial discrimination, particularly discrimination that is systematically webbed across most institutions in the U.S., both in the past and the present.

Successes and Weaknesses in Research: Examples from Education

In The Nature of Prejudice, Allport (1958) accents the importance of using a range of research techniques to understand patterns of racial prejudice and discrimination. Today, as then, social scientists need to use all major research techniques to better understand racial oppression in its many everyday manifestations. Let me turn, selectively because of time, to a few social science research areas where there have been successes in examining racist realities, yet where there is much need for further research by social scientist in various disciplines.

Research on School Desegregation: A Partial Success Story One of the major successes in social science research since Brown is the clear demonstration of the positive achievement and social network effects of school desegregation. Conservative analysts, and the mass media, have often communicated the erroneous view that social science research shows that children do not gain in terms of achievement in desegregated schools--and thus that one must conclude that the "liberal" idea of desegregation bringing greater equality in achievement is disproved. However, like earlier research in the 1970s (St. John, 1975), current sociological and social psychological research shows that attending desegregated schools typically facilitates achievement for most children. One major study found that African American children in the third grade in predominantly white schools read better than those in predominantly black schools (Jencks & Phillips, 1998). [ii] An overview analysis of numerous research efforts showed that most desegregation studies reveal positive effects for academic achievement for children of color in majority–white schools, as compared with schools that are majority children of color (Braddock & Eitle, n.d.). A major study of 1800 children in the large Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system discovered that both black and white children did better in terms of test scores and track placements in substantially desegregated schools than in segregated schools (Mickelson, 2003). The reason for these differences is that predominantly white schools generally get much more in the way of socioeconomic and human resources.

Interestingly, early studies of desegregation, such as that of James Coleman (1966), downplayed school resources in explaining racial differentials in achievement. However, more recent researchers, such as those examining desegregated Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, have found many differences in resources available to predominantly black and predominantly white schools. Desegregated schools with large numbers of white children were more likely to have adequate media centers, computers, and other technology, as well as newer buildings, more classes for advanced students, and more teachers with substantial experience (Mickelson, 2003). When schools are substantially desegregated, white officials typically spend more money on schools. When they resegregate, however, the opposite usually happens (Rethinking Schools Project, 2001). Much social science research shows that children of color educated in desegregated settings generally have much better entrée into important information networks. In desegregated schools they generally have better networking resources, which help later in providing access to advanced education or better-paying jobs (Orfield & Eaton, 1996). Black young people who are educated in desegregated public schools are more likely than similar students from segregated schools to attend desegregated colleges, work in desegregated employment settings, and acquire friends from other racial groups (Braddock & Eitle, n.d.).

In this area of policy-significant research on student achievement, the main need today is not for more or better research, but instead a willingness on the part of more federal judges to pay serious attention to first-rate social science research like the Warren Court did. Instead of considering the well-demonstrated benefits of desegregation, many conservative judges are allowing local school systems to abandon meaningful school desegregation. Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have followed in the 1990s and early 2000s by allowing the abandonment of many more school desegregation plans. (See, for example, Board of Education of Oklahoma v. Dowell, 1991 and Freeman v. Pitts, 1992).

Needed Research in Education: Desegregation Pioneers One area where we do need much more field research is on the character and impact of desegregation on children's everyday lives in various school settings. Thus, what happens to black children in the course of their daily school rounds in desegregated schools? As segregation has become desegregation, many black children have paid a high price for that desegregation--a price paid largely because of dereliction of duty by government officials and judges who have allowed formerly segregated districts to subvert court decisions and civil rights laws. Thus, early desegregation plans mostly placed the burden and pain of desegregation on the backs of black children and parents. The impact of this desegregation on children and parents has rarely been studied, but is an area where much more social science research should be done if we are to truly understand the desegregation process.

In one of very few studies of the child pioneers, Leslie Inniss (1995) interviewed eleven adults who were the first to desegregate New Orleans high schools. Decades later, as adults, all felt that they had paid an extremely high personal price for this school desegregation.^[iii]Desegregation was so severe that two children had serious nervous breakdowns. Most indicated that the desegregation experiences were painful beyond description. Interviewed decades later as adults, all were still hurting from their experiences. They reported constant harassment by white students or teachers. One respondent reported that "after a while all hell broke loose and they really started harassing us," and another noted that "Well, we had a little group [of whites] that would meet us every morning, I mean they would say little ditties to us, it was sort of like entertainment" (Inniss, 1994, p. 259).

