Resources on Structural Racism from Social Science Space and Beyond
Structural Racism & Inequality
Resources from Social Science Space and Beyond
- The very roots of social and behavioral science lie in examinations of inequality and social ills, and efforts drawn from research and theory to ameliorate these wicked problems. This inquiry has and continues to offer some of this scholarship’s highest highs (and has at times provided some of its lowest lows), with work on racism, ‘otherness,’ inequality, and structural failures in societies commanding scholarly attention.
- Here at Social Science Space, SAGE Publishing’s community site, we aim to hold up a mirror, and a microphone, to the social and behavioral science community, curating its insights, understanding its infrastructure, and logging its aspirations and frustrations.
- The following articles related to structural racism and institutional violence have appeared at Social Science Space or are recommended by us. They have been written by the members of the community itself – social and behavioral scientists and their scholarly organizations.
Resources from SAGE Publishing | Other resources
Additionally, you can visit our page on Black History Month.
We also recommend our curated collection of some of the most important work across social science disciplines, Anti-Racist Social Science Books and Articles. The list of articles and books, broken out in various disciplinary sections, was generated through surveys of social scientists and by consulting expert advisors. We consider this page as a jumping-off point and we welcome engagement and discussion and suggestions for additional titles to list – the page includes a call on how to suggest additions. Institutions
How have the building blocks of society — family, school, government and industry — created or co-opted discriminatory ideals and woven them into everyday life? These articles look at how social and behavioral research has identified the underlying issues and suggested ways forward for systems, governments and policing.
Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System
The relationship between citizens and their criminal justice systems comes down to just that – relationships. And those relations generally start with […]
American Sociological Association Statement, Guidebook Back Teaching about Race and Racism
The American Sociological Association recently released a statement “urg[ing] public officials, educators, and lawmakers to avoid suppressing knowledge, violating academic and free speech, and prohibiting scholars and teachers from discussing and teaching about the roles of race and racism in society.
Report Proposes Post-Bacc Programs to Increase Diversity in Academia
In the report “Post-Baccalaureate Bridge Programs: An Underutilized Tool for Strengthening Faculty Diversity,” authored by Senior Advisor Eugene Tobin, Senior Researcher Daniel Rossman, Senior Analyst Christy McDaniel, Vice President of Educational Transformation Martin Kurzweil and Managing Director Catherine Bond Hill, the underrepresentation of diversity in academia and mechanisms to increase it are discussed.
Incidents
Seemingly permanent injustice comes to be the status quo and improvement as a result comes at a glacial pace. But individual incidents, from murders caught on cellphones to conceptual breakthroughs debuting in courtrooms, can catalyze change. What does social and behavioral science say or suggest as the first draft of history is laid down?
Riots Are Not Just Mindless Violence
Social psychology teaches us that when people riot, their collective behavior is never mindless. It may often be criminal, but it is structured and coherent with meaning and conscious intent. To address the causes of such violence, we need to understand this.
Erica Chenoweth on Nonviolent Resistance
You and a body of like-minded people want to reform a wretched regime, or perhaps just break away from it and create an independent state. Are you more likely to achieve your goals by a campaign of bombings, assassinations and riots, or by mass protests which are avowedly peaceful? Your first step should be to schedule a sit-down with Erica Chenoweth, who has been studying that question since 2006.
Stephen Reicher on Crowd Psychology
“In a sense, you could summarize the literature: ‘Groups are bad for you, groups take moral individuals and they turn them into immoral idiots.’ I have been trying to contest that notion,” social psychologist Stephen Reicher says in this Social Science Bites podcast, “[and] also to explain how that notion comes about.”
Insights
Experimental inquiry and research is the atomic unit from which all science emerges. These articles share specific findings and research outcomes about human beings and societies that inform our understanding of racism, brutality and inequality.
Charles V. Hamilton, 1929-2023: The Philosopher Behind ‘Black Power’
Political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, the tokenizer of the term ‘institutional racism,’ an apostle of the Black Power movement, and at times deemed both too radical and too deferential in how to fight for racial equity, died on November 18, 2023. He was 94.
Norman B. Anderson, 1955-2024: Pioneering Psychologist and First Director of OBSSR
Norman B. Anderson, a clinical psychologist whose work as both a researcher and an administrator saw him serve as the inaugural director of the U.S. National Institute of Health’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and as chief executive officer of the American Psychological Association, died on March 1.
