How do organizations reproduce racism while apologizing for it? We address this question using a racialized decoupling perspective, examining how organizational apologia discursively disconnects formal commitments to race neutrality from actual anti-racist actions. Analyzing a data set of apology statements issued in the United States, we show that beneath recurring apologetic narratives that acknowledge offense, deny intent, and signal diversity lie three key dynamics that (1) center racialized emotions, (2) preserve white ignorance, and (3) promote abstract liberalism. Through these dynamics, organizations, respectively, hierarchize reactions, deflect accountability, and project virtue-all in ways that distance themselves from the need for change. These apologies ultimately serve to neutralize the momentum of racial critique, functioning as myth and ceremony that allow organizations to appear good and non-racist while maintaining existing racial structures. We conclude by suggesting ways forward.

Racism, in both the popular imagination and academic conceptualizations, is often characterized as an act of commission. Scholarship sees racism as the actions of individuals, organizations, and states whose choices and policies disadvantage marginalized groups. Discrimination is conceptualized as actions that deny access to housing, work, schooling, or other resources, or as differential treatment once people of color gain entrance to white-dominated spaces. Studying racism as acts of commission has provided insight into the emergence and persistence of racialized exclusion. Yet, focusing disproportionately on commission may downplay long-standing claims about the “structural,” “institutional,” or “systemic” aspects of racism, which can be effectively reproduced through strategic inaction or omissions. This special issue inverts the dominant logic in the study of racism, arguing that scholars should pay greater attention to racism as an act of omission or choosing not to act. As the articles in this special issue show, conceptualizing the racism of omission provides a theoretical bridge between individual and structural accounts because once processes of racial exclusion are institutionalized, they are perpetuated through normalized inaction.

This review provides 10 actionable recommendations for advancing the scientific study of structural racism through theoretically grounded and empirically robust measures and methods. By offering conceptual and analytical clarity, these recommendations aim to enhance research rigor on the structure and function of racism. For each recommendation, we ( a ) delineate key theoretical principles tied to specific features of structural racism, ( b ) evaluate the strengths and limitations of existing measures and methods, and ( c ) propose best practices for measurement and modeling that align with theory and rigorous methodologies. Given the complex, multifaceted, and dynamic nature of structural racism, we emphasize the necessity of embracing epistemological and methodological pluralism. Scholars are encouraged to integrate insights through triangulation by leveraging diverse theoretical frameworks, varied data sources, and a wide array of methods. The review concludes by addressing pressing challenges and identifying opportunities for innovative research to deepen our understanding of structural racism and its enduring impacts in racialized societies.

A more inclusive society begins with imagining audacious alternatives to today's systems, argues a sociologist

A more inclusive society begins with imagining audacious alternatives to today's systems, argues a sociologist.

Victor Ray on serving up sociology.

This article develops the concept of racialized burdens as a means of examining the role of race in administrative practice. Racialized burdens are the experience of learning, compliance and psychological costs that serve as inequality reproducing mechanisms. To develop this concept, we examine administrative burdens in the US state from the theoretical perspective of racialized organizations. Using examples from attempts to access citizenship rights—via immigration, voting and the social safety net—we illustrate some key points. First, racialized burdens combine control of access to resources and ideas about racial groups in ways that typically disadvantage racially marginalized groups. Second, while still promising fair and equal treatment, racially disproportionate burdens can be laundered through facially neutral rules and via claims that burdens are necessary for unrelated reasons. Third, racialized burdens emerge when more explicit forms of racial bias in policies or administrative practices become illegal, politically untenable or culturally unacceptable. Racialized burdens neatly carry out the “how” in the production of racial inequality while concealing, or providing an alibi for, the “why.”

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewThe Death of Affirmative Action? Racialized Framing and the Fight against Racial Preference in College Admissions. By J. Scott Carter and Cameron D. Lippard. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021. Pp. viii+216. $45.95 (paper).Victor Erik RayVictor Erik RayUniversity of Iowa Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 129, Number 1July 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724753 Views: 97Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

This article contributes to the symposium on Meer's The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice. I highlight Meer's contributions to ongoing debates over the fragility of racial progress and how white supremacist policy and ideology have become normalized. During a moment of rising global nationalist movements maintaining a realist perspective about racial progress is imperative. However, realism about the depth and power of racist structures does not mean abandoning hope that harm-reducing policies are possible. I conclude by highlighting Gowayed's recent scholarship on differing state responses to incorporating refugees, showing that some policies of racial states - while far from perfect - can reduce relative harms.

