Systemic Racism

Posted On July 4, 2020

Please feel free to help by adding on other studies you have found, but please also try to make sure they’re peer reviewed and by a credible source.

Resources and their summation:

Housing

• https://www.thisamericanlife.org/512/house-rules#play 
• https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-514_HDS2012_execsumm.pdf
  • 8000 testers of differing races tried to rent or buy homes
  • Renting
    • Black people = 11% less likely to be told about units and 4% less likely to be shown units
    • Hispanics and Latinos = 12% and 7%
    • Asians = 9% and 6%
  • Buying
    • Black = 17% and 17%
    • Hispanics = n/a
    • Asians = 15% and 18%

• Work and Education

• Call back rates
  • NBER 
    • For every ad (1300), gave 2 high quality resumes and 2 low quality resumes, one of each assigned a random black name and the others randomly assigned a white name
    • Whites = 10 resumes/1 callback
    • Blacks = 15/1 (i.e. 50% gap in callback rates)
    • White name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience
    • Higher Quality Resume difference for whites receive 30% more callbacks than whites with lower quality resumes, however the same cannot be said for blacks
      • As quality goes up, the gap between white and blacks widen with resume quality
      • This not only makes it harder for a black person to find a job, but also to improve their employability
    • Amount of discrimination does not differ between different occupations or industry categories; also federal contractors who are constrained by affirmative action laws do not discriminate less and neither do larger employers or employers who explicitly state that they are an “Equal Opportunity Employer”
    • Living in a better neighborhood does not decrease the gap of discrimination between blacks and whites
    • Might be worth noting that employers are varied between doctors, principals, prosecutors, etc. – they don’t think they’re biased, but they are – important to be aware
    • https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 
• College Professors
  • What Happens Before?  A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations 
    • Emailed more than 6500 professors in 250 schools
      • All emails were the same
    • Women and minorities systematically less likely to get responses
    • When they did get responses, they were less likely to be positive
    • Chinese and Indian students, more than any other group, were discriminated against the most
    • Even when the faculty is diverse, the discrimination is the same
    • Privates schools, discrimination is worse than public
    • Little discrimination in humanities, more in science, and a lot in business school (25% gap in email responses)
  • https://www.npr.org/2014/04/22/305814367/evidence-of-racial-gender-biases-found-in-faculty-mentoring 
  • https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=661105029067075102072084127123100075036068033079045035081067021018025120121124118118096007116103015125020083111087103119101096006001026038048127014124125117112120066047075020005099015118117073090117100089126115003024118105008109117102073104089018069&EXT=pdf 

School Discipline 

• Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) Data Snapshot: School Discipline
  • Out of School Suspension
    • Black student = 18% of student preschool population – 48% more than once OSS
    • White student = 43% – 26% 
    • Boys = 54% – 82% 
  • High School Suspension
    • Black = 3 x’s the rate of white (5% of white vs 16% black)
    • American Indian and Native Alaskan = 2% while making up 1% of population
  • Suspension of Girls of Color
    • Black = suspended 12% = more than any other girl ethnicity groups and most boys
    • American Indian and Native Alaskan = 7%
    • White boys = 6%
    • White girls = 2%
  • http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rulesforengagement/CRDC%20School%20Discipline%20Snapshot.pdf
• https://www.npr.org/2020/03/14/815778434/new-documentary-examines-how-black-girls-are-disproportionately-punished-in-scho?fbclid=IwAR0c5L2IV_Hy-GYk1Q7PyDa22ghWzrdTPsGDNSoXoTXlCALlMm0Kew5F7XQ 
• Important to note that these suspensions do not accurately reflect how often people do something worth getting suspended over, rather they reflect how biases dictate responses to those behaviors and how these biases put minority groups at a disadvantage.

Criminal Justice

• Getting Pulled Over – controlled for the idea that maybe one ethnicity group spends more time on road than another
  • Nearly 100 million traffic stops 
    • State patrol stops – black = .11 – white = .08 – Hispanic = .05
    • Municipal police stops – black = .23 – white = .17 – Hispanic = .11
  • Search rates 
    • State patrol – black 3.8% – white = 1.6% – Hispanic = 3.6%
    • Municipal – 15 – 11 – 13 
  • https://5harad.com/papers/100M-stops.pdf
• Weed Usage
  • Black = 3.73 x’s more likely to get arrested for possession, despite whites and blacks using it at same rates
  • https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel2.pdf 
  • https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-blackwhite-marijuana-arrest-gap-in-nine-charts/?arc404=true 
• Incarceration 
  • 1/3 black; 1/6 latino; 1/17 white
  • 1/18 black females; 1/45 hispanic female; 1/111 white female
  • Crack cocaine = 5 grams = 5 years vs powder cocaine – 500 grams = 5 years – 80% black = crack cocaine (2010, congress raised crack cocaine 28gram while powder remained at 500
  • Reduce black male wage earnings by 44% – (side note – doesn’t take a study to realize the cyclical effect of being poor and having one parent incarcerated)
  • Perception differences on whether drug laws enforced fairly – 79.4% of white = yes – 33.7% of black = no
  • https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/addressing-racial-disparities-in-incarceration/
• Racial Bias in Death Sentencing
  • National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science program
    • 2000 study in which 348 jury-eligible participants individually viewed one of four identical versions of a staged capital penalty trial that varied only by the race of the defendant and the victim, found that blacks were 4 times more likely to be sentenced to death than the white defendant, especially in cases in which there were cross-racial conditions
    • 2009 same study, 500 participants, same results
    • 2011 same study, 500 participants, same results.  
    • https://www.jstor.org/stable/23011959?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents 

