DISCRIMINATION BY DEFAULT: HOW RACISM BECOMES ROUTINE

Vol. 16 No. 6 (June, 2006) pp.431-433

DISCRIMINATION BY DEFAULT: HOW RACISM BECOMES ROUTINE, by Lu-in Wang. New York and London: NYU Press, 2006. 200pp. Cloth $40.00/£27.95. ISBN: 0-8147-9379-7.

Reviewed by Thomas Shevory, Department of Politics, Ithaca College. Email: shevory [at] ithaca.edu.

The premise of Lu-in Wang’s DISCRIMINATION BY DEFAULT is that racism, and the discriminatory actions that flow from it, are not so much the result of intentional or conscious desires to harm as they are the consequence of deeply imbedded social contexts and stereotypes. These encourage or allow ubiquitous everyday discriminatory practices to disappear into invisible patterns of “normal” or “reasonable” conduct. Discrimination becomes the “default” mode of operation by ordinary people, and, perhaps more importantly from a legal perspective, by those with institutional power and authority, such as police officers, prosecutors, judges, and an array of other public officials. As a result of this, the effects of discrimination remain largely hidden from those engaged in discriminatory conduct, and discrimination is very difficult to challenge in a legal system in which “intent” is a primary factor for assigning legal responsibility or blame.

Wang begins the book with several hypothetical scenarios to show how discrimination by default might occur in various contexts. One involves a black couple who become angry and frustrated when a white couple is seated ahead of them while waiting for service at a restaurant. (It turned out that the white couple were “regular costumers.”) Another involves a woman working for a law firm who is placed on a “team,” the leader of which routinely belittles her contributions while also criticizing her for not being more assertive. A third involves an Asian student who is severely disciplined by a professor for not attending class because of a family crisis, while a white counterpart in the class is not, even though his excuse seems less compelling. Wang asserts that “It may be that in each of the three cases the decision maker treated the other person less favorably than he or she should have if that person were of a different race, gender, or ethnicity—but that in none of the three cases did the decision maker intend to do so. It may be, in other words, that each of them discriminated not by design, but by default” (p.4).

Wang then gives us an array of other instances of how defaults tend to serve the interests of institutional forces that are in place and that have power. Computer software defaults are an example, as is Microsoft’s domination of computer operating systems. As Wang states, “Many of us accept almost all of these settings, some because we have no preference otherwise, and some because we don’t realize we have a choice” (p.5). It is the lack of recognition or awareness of what this involves that makes it so powerful. As Wang notes, “In this situation, our failure to take action literally may be the result of our neglect or failure, but acceptance of the default seems for the most part to be neutral or [*432] objectionable. In some cases, the choices made by default may even seem desirable, to the extent that the default setting is viewed as the expected, the best, or the most popular setting” (p.5).

Much of Wang’s attention to legal matters is focused on the criminal justice system. Racial profiling and police abuses of minorities are fertile fields for discrimination by default, and ones in which it can have particularly pernicious consequences. The shooting of Amidou Diallo provides a horrifying example of what can flow from racist conduct that may not be entirely conscious. Following Malcolm Gladwell, Wang considers the officers’ conduct to be the result of mental processes “‘that fall into a kind of gray area, the middle ground between deliberate and accidental’” (p.10). In Diallo’s case, of course, the “default” that allowed him to be viewed as hostile and dangerous had everything to do with race. In American society, whiteness still serves as the default, and an infinite variety of patterns of conduct are defined by its imperatives. The dominance of whites is not unlike the dominance of Microsoft as the default of computer operating systems. “Whites enjoy a market and social environment characterized by networks that increase the initial advantage of being the accepted standard . . . The group’s dominance perpetuates itself ‘naturally,’ through seemingly neutral preferences for language, culture, stereotypes, and credentials that are associated with the standard and exclude those who are, or are perceived to be, incompatible” (pp.12-13). But, of course, the history of racism in the U.S. makes its unraveling much more intractable than eroding Microsoft’s dominance of certain software markets.

The argument that racism is institutionally imbedded and thus difficult to challenge at the level of intentionality is, of course, not entirely new. And the difficulty of proving intentions is endemic to virtually all aspects of the legal system. The virtue and contribution of Wang’s book is that it draws heavily and imaginatively upon numerous social psychological studies to demonstrate how social defaults work in complex and subtle ways to support multiple forms of institutional racism in U.S. society. In a chapter entitled, “Situational Racism,” Wang reveals the myriad ways in which ambiguity of social context can allow for discriminatory actions to be both exercised and disguised. As she puts it, “the myth that certain groups are especially prone to criminal or deviant behavior makes seemingly race-neutral reasons more believable and allows for the apparent separation of racial bias and reasonable suspicion or probable cause” (p.47). In a chapter, entitled “Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes,” she shows how attempts on the part of whites to be seen as non-racist can create a psychological burden that leads to resentment. The chapter on the health care system is especially important, because it deals with aspects of racism that are often ignored while also being at the core of racism’s corrosiveness. In other words, the book does an excellent job of revealing some of the underlying dynamics of racism in a social system that may no longer rely primarily upon graphic racist appeals or gross racist stereotypes to function as a system of power. [*433]

Finding mechanisms to combat racial defaults provides a distinct set of challenges, because in making legal claims “the discrimination in question might not meet the prevailing standard because the perpetrator might not have intended to discriminate or the challenged decision might appear to be justified on nondiscriminatory grounds” (p.135). I agree with Wang, then, that change must occur at the institutional level, and she provides desegregation of hospitals via the financial incentives provided by Medicare as an example of how this can occur (pp.140-141). Given her emphasis on institutional contexts, I was somewhat surprised that Wang did not include a discussion of affirmative action. In fact, this book is a very good argument in favor of affirmative action. In my own view, one of the best ways to undermine the defaults of discrimination in the U.S. would be to diversify an array of institutions: hospital bureaucracies, medical schools, public health systems, all levels of police departments, prosecutors’ offices, jury pools, law school faculties, and so on. I would suggest that discriminatory “defaults” are more difficult to disguise in institutions that practice affirmative action, and that affirmative action is itself a check against unconscious or semi-conscious forms of discrimination.

Wang’s thesis should not be taken as presuming that intentional acts of discrimination have disappeared from American life. Recently the National Fair Housing Alliance (2006) released a study showing that “racial steering” was the “norm” practiced by realtors in the U.S. In 87% of cases where NFHA testers were taken to see properties, steering occurred. Such practices foster broad patterns of segregated housing and all the discriminatory consequences that follow. While such actions may be a “default” in some respects, it is hard to imagine that they do not involve conscious deliberate acts of discrimination. Overt racism is still alive and well in this society.

Finally, it is worth noting that one of the many positive things that this book has to recommend for itself is a very clear writing style that makes complex legal and social science concepts accessible to a wide array of audiences. Given the capacities of some legal scholars to devolve into incomprehensibility for non-specialists, this is no small achievement. As a result, the book would be appropriate for a variety of teaching situations, including undergraduate courses on law related issues, as well as those in which the primary emphasis is not on law, but upon the politics of race. Given the difficulties that white undergraduate students often have of grasping the meanings of institutional racism, the book could serve an important purpose in this context.

REFERENCE:

National Fair Housing Alliance. 2006. “National Fair Housing Alliance Releases Housing Discrimination Data and Denounces Crisis of Segregation.” NATIONAL FAIR HOUSING ADVOCATE ONLINE, 29 May, 2006, http://www.fairhousing.com/index.cfm?method=page.display&pageid=3657 .

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