R
Race relations
Definition Social, political, and economic
interactions among persons associated with
different racial and ethnic groups, often
involving patterns of prejudice, discrimination,
and subordination
In both the United States and Canada, the 1990’s saw sig-
nificant controversies, changes, and developments in race
relations.
During the 1990’s, social scientists and journalists
wrote numerous books and articles about continu-
ing conflict, negative stereotypes, and discrimina-
tory treatment. Activists with liberal and left-wing
perspectives often argued that aggressive steps were
needed in order to reduce the continuing effects of
institutional racism and “white privilege.” Moder-
ates and conservatives, in contrast, tended to be sat-
isfied with the goal of promoting equal opportuni-
ties for individuals, and they sometimes focused
on allegations of “reverse discrimination.” Although
radical right-wing organizations had much less
public support than in the past, the Ku Klux Klan
and other white identity groups continued to de-
nounce the idea of racial integration and to pro-
claim the inherent superiority of persons of Euro-
pean ancestry.
The United States Throughout the 1990’s, Ameri-
can society was growing increasingly diverse in race
and ethnicity. By the end of the century, African
Americans made up about 12.1 percent of the popu-
lation, whereas the growing Hispanic population
reached 12.5 percent, of which almost half also clas-
sified themselves as white. Persons of Asian ancestry
represented 3.6 percent, and Native Americans
made up less than 1 percent. The conceptualization
of a binary black-white society was clearly anachro-
nistic, even though most discussions of race rela-
tions tended to focus on that aspect of the topic.
The Supreme Court issued a number of decisions
that were more conservative than in previous de-
cades. When considering court-ordered busing to
desegregate schools, for example, the Court allowed
communities to terminate mandatory programs af-
ter making good-faith efforts at desegregation. A
Harvard University study, directed by Gary Orfield,
found that largely because of these decisions, class-
rooms were becoming increasingly segregated.
White students were particularly segregated by race;
by 1999, they attended schools in which more that 80
percent of the students were white and less than 20
percent were from other racial groups. Experts dis-
agreed about the consequences of this renewed seg-
regation. Many conservatives argued that racial inte-
gration had little to do with the quality of education,
whereas most liberals insisted that segregation inevi-
tably meant less equality in funding schools and
fewer opportunities for children of diverse back-
grounds to learn to live and work together.
The decade saw much controversy over the mat-
ter of equal opportunity versus parity in employ-
ment and admissions to competitive schools. One
contentious issue was the use of employment qualifi-
cations that had a “disparate impact” on historically
disadvantaged groups. After the Supreme Court
modified its previous, more liberal rulings, Congress
reacted with the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which re-
quired employers to demonstrate that all qualifica-
tions were closely connected to performing the par-
ticular job. Affirmative action programs, which
usually included limited preferences for minorities
and women, were often denounced by opponents as
unfair to white males. In the case ofAdarand Con-
structors v. Peña(1995), the Supreme Court ruled
that all racial preferences in government-financed
programs were inherently suspect and must be eval-
uated by the criteria of “strict scrutiny,” which made
it much more likely that they would be struck down
as unacceptable. In California, voters approved a
1996 referendum, Proposition 209, which outlawed
all race-based preferences in state-sponsored activi-
ties. Two years later, voters in Washington State
passed a similar law. Although affirmative action