Most also reported a decreased sense of self-esteem and self-confidence. As one former student expressed it, "desegregation left me with feelings of alienation and incompetence" (Inniss, 1995, p. 154). The pressure was toward one-way assimilation to white ways, as another respondent explained, "We had to learn their way of doing things – acting, talking, dressing – their way of being, but nobody was interested in our way. We wanted so badly to be accepted, we tried to do and be all they wanted and we were still rejected. Even today, I have a really big problem with rejection of any kind" (p. 154). There were major physical effects, as yet another former student noted: "To this day . . . I never eat breakfast . . . . I know it's because for those four years my stomach was so much in knots I couldn't eat before I went to school and then I couldn't eat lunch. I wouldn't sit in the lunchroom because of the things they would do. . . . deep down you know that it's stuff that still affects you" (pp. 154-155).

Note how overwhelming the structuring process of desegregation was on these children who were pioneers. These accounts remind one of the social psychological analysis of Erving Goffman (1961) in his work Asylums. There Goffman shows how overwhelming the structuring processes of total-institution frameworks like mental hospitals and prisons can be in shaping human psychological responses such as extreme fear, anxiety, conformity, and resistance. Similarly, the institutions of racial segregation--including these ostensibly desegregated schools set in a still intensely segregated society--have often had a similar impact on their "inmates." Today much more social science research needs to examine how racist institutions operate in detail and how they cause those they oppress such untold pain, as well as how those targeted resist effectively or ineffectively.

Young Children: Doing and Learning Racism As we have seen, much of the problem in school desegregation has come at the hands of white children, yet we know relatively little about what these children know about racism, how they learn it, and how they use that knowledge. We know little about how they learn, and teach each other, racist ideas and behaviors. Much educational research misses how early this education in racist ideas begins.

Let me illustrate using accounts from a recent book by Debra Van Ausdale and Feagin (2001). Van Ausdale adopted a "least-adult" research approach (i.e., researcher as children's playmate) to gather rich field data over eleven months in a multiracial daycare center. Here is one account of racist action:

Carla, a three-year-old white child, is preparing for resting time. She picks up her cot and starts to move it. The head teacher, a white woman, asks what she is doing. "I need to move this," explains Carla. "Why?" asks the teacher. "Because I can't sleep next to a nigger," Carla says, pointing to Nicole, an African American child, on a cot nearby. "Niggers are stinky. I can't sleep next to one." Stunned, the teacher's eyes widen, then narrow as she frowns. She tells Carla to move her cot back and not to use "hurting words" (p. 1).

A young child not only makes use of the harsh racial epithet but also knows what it means. In this ethnographic work, we have come to see that young children like Carla are not the unsophisticated, imitative pre-operational children portrayed in much mainstream children's and educational literatures. While Carla doubtless draws racist material from her social-group sources, she does more than imitate. She uses what she knows to evaluate what is likely a situation not previously encountered. We also see here too that in the everyday world "racism" is not just about views and attitudes, but is also about action and racial-role performance. This child is acting out the status-role of a white person who does not wish to be near a black person.

Here is another example from our ethnographic data on the fifty children in this daycare setting:

During play-time Renee, a four-year-old white child, pulls Lingmai, an Asian American three-year-old and Jocelyn, a four-year-old white child, across the playground in a wagon. Renee drops the handle and stands still, breathing heavily. Lingmai jumps from the wagon and picks up the handle. Renee admonishes her, "No, No. You can't pull this wagon. Only white Americans can pull this wagon." Renee has her hands on her hips and frowns at Lingmai. Lingmai tries again, and Renee again insists that only "white Americans" are permitted to do this task (pp. 104-105).