Police Brutality

• Shooting game
  • A researcher from the University of Colorado Boulder developed a game that puts the player in the position of being a police officer who randomly encounters black and white men, some armed and others holding objects like wallets, sodas, and cellphones.  The player is given a short amount of time to shoot.  Regardless of whether they were white, black, young, or old, black people were shot more often than white people
  • http://psych.colorado.edu/~jclab/pdfs/Correll%20et%20al.%20(2007).pdf
  • You can play the game yourself here:  http://psych.colorado.edu/~jclab/FPST/demo/canvas/testPrograms/st_v.1.html

Health

• Empathy Gap
  • Pain on Skin
    • 61 participants shown a total of 12 clips with 6 different actors, 2 white, 2 Asian, 2 black – each race had one male and one female.  
    • Clips had zoomed up to hands of different colors.  The hands were then touched either by eraser or by needle 
    • Hooked participants to node to measure physiological responses and found that when same race was touched by needle, elicited more of a response.  So if participant was white, participant made more stress responses when white person was touched, then Asian people, and lastly black people.
    • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108582/ 
      • Downside = sample size – black isn’t measured
    • https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(10)00515-4?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982210005154%3Fshowall%3Dtrue 
      • Included violet hand, which held a great empathetic response than that of the opposite color
        • Controlled for no racial prejudices or stereotypes
      • Downside – study is from Italy 
    • https://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/26/8525 
      • The OG 
    • https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40167-013-0002-4
      • Shows that it’s cultural specific – those raised in a one-race nation feel empathy to the same degree for both their race and the race of the nation (China)
    • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945215000672
      • Shows that other-race contact reduces empathy gap
• Pain disparity between patients and doctors (this one is a little annoying to read due to having to click on each link for each page, but it’s worth it)
  • 216 physicians – 455 participants 
    • 33% nonblack = physicians think pain was overestimated
    • 47% black
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2576060/ 
• Maternal mortality rate
  • Black
    • 2.8-3.3 times higher than white 
  • American Indian/Alaska Native
    • 1.7-3.3 
  • https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6835a3.htm?s_cid=mm6835a3_w#T1_down
• Care and treatment – belief of biological differences between blacks and whites
  • Part 1
    • 121 participants without medical education had to rate how painful a stimulus would be if happened to them and then had to rate how painful it would be to another person (randomly given black or white)
    • 73% of the participants rated black people as having biological differences to white people in that the black body is stronger than the white body
  • Part 2
    • 418 medical students 
    • 50%
  • https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/113/16/4296.full.pdf 
• Prescription differences
  • Meta-analysis of 34 different studies 
    • Hispanics/Latinos 
      • No difference for any analgesia
      • 22% less likely than white counterparts to get opioids
    • Black/African Americans
      • 22%
      • 29%
  • https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine/article/13/2/150/1935962 

General

• Dark = Bad, Light = Good
  • 2009, study found that when shown three pictures of Obama, one manipulated to make his skin lighter, one darker, and the other untouched, people who voted for him thought the real picture was the lighter skinned one, while people who didn’t vote for him thought the real picture was the darker skinned one.  This was also done for unknown people of color with the same results.
  • https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2009/11/20/0905362106.full.pdf 
• Trust
  • https://www.pnas.org/content/108/19/7710
    • Participants took IAT by rating photographs of varying faces of different races and rating them 0-9 on how trustworthy they were. White faces were deemed more trustworthy
  • • Then the participants were given money with which they had a choice in giving the person photographed a portion of that money of which would be quadrupled with the option of the photographed person keeping the money or giving away half of it. This game measured the trust the participants had in the person photographed. IAT scores positively correlated with trust. White people were trusted 80% more than black people.
• White legislators don’t respond to black names
  • http://ftp.iza.org/dp9290.pdf 

Include summary of implicit bias/unconscious bias

Articles and Videos from which I got links to studies or ideas to look up specific studies:

http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/05/racism-is-real/ – Video that lists a few studies

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/nicholas-kristof-is-everyone-a-little-bit-racist.html – Article that lists a few studies

https://www.cracked.com/article_21822_5-studies-that-prove-racism-still-way-worse-than-we-think.html – Wayyyy more that 5 studies

https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/racial-empathy-gap-people-dont-perceive-pain-in-other-races.html – Has empathy-related studies