How African Ubuntu Might Help Decolonize Research
The author and her colleagues identified four practical ways that a complementary use of ubuntu can positively shape how research is done.
Voices
In the end, the community is people, and those people participate in society as citizens, suffering injustices themselves (or perhaps causing them) as they push forward. Hear their stories and cris de cœur.
Jennifer Richeson on Perceptions of Racial Inequality
There is inequality in the United States, a fact most people accept and which data certainly bears out. But how bad do you think that inequality is, say, based on comparing the wealth held by the average Black person in America and the average white person?
Why is Interdisciplinary Research on Race and Racism So Important?
Intersectional problems require interdisciplinary thinking. So when we think about race and racism, it might be worth asking – what are we not seeing by limiting ourselves to a single discipline?
On the Other Side of Racism Awareness: Interviews
Stuck in the US due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, Brendon Fox decided to revisited themes from his doctoral research and conducted some follow-up interviews with young Black men about their racial experiences before, during and after college..
Resources from SAGE Publishing
Drawing from the large repository of pedagogic material on the social and behavioral sciences published by parent of Social Science Space SAGE and available at the SAGE Knowledge platform, here are some free-to-use video and textual resources that can help in the academic study of structural and institutional racism. We also offer a microsite of materials from SAGE-published journals.
Video and Audio Resources
Prejudice & Stereotyping: Experimental Approach
Keon West, a social psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, looks at the question, do people judge Muslims more harshly than white non-Muslims?
Thurston Domina Discusses Inequality & Education
Thurston Domina, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina’s School of Education, discusses inequality and education, particularly how education reinforces and builds inequalities. He highlights research that has had an impact outside of the field, and describes the challenges of studying the sociology of education
Historical Social Construction of Race and Racism
Muzammil Quraishi, a criminologist at the University of Salford, explores the historical social construction of race and how it was socially constructed through the colonial period.
The New Racism in a Raceless Society
Leslie Baker-Kimmons, a sociologist at Chicago State University, examines how race continues to be a social significant component in contemporary America and how society’s attempts to ignore the social significance of race create a new form of racism.
Written Resources
Policing the Police: Privatization as a Means of Oversight
In this case study, Brendan D. Dooley, a criminologist at American University in Washington, D.C., examines the experience of the Black Lives Matter movement and asks if privatizing police forces might serve its goals of reducing police violence.
In this excerpt from The SAGE Encyclopedia of Abnormal and Clinical Psychology, Janice Habarth, a clinical psychologist at Palo Alto University, and Denise Coquia of Palo Alto University, define institutional or institutionalized racism and offer examples of it and the its outcomes.
In this excerpt from the Encyclopedia of Multicultural Psychology, Y. Evie Garcia and Annel Esparza, psychologists at Northern Arizona University, discuss how the idea of internalized racism has expanded beyond its historical roots in the African American experience and look at ways to begin a healing process.
In this excerpt from The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior, Angie Maxwell, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas, looks at and measure the idea of symbolic racism, which she writes “unearthed notions of racial resentment—as it is sometimes called—and a denial of ongoing institutional racism.”
In this excerpt from The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Internet, Nicolas J. LaLone, an information scientist at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, explains how the nature of the Internet allows racist organizations to grow, details the types of racism found online, then looks at how the dissemination of online racism has evolved.
The Legacy of Police Opposition to the Civil Rights Movement for Contemporary American Policing
In this excerpt from The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing, Jonathan Simon, a criminal justice professor at the University of California-Berkeley, examines how increasingly aggressive policing and declining legitimacy of police during the civil rights era in many minority communities has a historical component that has aggravated this dynamic beyond what the structural forces of either crime or inequality might otherwise produce.
“Critical Race Theory” from The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods
As part of the SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods, this resource on Critical Race Theory by Tim Liao, Alan Bryman, and Michael S. Lewis-Beck details what Critical Race Theory is, and what sort of methods researchers in the discipline employ.
This study by Ashley Payne and Denise Winsor specifically looks at how concepts of institutional racism, power dynamics, and personal epistemology are expressed through rap lyrics and how it is represented through experience and expression.
Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies
This handbook by Norman Denzin, Yvonna Lincoln, and Linda Smith outlines indigenous queries and methods.
Researching Race and Ethnicity
This book by Yasmin Gunaratnam provides an innovative discussion of the methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of doing qualitative research that is informed by questions of ‘race’, ethnicity and social difference.