Here a four-year-old white child performs the racial status-role of “white American” with some skill. Putting together the concepts of “white” and “American,” she uses the combined concept and term to exclude a child of color. Not only do young whites often know how to attack and exclude "racial others," but they usually have some sense of their white identities. In this case, Renee realizes that whiteness means power and acts aggressively on this understanding. Group membership and performances are central to children in the development of their racial understandings. The negative impact on the Asian American child was clear from the fact that after the incident she ran crying across the playground. The incident likely left her with painful memories. Significantly, very little research on schools has examined such aspects of children's lives there, particularly the lives of children of color, who often become targets of hostile and discriminatory white actions even a very young ages.

Interestingly, when we have recounted such incidents as these to white adults, almost all have expressed surprise that such young children could act in this way. Indeed, they have often said that young children are naïve innocents and could not possibly know much about thinking or doing racism, or that they have simply imitated adults and older children. Our data flatly contradict this widespread notion among many researchers and in the general public. What most such adults do not understand is that children are very active in creating their own social ("play") groups and their own social worlds within which much learning about racial/racist matters takes place. Clearly, there is a great need for more social science research in the natural settings where children live on a daily basis and where racist performances are routinely given.

The Many Costs of Racism

Costs of Racism: Legacies of Legal Segregation In these various school desegregation accounts we see the many ways in which children of color pay a heavy price for racial oppression. Adults of color also pay a heavy price. Indeed, another area where there is serious need for sociological and social psychological research is that of the costs of racial hostility and discrimination. Some of these costs represent a continuation of damage done by racist practices of the recent past. Past racism, such as that of legal segregation, often continues to have a heavy impact, in part because of the importance of black collective memories historically to black survival, and in part because of continuing discrimination at the hands of whites today.

One of my current students, Ruth Thompson-Miller (2004), has recently done in-depth interviews with fifty older African Americans about their life experiences under the legal segregation. The level of pain and fear inflicted on these African Americans has yet to be fully told. Most of her interviews include at least one commentary along the lines of this statement from a 78- year- old man:

Now it is wonderful to be able to speak my opinion and say what I have to say. You see everything was bottled up for so many years, that I could not say what I wanted to say. "Yes sir, no sir, yes sir, no sir, Mr. White Folks." You see I don’t have to do that no more . . . . Back then I didn’t have no voice. Back then you had to be humble . . . very humble. Because you didn’t want them to come along and try to burn the house down and your family on account of you…. You just couldn’t prove it. If you try to live big, they would destroy you. The message was they didn’t want you to make the money. You were living too high. [Whispers] You were living too high. You'd better not live too high. [Why didn’t the community come together?] Scared! [Emphasized]. Scared. You want to know the truth, scared. They could get hurt. [lowered voice] Definitely, get hurt.

This man vividly describes his experiences under conditions of racial totalitarianism where he had no voice and where the community was of necessity fearful in the extreme. Servility was enforced by the violent terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. Note the lasting effects of extreme subordination, for the respondent still feels the pain and indicates fearfulness in his manner of speaking. Most social science analyses of racial matters do not consider seriously the existential perspective of oppressed others. When African Americans assess the reality of being black in institutions controlled by whites, they generally do not speak in abstract concepts but rather voice in specific or graphic terms the oppressiveness of routinized encounters with whites.

In another interview, a former domestic worker became nervous and tense as the interview progressed. She was sweating profusely when she made this comment about her experiences under legal segregation:

During the time that I was coming up, we were always taught to always--especially to a white person--they would tell us always be obedient to them. “Yes sir, no sir, yes madam and no madam . . ." [Emphasized] That is the way I tried to bring my children up too. Always be obedient. Be obedient to them. Never be sassy. I tried to tell them, “I have been obedient, and I have listened to a lot of instruction that I got from my fore parents. I don’t know how I would have brought you all up if I had not been obedient.” My dad and my step mom would always have us together, and he would talk to us about different things and how to be obedient . . . . [to] white people during that time, "[or] they may find you dead somewhere."

There was much fear in her face and reactions as she then took hold of her grandsons who were nearby, and said, “That is why I tell my grandbabies to always be obedient. That is what I tell them.” And they listened to her with rapt attention. Here we see the multigenerational impact of racial oppression—the ways in which oppression's impact in one generation gets transmitted to subsequent generations.

