On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed, black teenager was shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s killing, and the grand jury’s subsequent refusal to indict the officer responsible for his death, sparked national outrage and demonstrations across the country. Pundits and advocates alike saw the incident as evidence of a pervasive problem of excessive use of force by police against black males. In the investigative report that followed the killing, the U.S. Department of Justice documented extensive racial problems with the law enforcement practices of the Ferguson Police Department.
Yet disparities in policing are just one indicator of the racial inequality spread throughout the St. Louis metropolitan …show more content…
Pinpointing the many sources of adaptive discrimination, however, is difficult. This Article contends that it begins with government entities, public and private organizations, and individuals who skirt both laws prohibiting intentional discrimination and the rules of socially acceptable conduct by reconstituting discrimination in less overt forms. Once reconstituted, discrimination persists through ostensibly race-neutral institutional rules, laws, and behaviors that converge around norms of white privilege, racialized class ideologies, and pervasive implicit racial bias. These dynamics—which are a function both of discrimination that we conventionally associate with racial “intent” and the passive reinforcement of its discriminatory effects—create an equilibrium of inequality that continues to deny African Americans, in particular, opportunity, status, and power as a …show more content…
The precepts of adaptive discrimination, however, also urge us to explore discrimination’s broader dimensions. They suggest that we shift from a singular, transaction-based notion of racial discrimination as a form of individual bias, prejudice, and intolerance, and train additional attention on the sources and persistence of systemic disadvantage. Therefore, while we need to dismantle discriminatory policing practices, we need also to find ways to eliminate the underlying systems that dehumanize black life and created the overarching context for Michael Brown’s fatal
Yet disparities in policing are just one indicator of the racial inequality spread throughout the St. Louis metropolitan …show more content…
Pinpointing the many sources of adaptive discrimination, however, is difficult. This Article contends that it begins with government entities, public and private organizations, and individuals who skirt both laws prohibiting intentional discrimination and the rules of socially acceptable conduct by reconstituting discrimination in less overt forms. Once reconstituted, discrimination persists through ostensibly race-neutral institutional rules, laws, and behaviors that converge around norms of white privilege, racialized class ideologies, and pervasive implicit racial bias. These dynamics—which are a function both of discrimination that we conventionally associate with racial “intent” and the passive reinforcement of its discriminatory effects—create an equilibrium of inequality that continues to deny African Americans, in particular, opportunity, status, and power as a …show more content…
The precepts of adaptive discrimination, however, also urge us to explore discrimination’s broader dimensions. They suggest that we shift from a singular, transaction-based notion of racial discrimination as a form of individual bias, prejudice, and intolerance, and train additional attention on the sources and persistence of systemic disadvantage. Therefore, while we need to dismantle discriminatory policing practices, we need also to find ways to eliminate the underlying systems that dehumanize black life and created the overarching context for Michael Brown’s fatal