8.4 Explaining Racial and Ethnic Inequality
Dr. Tim McLean
Learning Objectives
- Understand cultural explanations for racial and ethnic inequality.
- Describe structural explanations for racial and ethnic inequality.
Why do racial and ethnic inequality exist? Why do Black individuals, Latinx individuals, Native Americans, and some Asian Americans fare worse than white individuals? In answering these questions, many people have some very strong opinions.
Biological Inferiority
One long-standing and discriminatory explanation is that Black individuals and other people of color are biologically inferior: They are naturally less intelligent and have other innate flaws that keep them from getting a good education and otherwise doing what needs to be done to achieve the American Dream. White Americans have historically used this belief to justify slavery, lynchings, the harsh treatment of Native Americans in the 1800s and beyond, and lesser forms of discrimination. In 1994, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray revived this racist view in their controversial book, The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), in which they argued that the low IQ scores of African Americans, and of poor people more generally, reflect their genetic inferiority in the area of intelligence. African Americans’ low innate intelligence, they said, accounts for their poverty and other problems. Although the news media gave much attention to their book, scholars condemned the book’s argument as a racist way of “blaming the victim” (Gould, 1994).
Cultural Deficiencies
Another racist explanation of racial and ethnic inequality focuses on supposed cultural deficiencies of African Americans and other people of color (Murray, 1984). These “deficiencies” include a failure to value hard work and, for African Americans, a lack of strong family ties, and are said to account for the poverty and other problems facing these minorities. As we saw earlier, more than half of non-Latinx whites think that Black individuals’ poverty is due to their lack of motivation and willpower. Ironically, some scholars have suggested they found support for this cultural deficiency view in the experience of many Asian Americans, whose success is often attributed to their culture’s emphasis on hard work, educational attainment, and strong family ties (Min, 2005). If that is true, these scholars say, then the lack of success of other people of color stems from the failure of their own cultures to value these attributes.
Whether people of color have “deficient” cultures remains hotly debated and highly controversial (Bonilla-Silva, 2009). Social scientists in general find little or no evidence of cultural reasons for minority communities and say the belief in cultural deficiencies is an example of symbolic racism that blames the victim. Citing survey evidence, scholars find that poor people of color value work and education for themselves and their children at least as much as wealthier white people do (Holla