An intense fear of whites was evident in most of these interviews. Their fearfulness can be seen not just in their words but expressed feelings and unconscious reactions. Here the structuring processes of the total-institution framework of legal segregation were, and to some extent still are, life-consuming and overwhelming. The institutions of segregation had a severe impact on those they oppressed. Clearly, more social science research needs to examine how these totalistic racist institutions have operated and how their effects continue to the present day--as well as to explore how reparations might be paid for such high levels of racial oppression.

More Costs of Racism: The Current Scene As we have seen, racial oppression is not just a matter of the past and of some ancient costs. These costs of racism are very real today. Let me illustrate from an exploratory research project that I recently completed with another former student, Karyn McKinney (2003). In our project we did five focus groups with middle-class African Americans in the Midwest and the South.[iv]

Here are two of many dozens of examples given by focus group participants who responded to broad questions about the impact of discrimination on their lives. The first is from a dental assistant, who described her reaction to a black child's experience recently at a private elementary school:

[An] incident happened to my girlfriend's daughter about a month or so ago. She's in a Christian school. And the teacher told the kids that black, black children are born with their sin. And the little girl went home and she asked her mother, she said, “sit down,” and told her mother. She said “I just wish I was white.” And she's only nine, she's nine. . . .And [the] little girl had said what the teacher had said, and she said “Black people were born of sin, let's pray for the black people.” And now the little girl is really scarred, but you don't know how scarred, and that she is scarred. . . . and that kind of stuff makes you angry. You take a little child, that doesn't know anything about prejudice, and this is the way you plant it, and all these other little Caucasian heads, why? And you plant it in all these little white children's heads, so their parents not gonna go back and correct them! . . . So when he grows up, this is how he's gonna feel about black people, regardless of what somebody tells him or her (Feagin, 2000, p. 28-29).

Once again we observe the negative impact on black children of white discrimination in desegregated school settings, this time action by a white teacher and quite recently. The teacher may be alluding to the old religious myth of Noah condemning his (supposedly black) son Ham's descendants to be servants of whites. In this account the racial hierarchy is clear; a white teacher has the social power to cause a black child much psychological damage. This account is also thoroughly social. We see the impact of the social myth that likely lies behind the teacher's racist performance. And there is the negative impact on the child's self-image, which impact is further expanded as the child reports first to her mother, who then relates the account to a friend. That friend, the respondent, is still angry about the damage done to a child.

We also observe the spreading impact of contemporary racial oppression in this account from a black engineer in another focus group. The group had just discussed the reality of what one participant called the "eight whole hours of discrimination" African Americans experience, and this engineer commented on the impact of recurring discrimination he had experienced at work:

One of the things, though, that really has had an effect on my family personally was, me having [less] time to really spend with my son. As far as reading him stories, talking, working with him, with his writing, and, all of that. And those things really, really hurt us, and it hurt my child, I think, in the long run, because he never had that really . . . . I know when, when the program [where discrimination took place] was really, really running, some, some days I would come home and I would have such excruciating headaches and chest pains that I would just lay on the bed and put a cold compress on my head and just relax. Thank God I got him through that period. . . . And by the time I come home, I'm so stressed out. And he runs up to me, and you know I give him a hug, but when you're so stressed out, you need just a little period of time, maybe an hour or so, just to unwind, just to relax, you know? . . . . to just watch the news or something, to kinda unwind and everything. So it definitely affects . . . and you know you're almost energy-less. . . . And then by the time you get home, you have your family. So, by the time you kinda unwind a little bit to get ready to go to upstairs, you haven't handled responsibilities. . . (McKinney & Feagin, 2003, pp. 108-109).

Once more we observe the strongly negative impact of discriminatory behavior by whites within U.S. institutions, in this case a corporate workplace. An individual's frustration and pain from discrimination rarely occur in isolation, for in many focus group accounts there is a domino effect. Chest pains and headaches are associated with a serious loss of energy, which in turn has further consequences for responsibilities and interactions in family settings. The drain of energy from discrimination at work takes a heavy toll on the activities of black Americans not only in their individual lives but also on others in their family and community contexts. So far as I can tell, McKinney and I are the first social scientists to theorize seriously and examine empirically the high personal and energy costs of racism for African Americans. We are influenced regularly in this work by the sharp experiential intelligence, the experiential theorizing of our respondents.