Importance Hospitals do not collect or share data tracking their policing and security activities despite their reliance on police and security personnel, including armed officers. Thus, little is known about how hospital security is associated with patient and staff safety. Objective To examine the harms exerted by health care–affiliated police and security personnel. Design, Setting, and Participants For this qualitative study, data were collected using a systematic Media Cloud search for US news media coverage from January 2011 to May 2022. A total of 18 987 articles on policing and hospitals were screened and a content and thematic analysis of articles that met the search criteria was conducted, which involved incidents that revealed harm to patients, patients’ families, and staff. Data were analyzed from October 2022 to April 2023. Main Outcomes and Measures Incident year, incident location (hospital name, city, state), survivor and victim characteristics (race and ethnicity, presence of mental illness), and a narrative description of the incident focusing on outcomes of harm exerted by police and security personnel in the health care setting. Results A total of 48 unique stories across 25 US states were included. The median (range) year published was 2017 (2009-2022). Harms reported to have been perpetuated by health care–affiliated police and security personnel were identified within 5 domains from 48 unique incidents: (1) patients shot by police or security personnel (17 patients); (2) patients subject to excessive use of force (17 patients); (3) patients arrested (7 patients); (4) patients subject to sexual assault (2 patients); and (5) hospital personnel or those considered collateral damage shot, injured, or arrested (5 individuals). Most survivors and victims were Black, although the race and/or ethnicity of involved individuals was not routinely reported across the news stories. Mental illness was the most documented medical condition among patients injured or killed by health care–affiliated police and security personnel. Conclusions and Relevance This qualitative study of US news media found that police and security personnel in hospitals were reported to have perpetuated harm via excessive force, sexual assaults, injuring patients and health care workers, and fatal shootings. Compounded by a lack of transparency and accountability mechanisms, this may represent an underrecognized manifestation of structural racism at the organizational level. Policy suggestions include introducing accountability measures, deescalation techniques, and removing arms from hospital security personnel to reduce harm and fulfill health care’s healing mission.

‘Everyone you kill in the line of duty becomes a slave in the afterlife’ (Quoted in Pérez 2022). This ostensible joke from an anonymous cop was unearthed during a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) investigation following officers’ brutal beating of Rodney King. Using deadly serious racist humour, the jest seamlessly connects the structural racism of the plantation with the racialized sadism of contemporary policing. The joke’s invocation of the continuities between plantation and prison – America’s premier racist institutions – was perhaps unintentional. Abolitionists would recoil at laughter over these horrors while acknowledging the underlying truth of carceral continuity. Racist humour is facilitated by (and often reveals) underlying structures of domination. Raúl Pérez’s (perfectly titled) Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy is a powerful explication of white supremacist humour. Joining American sociology’s recent Du Boisian turn (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Morris 2015), Pérez’s analysis mines an underused gem from the famous passage in The Souls of Black Folks (1903) on double consciousness. Du Bois noted that whites’ ‘amused contempt’ was an essential emotional feature of racism, central to both the construction of Black Americans as ‘a problem’ and to forging white solidarity. Pérez uses this Du Boisian gem of amused racial contempt to craft a theory of humour as a boundary creation and maintenance tool. Opposed to theories that treat ethnic humour as if it can be decontextualized from racial (and colonial) histories, Pérez’s theory of amused racial contempt shows jokes can undermine social solidarity and further white supremacist goals. Whites bond by laughing with each other and laughing at nonwhites. Pérez’s theory provides a powerful caveat to scholarship on the rise of colourblind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2010). Stigmatizing verbal expression of racism and reducing the use of slurs in public life was a major civil rights victory. In response to this stigma, racist ideas are often expressed through dog whistles and racially evasive language (Ray 2022). The plausible deniability inherent to the medium makes racist humour a partial exception, allowing overt racism to be expressed and enjoyed. After all, taboo-bending and edginess are the nature of jokes. The medium’s features allow jokers to deny, or even invert, responsibility for giving offence. ‘Part of what makes racist humour so powerful and insidious is that it

Hosted and co-sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University in the U.S., the 2022 Center for Institutional Courage: Racism, Sexual Violence, and Institutional Courage Workshop (The Workshop) was held on 18 March 2022. Gathering 27 scholars and advocates, the first half of the day consisted of research presentations on institutional courage (Freyd), the theory of racialized organizations (Ray), and cultural betrayal trauma theory (Gómez). The latter half applied this basic knowledge through a fireside chat discussion of institutional courage in action across inequalities and institutions: employing anti-racist approaches in research with Black families (Weathington), addressing campus sexual violence with male college athletes (Tracy), tackling salary inequity in academia (Delva), and addressing racism and sexism in the workplace using the small wins model (Nishiura Mackenzie). The goals of both The Workshop and our editorial include foci on institutionalized racism and sexual violence, as well as tangible, systemic change through institutional courage (Freyd, 2014, 2018) regarding racist and sexist inequalities across institutions. As such, our editorial follows the above format, with a closing message of validation, hope, and perseverance through institutional courage.

This essay makes three points on the contemporary racial backlashes' impact on racialized organizations. First, Derrick Bell's notion of interest convergence—which argues that diversity policies did not spring from the goodness of white people's hearts but were a face‐saving political necessity—helps to explain why the current assault on racially ameliorative policy has been so effective and why the retreat from diversity may worsen. Conservative activists are attempting to force interest divergence, as the historical conditions leading to affirmative action and diversity policy have disappeared. Second, Powell's decision in Regents of University of California versus Bakke, which made diversity orthodox, was facilitated by interest convergence. Diversity emerged as a deeply reformist organizational strategy designed to manage civil rights activists' revolutionary calls for a fully inclusive society. Third, interest divergence and the retreat from diversity have major implications for deepening racial inequality in organizations. By attempting to ensure interest divergence, contemporary right‐wing movements hope to make the currently implicit white dominance of mainstream organizations (Ray 2019b) explicit again.

