How Does Racism Effect Us?

Posted in: ECCANDC
As we move into the next decade of the 2000's we are still a nation that struggles with racism within our national and local communities. Take a moment to reflect on how it effects us a group and what we can do to end it forever.

It is time for Change!

Racial discrimination

An anti-discrimination poster in a Hong Kong subway station, January 2005 Racial discrimination is treating people differently through a process of social division into categories not necessarily related to ''race''. Racial segregation policies may officialize it, but it is also often exerted without being legalized.

Researchers, including Dean Karlan and Marianne Bertrand, at the MIT and the University of Chicago found in a 2003 study that there was widespread discrimination in the workplace against job applicants whose names were merely perceived as ''sounding black''. These applicants were 50% less likely than candidates perceived as having ''white-sounding names'' to receive callbacks for interviews. The researchers view these results as strong evidence of unconscious biases rooted in the United States' long history of discrimination (i.e. Jim Crow laws, etc.)[16]


Institutional racism
Further information: Institutional racism, State racism, Racial profiling, and Racism by country
Institutional racism (also known as structural racism, state racism or systemic racism) is racial discrimination by governments, corporations, educational institutions or other large organizations with the power to influence the lives of many individuals. Stokely Carmichael is credited for coining the phrase institutional racism in the late 1960s. He defined the term as ''the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin''.[17]

Maulana Karenga argued that racism constituted the destruction of culture, language, religion and human possibility, and that the effects of racism were:

the morally monstrous destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples.


Economics and racism
Historical economic or social disparity is alleged to be a form of discrimination which is caused by past racism and historical reasons, affecting the present generation through deficits in the formal education and kinds of preparation in the parents' generation, and, through primarily unconscious racist attitudes and actions on members of the general population. (e.g. A member of race Y, Mary, has her opportunities adversely affected (directly and/or indirectly) by the mistreatment of her ancestors of race Y.)

The common hypothesis embraced by classical economists is that competition in a capitalist economy decreases the impact of discrimination. The thinking behind the hypothesis is that discrimination imposes a cost on the employer, and thus a profit-driven employer will avoid racist hiring policies

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