Modern Racism and Backstage Racism

Even this brief survey of selected recent research indicates that the central problem of "race" in the United States is white America--whites' racialized belief systems, their racist ideology, their racialized emotions, their proclivities to act in discriminatory ways individual and collectively, and their ways of institutionalizing racism.

Opinion surveys of white attitudes toward black Americans have shown a significant decline in many racist attitudes since the 1940s, and this has led many white popular and scholarly analysts, as well as much of the white public, to view racism as no longer a serious problem. However, social science researchers have long raised questions about this apparent liberalization of white attitudes. Several studies have explored the ways in which whites have accommodated to a more desegregated society. Thus, David Sears (1988) and John McConahay (1986) have identified "symbolic racism" and "modern racism"—which involves among other things the white view that serious discrimination no longer exists for black Americans and thus the latter are making illegitimate demands for social change. Old-fashioned white views favoring aggressive segregation and extreme racist stereotypes have largely been replaced by modern racism in which proponents accept desegregation but resist large-scale changes necessary for integration. Sociologist Lawrence Bobo (1988) has suggested that whites' support for changes in racist patterns ends when changes endanger their standard of living. Moreover, surveying college students on three major campuses, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tyrone Forman (2001) discovered that racial attitudes expressed by whites on short-answer survey items were frequently rather different (usually more liberal) than those expressed in in-depth interviews on similar questions. Experimental research has also suggested major discrepancies in white attitudes as measured in surveys and white actions in experimental settings.

These apparent contradictions in white attitudes expressed in different settings suggest a need for much research on what is going on in white heads and behaviors. Thus, Leslie Houts (2004) and I are in the process of researching the socio-spatial ecology of white racist practice. We are examining how whites think and act in regard to racial language, ideas, joking, and other behaviors in what we call the "frontstage" and the "backstage." With the cooperation of college professors in various regions of the country, we gathered in 2002-2003 journals from 670 white college students in which we asked them to record over a 2-4 month period any "racial events" that they experienced--that is, any event that reflected a “racial issue, image, and understanding.”[v]

I will cite here three journal accounts to illustrate the dramatic character of these findings in regard to the current contours of racist thought and practice. In this first journal account, a white female college student in the Midwest discusses returning to meet old high school friends:

I went over to the Smith farm this afternoon around dinnertime. I went to a small farm school, graduated with 42 kids, all white and mostly farmers. The farmers that I graduated with are all racist, everyone knows this—it’s not a secret. Todd asked how school was going and then asked when I was going to let them come down and visit. I said, “I don’t know guys, one of my suitemates is black, you would have to be nice to her.” All the guys said, “Black!?!” Like they were shocked that I could actually live with someone of another color. Then David said, “Now why would you go and do that for?” Then they agreed that nothing would be said if they came to visit and then started to talk about some fight they had gotten into with some black kids in town.

In the backstage with just white friends, these mostly male friends expressed very negative responses to the idea of a black roommate. Yet, they indicated to her that they would not say anything to the woman if they came to visit, where they would be performing in the frontstage. As in other journals, this young woman also makes it clear that her white friends, though racist, are “really nice guys.” There is recurring commentary in the journals on the "niceness" of whites who take racist action and make racist commentaries—which is not seen as contradictory.

Central to the backstage are networks. In friendship and kinship settings it is usually white men who are central officiants in racist rituals, while both men and women play the roles of acolytes and passive bystanders. Typically, these arenas of racist performance are reserved for friends or relatives, though in some settings just being white gives a stranger the racial credentials to be in the "safe" backstage. One white male college student in the Midwest discusses getting together with five other white men recently:

When any two of us are together, no racial comments or jokes are ever made. However, with the full group membership present, anti-Semitic jokes abound, as do racial slurs and vastly derogatory statements. Jewish people are simply known as “Hebes”, short for Hebrews. Comments were made concerning the construction of a “Hebeagogue” — a term for a Jewish place of worship. Various jokes concerning stereotypes that Jewish people hold were also swapped around the gaming table-- everything from “How many Hebes fit in a VW beetle?” to “Why did the Jews wander the desert for forty years?” In each case, the punch lines were offensive, even though I’m not Jewish. The answers were “One million (in the ashtray) and four (in the seats) and ‘because someone dropped a quarter’, respectively. These jokes degraded into a rendition of the song “Yellow,” which was re-done [in our group] to represent the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It contained lines about the shadows of the people being flash burned into the walls (“and it was all yellow” as the chorus goes in the song).