Journal Article Review of “The Racialized Social System: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory” Get access By Ali Meghji United Kingdom. Polity Press, 2022. 182 pages. https://www.wiley.com/en-sg/The+Racialized+Social+System:+Critical+Race+Theory+as+Social+Theory-p-9781509539956. Victor Ray Victor Ray University Of Iowa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 101, Issue 4, April 2023, Page e10, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soac146 Published: 03 January 2023 Article history Received: 22 November 2022 Accepted: 30 November 2022 Published: 03 January 2023

In 2021, The American Association of Medical Colleges released a framework addressing structural racism in academic medicine, following the significant, nationwide Movement for Black Lives. The first step of this framework is to "begin self-reflection and educating ourselves." Indeed, ample evidence shows that medical schools have a long history of racially exclusionary practices. Drawing on racialized organizations theory from the field of sociology, we compile and examine scholarship on the role of race and racism in medical training, focusing on disparities in educational and career outcomes, experiences along racial lines in medical training, and long-term implications. From the entrance into medical school through the residency application process, organizational factors such as reliance on standardized tests to predict future success, a hostile learning climate, and racially biased performance metrics negatively impact the careers of trainees of color, particularly those underrepresented in medicine (URiM). Indeed, in addition to structural biases associated with otherwise "objective" metrics, there are racial disparities across subjective outcomes such as the language used in medical trainees' performance evaluations, even when adjusting for grades and board exam scores. These disadvantages contribute to URIM trainees' lower odds of matching, steering into less competitive and lucrative specialties, and burnout and attrition from academic careers. Additionally, hostile racial climates and less diverse medical schools negatively influence White trainees' interest in practicing in underserved communities, disproportionally racial and ethnic minorities. Trainees' mental health suffers along the way, as do medical schools' recruitment, retention, diversity, and inclusion efforts. Evidence shows that seemingly race-neutral processes and structures within medical education, in conjunction with individuals' biases and interpersonal discrimination, may reproduce and sustain racial inequality among medical trainees. Medical schools whose goals include training a more diverse physician workforce towards addressing racial health disparities require a new playbook.

In the late 20th century, a group of activists, legal scholars, and practitioners started writing about a key concern: the persistence of racial inequality despite the formal legal changes wrought by the Civil Rights Movement (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). These scholars formed a school of thought, Critical Race Theory (CRT), undermining the race-neutral pretentions of the law. Drawing on analyses of key legal cases like Brown v. Board (see Bell, 1980, 2005), these scholars show the persistence of racism in the United States. As an explanatory framework, CRT’s utility goes well beyond the legal system, explaining both change and continuity in the racial order. Insights from CRT have shaped scholarship in the fields of education (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 1998), philosophy (Mills, 1997, 2017), and a host of other fields. Although CRT has made inroads with sociologists, inspiring incisive analyses of the state (Bracey, 2015), legal institutions (Moore, 2008), and historical changes in racial ideology (Bonilla-Silva, 1997), CRT is not yet a reigning sociological paradigm.

We argue that empirical sociology would benefit from a greater engagement with critical race theory (CRT). In this introduction, we outline four steps to the empirical application of CRT in sociology: (1) understanding that social science is not value neutral, (2) using CRT to inform research design and methodology, (3) investigating racism at multiple levels of analysis, and (4) empirical data and analysis should uncover the relational aspect to racism. The studies in this special issue demonstrate how CRT and social science cross empirical boundaries in fruitful collaboration to document the reproduction of racism in the 21st century.

The year 2020 saw the largest social movement in response to the police killings of Black people and anti-Black racism in U.S. history. As a result, medical schools and professional societies such as the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges are reckoning with their role in perpetuating racial inequality and the impact of structural racism on medical training. Whether these efforts will translate into meaningful change has yet to be determined. Success depends on a deep understanding of the fundamental role racism plays in how medical schools function and an acknowledgment that current organizational structures and processes often serve to entrench, not dismantle, racial inequities. Drawing on racialized organizations theory from the field of sociology, this article gives an overview of scholarship on race and racism in medical training to demonstrate how seemingly race-neutral processes and structures within medical education, in conjunction with individuals' biases and interpersonal discrimination, serve to reproduce and sustain racial inequality. From entrance into medical school through the residency application process, organizational factors such as reliance on standardized tests to predict future success, a hostile learning climate, and racially biased performance metrics ultimately stunt the careers of trainees of color, particularly those from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine (URM). These compounding disadvantages contribute to URM trainees' lower matching odds, steering into less competitive and lucrative specialties, and burnout and attrition from academic careers. In their commitment against structural racism in medical training and academic medicine, medical schools and larger organizations like the Association of American Medical Colleges should prioritize interventions targeted at these structural barriers to achieve equity.