Encyclopedia of Sociology

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

of job channeling indicate the effects of intention-
al and indirect racial discrimination over several
centuries.

Studies have shown that housing segregation
remains very high in U.S. metropolitan areas, North
and South. This is true for both low-income and
middle-income African Americans. Change in resi-
dential balkanization has come very slowly. Census
data indicate that from 1980 to 1990 there were
only small decreases in the level of residential
segregation in thirty major U.S. metropolitan are-
as; fewer changes than for the previous decade.
Two-thirds of the black residents of the southern
metropolitan areas and more than three-quarters
in northern metropolitan areas would have to
move from their present residential areas if one
wished to create proportional desegregation in
housing arrangements in these cities (Massey and
Denton 1993, pp. 221–223). U.S. cities remain
highly segregated along racial lines.

At all class levels, African Americans still face
much discrimination. After conducting pioneer-
ing interviews with forty black women in the Neth-
erlands and the United States, social psychologist
Philomena Essed (1990) concluded that racial dis-
crimination remains an omnipresent problem in
both nations. She showed that black accounts of
racism are much more than discrete individual
accounts, for they also represent systems of knowl-
edge that people collectively accumulate to make
sense of the racist society. Research by U.S. social
scientists has confirmed and extended these find-
ings. Lois Benjamin (1991), Kesho Y. Scott (1991),
and Joe Feagin and Melvin Sikes (1994) conducted
in-depth interviews to move beyond the common
litany of black underclass pathologies to docu-
ment the racial discrimination that still provides
major barriers to black mobility in U.S. society.
These field studies have revealed the everyday
character of the racial barriers and the consequent
pain faced by blacks at the hands of whites in
employment, housing, education, and public
accommodations.

Researchers Nancy Krieger and Stephen Sid-
ney (1996) gave about 2,000 black respondents a
list of seven settings where there might be dis-
crimination. Seventy percent of the female re-
spondents and 84 percent of the male respondents
reported facing discrimination in at least one area.

The majority reported discrimination from whites

in at least three settings. Several national surveys

as well have found substantial racial discrimina-

tion. For example, a 1997 Gallup survey (1997, pp.

29–30, 108–110) inquired of black respondents if

they had faced discrimination in five areas (work,

dining out, shopping, with police, in public trans-

portation) during the last month. Forty-five per-

cent reported discrimination in one or more of

these areas in that short period.

Discrimination for most black Americans en-

tails much more than an occasional discriminatory

act, but rather a lifetime of thousands of blatant,

covert, and subtle acts of differential treatment by

whites—actions that cumulate to have significant

monetary, psychological, family, and community

effects. African Americans contend against this

discrimination in a variety of ways, ranging from

repressed rage to open resistance and retaliation

(Cobbs 1988). This cumulative and persisting dis-

crimination is a major reason for the periodic

resurgence of civil rights organizations and pro-

test movements among African Americans (see

Morris 1984).

ANTIBLACK RACISM AND OTHER

AMERICANS OF COLOR

During the 1990s numerous researchers from

Latino, Asian, and Native-American groups ac-

cented their own group’s perspective on racial and

ethnic relations and their experience with dis-

crimination in the United States. They have often

criticized a binary black-white paradigm they feel

is dominant in contemporary research and writing

about U.S. racial-ethnic relations (see Perea 1997).

From this perspective, the binary black-white para-

digm should be abandoned because each non-

European group has its distinctive experiences of

oppression.

However, a few scholars (Feagin 2000; Ani

1994) have shown the need to adopt a broader

view of the long history and current realities of

U.S. racism. The racist foundation of the nation

was laid in the 1600s by European entrepreneurs

and settlers as they enslaved Africans and killed or

drove off Native Americans. By the middle of the

seventeenth century African Americans were treat-

ed by whites, and by the legal system, as chattel