This student continues his journal entry with another example of racialized joking:

A member of the group also decided that he has the perfect idea for a Hallmark card. On the cover it would have a few kittens in a basket with ribbons and lace. On the inside it would simply say, “You’re a nigger.” I found that incredibly offensive. Supposedly, when questioned about it, the idea of the card was to make it as offensive as humanly possible in order to make the maximal juxtaposition between warm- and ice- hearted. After a brief conversation about the cards which dealt with just how wrong they were, a small kitten was drawn on a piece of paper and handed to me with a simple, three-word message on the back. . . . no group is particularly safe from the group’s scathing wit, and the people of Mexico were next to bear the brunt of the jokes. A comment was made about Mexicans driving low-riding cars so they can drive and pick lettuce at the same time.

Note the critical social dynamic here, for the student indicates that this type of vicious racist joking and bantering only takes place when more than two men together. In their journals, numerous students explained that blatant racist expressions were more common when more than two whites were interacting. A key factor here is building social relationships and networks by using old racist stereotypes and images like those long used by older generations of whites. Also, in the longer account, internal mumblings of disapproval by a few in the group did not stop the ongoing racist commentaries.

In another setting, a white graduate student reports meeting with five other white college graduates for an outing on a Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday weekend:

A few of the MBA graduates were expressing their happiness about having a long 3 day weekend ahead. One of the male MBA graduates (who I will call Rob), who is now employed at a large corporation earning more than 6 figures per year as a stock trader, was standing at the front of the room. Rob stated, “Yes, since it is ‘Martin Luther King day’ [with a sarcastic tone and smirk on his face, he used his fingers in a quoting motion to emphasize these words] then we get an extra day of diving.” He continued by saying, “You know, if we killed one of them [African Americans] everyday we could get the whole year off.” At this point I turned my head to face Rob. A couple of people in the room knew me and were aware of what I study and my antiracist views. The other two male graduates from the MBA program responded to Rob’s comment with smiles and boisterous laughing. The other female looked toward the floor and remained silent. After the room went quiet again I responded by saying, “Look Rob, I would rather you not start with this tonight OK, I can’t believe you just say something like that, do you even think about what that means, I don’t want to hear it,” as I began shaking my head in disgust. “Oh, Judy it’s just a joke,” he replied. He continued by saying, “You know, Judy studies these things, she studies race and all that.”

Only one of the six, the respondent, is still a college student. The others, in their late 20s and early 30s, are working in the business world, where their incomes and educational level (all have college degrees and four have done graduate work) places them in or near the top social echelon of all Americans. This account suggests that racist rituals backstage involve different categories of response, in this case again to racist joking. There are four different responses from just six whites. To use a ritual metaphor, one is the central officiant in racist speech-action. Two other white men are acolytes, while one woman (and apparently the other man) are passive bystanders. Only one white person, a woman, remonstrates with the officiant. Note the common way of framing racist speech-actions as "joking." Clear too are the distinctive positions of the women in the setting, who are not as active as the men. In most student journal accounts, young white men are the central officiants in backstage performances of racism, while women are more likely to be acolytes or passive bystanders.

In these accounts whites—centrally, in each case, white men--draw on pre-existing stereotypes that they have likely learned over years of interaction in groups of friends and relatives, or perhaps from the media. All the central actors are well-educated, and all are devoting much time and energy in developing and perpetuating racist commentaries within important social groups. Such interactive, repetitive bantering seems critical not only for learning and doing the status-role of "white man" but also for social bonding among white men, for maintaining important networks. We see too how the "safety" for doing racism backstage is created not only by the privacy of the space but also by the numbers present (more than two).

