Читать книгу Asian America - Pawan Dhingra - Страница 42

Institutional discrimination refers to the unequal treatment of groups based on the normal functioning of institutionalized practices. For example, until 1967 it was illegal in many US states for a judge to marry an Asian American to a white person. An individual judge may have been quite sympathetic to such marriages but, because anti-miscegenation laws forbade such marriages, s/he rarely performed them. In this way, even non-prejudiced persons discriminate. Anti-miscegenation laws are an example of direct institutional discrimination, of institutionalized practices designed to treat groups unfairly.

Much institutional discrimination is indirect, the product of unintended practices. This can be the hardest type of discrimination to overcome. For example, women typically have to or choose to take charge of the “second shift,” that is, the domestic work of cooking, childcare, and cleaning (Hochschild 1989). This limits their ability to be promoted in the workplace. Many businesses value “face time,” that is, measuring an employee’s contribution to the office by how often s/he is present. Because those in charge of the second shift cannot put in as much “face time,” they can miss out on many promotions (Weeden 2005). This is indirect institutional discrimination. “Face time” is not premised on a sexist notion in the same way anti-miscegenation laws are premised on racialized and sexist thinking, but the effect is discriminatory towards women as a group because it fails to recognize that women take on the work of childcare in families disproportionately more than do men. As another example of indirect institutional racism, individuals convicted of felonies have trouble voting in many states, even after being released from prison and while on parole. This supposedly race-neutral law disenfranchises black and Latinx men to a disproportionate degree, for within the current police, court, and prison industrial complex, they are arrested and convicted of such crimes at a higher rate than others (Alexander 2010). In these cases, people can discriminate without knowing and without even being prejudiced.