Race, Racism, and Diversity

• Race is a socially constructed classification system based on phenotypic categories like skin, eye, and hair color.
• Racialization is the social, historical, and political process of categorizing, perceiving, and treating individuals or groups as belonging to a particular racial category, often involving "othering."
• Race is a social construct because racial categories are not biologically determined but are created and maintained through social, political, and historical processes.
• Racism is a system of power that constructs and enforces racial hierarchies through individual biases, institutional policies, and social norms, thus shaping access to resources, opportunities, and rights.
• Diversity refers to the presence of differences in lived experiences, identities, and perspectives within a group or space, encompassing visible characteristics and differences in thought and background.
• Equality means everyone receives the same treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement, while equity means everyone receives fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement in all areas of life.
• Equity is achieved when everyone receives fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement.
• Tokenism is the appearance of inclusion without any real meaningful changes, norms, policies, or actions.
• Stereotypes are overgeneralized beliefs about a group of people.
• Prejudice is a judgement or opinion formed before all facts are known, usually based on stereotypes.
• Discrimination refers to negative behaviors or actions toward members of a group based on stereotypes and prejudice.
• Bias is a disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea, thing, or person.

Functionalism

• Functionalism views society as a system of interdependent parts working together.
• It emphasizes shared norms reinforced by institutions to create social order.
• Functionalists think about race in terms of how it contributes to social cohesion and dysfunction
• Racial and ethnic groups create solidarity through shared culture, but inequality creates dysfunction.

Conflict Theory

• Conflict theory focuses on power struggles, class divisions, and inequalities in society.
• Based on Marxist theory, it highlights the division between the wealthy (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat).
• Conflict theorists view race as a site of struggle where dominant groups maintain power by oppressing racialized groups.
• Dominant groups are reluctant to relinquish power economically, symbolically, and culturally.
• Organizations perpetuate racial domination by masking racial inequalities in their structures and practices.
• Sociology emphasizes institutional discrimination and minor forms of discrimination that contribute to racial disparities.
• Perceived discrimination influences individuals' lives.

Critical Race Theory (CRT)

• CRT views racism as normal or ordinary in society.
• Interest convergence is the idea that advances in racial equality only happen when they align with the interests of dominant groups.
• Race is a social construct.
• Intersectionality and anti-essentialism
• Voice or counternarrative
• Exploitation and Advantage
• Demonizing Groups justifies colonialism, discrimination, exploitation.
• Covert Discrimination: Subtle forms of discrimination are often overlooked.
• Slow Change
• Equality of results
• Discourses: The ways young middle-class individuals discuss inequality.
• Mobilization should include everyone.
• Problematic discourses should be countered.
• More research is needed on race, racialization, and racial inequality.
• Activism should occur in spaces we frequent.

Intersectionality

• Developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, and Nakano Glenn.
• Useful in service provision, activism, academic discourse, and understanding victimization.
• Black women are excluded by both gender and race.
• Feminism and anti-racism need rethinking.
• Contextations consider power along racial and gender lines.
• Its vague and open-endedness is a positive attribute.
• It is dynamic and ever-evolving, applicable in new settings and research questions.
• The term faces challenges, weaponization, or watering down.
• Visible minority women in engineering face compounded discrimination.
• They experience microaggressions and stereotypes.
• Women develop strategies to resist or navigate these barriers.

Individual Discrimination

• Overt discrimination is blatant, while implicit discrimination is less apparent.
• Bias is learned through socialization.
• All individuals can be biased, regardless of race or ethnicity.
• Experiencing bias and microaggressions leads to mental and physical health consequences.
• Cognitive bias is a strong preconceived notion based on available information, including confirmation, in-group, attribution, and availability biases.
• Unconscious biases have a significant impact.
• They are internalized from early childhood.
• Microaggressions are brief, everyday exchanges that send messages to individuals that they are outsiders.
• Verbal microaggressions
• Behavioral microaggressions
• Environmental microaggressions
• Microaggressions are difficult to talk about and report.
• Training and education
• Mental strategies
• Exposure
• Intergroup contact
• Developing a preference for similar others
• Higher contact between similar people
• Microaggressions are harmful.
• Experiences such as feeling like an "alien in own land," invisibility of race, and invalidation of interethnic differences are damaging.
• Hiring is based on cultural matching.
• A commonality between evaluator and candidate can spark a relationship, an unconscious process.
• Race becomes infused with emotion.
• Informal networks of power can exclude racialized individuals from decision-making.

Race and Childhood & Education

• Diverse classrooms offer academic performance benefits, resources, future health and income benefits, and diverse networks.
• Inter-group contact is important for addressing bias.
• Educational settings may be a powerful arena to address inequality.
• Refers to the sorting of students into different educational tracks or groups based on perceived ability or achievement.
• Criminological study about differential association.
• Lareau Research: Idea of consercultervation rather than natural growth
• Cultural capital in a particular way
• Institutional biases and racialized practices in the classroom contribute to disproportionate punishment of marginalized students.
• Teacher bias contributes to the disproportionate punishment of Black students.
• Immigrants see education as the best way for class mobility in the US.
• Latino and racialized students may face challenges in higher education.
• Structural solutions: after-school programs, nutritional food, increased training, mental health supports, and reduced teacher-student ratios

Race and the Workplace

• The work world is a central location for experiences of discrimination.
• A large percentage of Black Canadians perceive racism in the workplace as a problem.
• Work organizations are critical locations for the investigation of complex inequalities.
• Life course approaches: Advantages and disadvantages can compound over the life course.
• Human capital: Value and knowledge you bring to an institution.
• Race differences: Devaluing of human capital of racialized individuals.
• Black-sounding names are significantly less likely to get a callback
• Increased credentials do not eliminate racial barriers in callbacks.
• Some individuals choose to whiten resumes.
• Individuals may be less likely to whiten their resume when see DEI statement
• Asian individuals perceived to be less foreign
• Black individuals perceived to be less political
• Subjectivity is detrimental at the interview stage.
• There are a multitude of barriers once on the job.
• Potential biases exist in promotion decisions.
• Models of promotion are affected by bias in promotion settings
• White collar and low skilled work

Race and the Criminal Justice System

• One’s comportment and behaviour, how an individual acts and is perceived
• Racism and discrimination exist at a structural level.
• Company training that if suspect flees into neighbourhood, instead of following, police told to stop, assess situation, call backup before making impulsive decision.
• Stop and Frisk Policing
• Followed a tough on crime approach pushed by goverment and policy fearing increased crime.
• Drug crimes have the greatest racial disparities.
• Tough-on-crime approach from the war on drugs led to over-policing of minority neighborhoods.
• Higher implicit race bias increases the likelihood of shooting an unarmed Black individual.
• Higher levels of implicit bias in neighborhoods increase shootings.
• Complex histories exist between racialized groups and the police.
• It emerged from a history of colonialism and slavery.
• Procedural justice and community policing show potential promise in policing including: voice, fairness, respect, and trustworthiness.
• Algorithms and structural conditions are used as proxies for predicting criminality.
• Detention while awaiting trial is disproportionately greater for racialized individuals
• Imprisonment is a destabilizing force.
• The likelihood of going to prison can be greater than going to college.
• Critical of losing the right to vote and emphasizes structural and intergenerational inequalities.
• Demographics of the local legal profession matter.
• The important role of lawyers
• A lack of racial diversity leads to greater racial disparities in sentencing.
• More diverse representation of lawyers mitigates bias.
• Black individuals without criminal records have equal callbacks with white individuals with a criminal record.
• Ban the box initiatives
• Vocational and academic programs while incarcerated
• Employment is one of the strongest predictors of desistance.