One challenge to understanding white-male performances in groups such as these lies in explaining how they get to be so unsympathetic and hostile to other racial groups. Most backstage performances seem like drills in racist ritual in which certain influential white men lead others, both men and women, in developing or reinforcing unempathetic and hostile understandings about and proclivities toward racial outgroups. White participants in racist rituals reiterate their views and repeat their performances on a regular basis. Such repetition likely wires racist understandings deeply into their brains. Ritualistic behavior helps to create and perpetuate white-male-centered groups with similar interests and to thereby maintain not only the groups over time but to reinforce, communicate, and perpetuate an array white-male proclivities and privileges. In this fashion, these men socialize and cement new men (and women) into the "white fraternity." They are socializing people not only into racist attitudes but also into racialized group ties, norms, and boundaries. If a white person refuses to go along, moreover, like the woman in the last account, she will likely suffer some punitive boundary maintenance actions, even to the point of being treated as a "race traitor." White men in ritualized actions are not just revealing stereotypes, for they are practicing important social ties that shape or create the contours and rhythms of much group life.

Conclusion

Clearly, we need much more social science research of this type, research that looks much below the surface of everyday life--the surface reality that conventional research methods like surveys reveal. These subterranean realities are a critical part of this society. Social science analyses need to deal more centrally with how the hard realities of everyday life--especially those faced by Americans who are not straight white affluent men--are hidden from public discussion much of the time. Everyday life for many Americans--and much of that is oppressive--must be lived below the level of public recognition. This view of a subterranean, at least half-hidden, everyday society is rather different from that in the dominant theories and conceptions in the social sciences.

In addition, this growing body of empirical research, part of which is cited above, indicates that contemporary racism is still very deeply imbedded in the foundation of this society. It is systemic and encompasses the white attitudes, emotions, practices, and institutions that are integral to the long-term exploitation and domination of African Americans and other Americans of color. At this systemic racism’s heart are practices of whites that deny Americans of color the dignity, opportunities, positions, and privileges generally available to whites. Today as in the past, whites—especially white men--are central to this racist system, and they maintain it and perpetuate it through networking and socialization strategies that take place in both frontstage and backstage locations. Too often social scientists pussyfoot around on racial matters and study them in their less controversial (from a white point of view) forms of "prejudice" or "bias," and not in terms of everyday racial discrimination and institutionalized racism. As I see it, social scientists of all types need to study racism much more as an institutional and systemic social reality than as a individual matter of prejudice and stereotyping. There are indeed many un-researched and under-researched topics whose pursuit would not only enlighten the country in regard to systemic racism but also lay the groundwork for dismantling that system.

In my experience, interdisciplinary approach is very fruitful in this regard, both in regard to the theoretical understandings one develops to guide and interpret research and in regard to the methods chosen for empirical field research. Let me conclude quote the Allport once again:

[The] modern social psychologist [and, more generally, social scientist] . . . needs immersion in theories (both macro and micro). Above all he needs an ability to relate his problem to the context . . . psychology, often in sociology or anthropology, sometimes in philosophy or theology, occasionally in history or in economics, frequently in the political life of our day . . . [Social psychology] thrives best when cross-cultivated in a rich and diversified intellectual garden (Allport, 1968, pp. 18-19).

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[i] I am indebted to Hernan Vera for helpful comments, to Danielle Dirks for research assistance, and to Ruth Thompson-Miller and Leslie Houts for sample quotes from their research.

[ii] I draw here on Feagin, J. R., & Barnett, B. M. (in press). Success and failure: How systemic racism trumped the Brown v. Board of Education decision. University of Illinois Law

Review.

[iii] This summarizes a longer discussion in Feagin, J. R., & Barnett, B. M. (in press). Success and failure: How systemic racism trumped the Brown v. Board of Education decision. University of Illinois Law Review.

[iv] We used informants in several communities as starting points to suggest African Americans with experience in white workplaces. We secured thirty‑seven participants.

[v] We left instructions vague so students determined what was a "racial event." Sixty percent of the journals are from the South, with 40 percent from other regions. The first two quotes and a little analysis are drawn from Houts, L. A. (2004). Backstage, frontstage interactions: Everyday racial events and white college students. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Florida, Gainesville.