Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-wxvwp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-15T01:55:47.808Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Discrimination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2020

Philippe Fontaine
Affiliation:
École normale supérieure Paris–Saclay
Jefferson D. Pooley
Affiliation:
Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

Chapter 5 recounts how social scientists, during and after the war, tended to treat discrimination as a system-one with interlocking legal, political, and economic dimensions. By the 1950s systemic frameworks had receded in favor of more individualistic explanations for the “race problem.” The study of discrimination remained strikingly cross-disciplinary, but the lens of prejudice-individual attitudes in the aggregate-was newly prominent, supported by philanthropy and Cold War discretion. Gary Becker brought microeconomics to discrimination in this period, too, in an approach that, like the psychology of prejudice, stressed the causal priority of dispositions. The announcement of formal equality in the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s complicated the study of race for the balance of the century. Systemic accounts were partially revived, and evidence for persisting racial inequality was widely documented. But causal factors proved harder to identify. In the wake of de jure segregation, even radical critics of “institutional racism” and “internal colonialism” conceded that discrimination's effects were easier to describe than its causal dynamics. Quantitative sociologists and economists deployed a cascade of measures that demonstrated disparate outcomes, though again without clear explanatory accounts rooted in discrimination.

Information

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×