The Experience of Job Discrimination

Paper Summary:

The writer explores the time before the 1960s and 1970s when in both north and south, there were jobs that were typically filled by African-Americans, such as chauffeur and domestic, while there were many more jobs that were exclusive to European-Americans. The paper outlines a method of research that includes interviews with elderly African-Americans in order to understand what form of discrimination they faced.

From the Paper:

"Reskin (2000) noted that many social scientists assumed that it they pointed out that workplace discrimination existed and persisted, policy-makers would make the effort to eradicate it. When this did not happen, sociologists turned to thinking more intensively about why discrimination occurs. One of the prominent theories was conflict theory which held that the beneficiaries of systems of inequality have a vested interest in protecting their privileges and they do so by managing the resources that they control to exclude group members from marginalized groups. For Reskin (2000), however, this theory was inadequate, primarily because they cannot identify the processes through which group motives give rise to such outcomes nor can they explain variation in employment discrimination among workplaces. Her contention is that our concept of discrimination needs to expand to acknowledge that it results primarily from non-conscious cognitive processes, as well as from deliberate negative treatment."

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