Researching Racism: A Guide Book for Academics & Professional Investigators
This book offers a one stop guide to the meaning of racism, key studies in the field, core methodologies and an agenda for research for the future. Discussing the salient aspects of race and racism in contemporary society alongside methodological and practical considerations of qualitative research in the field, Researching Racism by Rob Philburn and Muzammil Quraishi is not only an original textbook but also a crucial guide for anyone beginning their own research on racism.
Through field notes of each student’s site visits, bus-riding experience, and GIS data, Amalia Dache-Gerbino, David Aguayo, Marquise Griffin, Sarah L Hairston, Christal Hamilton, Christopher Krause, Dena Lane-Bonds and Heather Sweeney aim to provide mixed-method results on spaces of resistance and public transportation access, parts of uneven geographic developments contributing to discourses of U.S. college accessibility in St. Louis.
In this extensive CQ Press piece, Bill Wanlund, freelance writer and former Foreign Service Officer, takes on the question: “Can global protest movements create change?” In doing so, he addresses several other important questions regarding the efficacy of online movements, the impact of coronavirus, etc.
A majority of African Americans believes the United States should make amends for the intergenerational harm caused by slavery and post-Civil War segregation, with some calling for cash payments to descendants of slaves and others favoring programs to help poor communities narrow the economic gap between blacks and whites. In this CQ Press piece, Allen Greenblatt, staff writer at Governing magazine, explores the possibilities for reparations.
In this CQ Press work, Peter Katel, awarded journalist and researcher, attempts to answer the question: “Are U.S. policies discriminatory?”
Digital Sociology in Action: A Case Study of Research on Black Twitter
In recent years, media attention has been placed on “Black Twitter,” a collective composed primarily of African Americans who have managed to effect change through the microblogging platform Twitter. This collection of users has been credited with injecting uniquely Black concerns and perspectives into the national discourse. However, Black Twitter as an entity has not been theoretically contextualized and grounded in empirical research. In this case study, Dr. Roderick Graham, sociologist and criminologist at Old Dominion University, describes how he and his colleague explored this social media phenomenon. The author emphasizes the importance of understanding the way in which Twitter was designed, its architecture, to developing insightful research, and choosing appropriate methods. The author discusses (1) process of conceptualizing theoretically important ideas and operationalizing them, (2) the considerations involved with sampling, and (3) the use hierarchical cluster analysis to draw conclusions about from Twitter data.
Special Report on Reparations for Slavery
A majority of African Americans believes the United States should make amends for the intergenerational harm caused by slavery and post-Civil War segregation, with some calling for cash payments to descendants of slaves and others favoring programs to help poor communities narrow the economic gap between blacks and whites. This CQ Researcher special report from August 2019 explores some of the constitutional, historical and mechanical ideas surrounding the issue.
Other Resources
A blog series from the Brookings Institution on policy solutions to upend structural racism and create a more equitable society for all. Contributors so far include Brookings fellows Camille Busette, Makada Henry-Nickie, Andre M. Perry, and Rashawn Ray.
Brown Lecture in Education Research series
Sponsored by the American Educational Research Association, the annual lecture has since 2004 spotlighted how research can advance understanding of equality and equity in education. The lectureship commemorates the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court took into account scientific research in issuing its landmark ruling.
Smithsonian Resource Master List
Smithsonian Magazine provides a list of over 150 resources covering topics ranging from the historical context of structural racism, protest, intersectionality and education.
National Education Association’s Racial Justice in Education
The National Education Association provides resources for teaching about structural racism and racial justice at varying levels of education.
A Toolkit for Centering Racial Equity Throughout Data Integration
This downloadable PDF from Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania starts with the premise that without a deliberate effort to address structural racism, institutional racism, and unrecognized bias, data integration will inevitably reproduce and exacerbate existing harm. there, the toolkit offers ways to center racial equity and community voice within the context of data integration and use.
Social Science Research Council
The SSRC hosts a number of resources for understanding and addressing racism and inequality. The Inequality Initiative is a series of programs and projects that bring innovative social science analysis to bear on our understanding of the roots and consequences of unequal participation in political, economic, and social systems across the globe. An American Dilemma for the 21st Century is a critical reassessment of and re-engagement with Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944. American Slavery’s Legacy Across space and Time is a research initiative combines qualitative, community-grounded social science with innovative big-data methodologies to bring to light in unprecedented detail how an entire community was transformed by the United States’ legacy of slavery, while also establishing ethical norms for this type of emerging research.
