Institutional practices can produce racial disparities without any racist intent

Evidence

Even in the absence of actors who are vulnerable to the effects of bias, institutions themselves can be biased by having policies and structures in place that harm some people and favor others, even in unintended and unanticipated ways. This is what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has referred to as “racism without racists” (2003). For example, policies that specifically apply to people who have criminal records (e.g., probation/ parole searches by police) can seemingly have nothing to do with race. To the extent that Blacks are disproportionately incarcerated in this country (see Alexander, 2010; Western, 2006), however, those policies will have a disparate impact on the Black community. In turn, the institutional actors responsible for carrying out those policies will enact racial disparities, even if unwittingly. In this way, bias can be built into structures and institutions and can contribute to how individuals police and are policed. Though this might sound bleak, the encouraging news is that by changing institutional priorities, norms, practices, and policies, we can mitigate disparities. In the same vein, an underappreciated, and perhaps underutilized, function of institutions is their ability to put into place policies and practices that act as guard rails that curb the expression of potentially problematic individual tendencies, such as implicit bias. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 398

Focusing too narrowly on individuals and on particular officers’ motives and actions obscures the larger forces at play, namely, institutions and institutionally supported practices that prompt officers to rely on implicit stereotypes when judging suspicion and potential criminality (Epp et al., 2014). As representatives of powerful institutions, police officers are themselves bound up in systems and are subject to many policies, practices, and laws that put them in a position to produce and reproduce racial disparities and systemic inequality—albeit subtly and inadvertently—without personally endorsing disparity or inequality. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 351

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and defines Bonilla-Silva’s ‘racism without racists’ concept.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s legal-institutional bias research; connects to Alexander’s ‘The New Jim Crow’ and the structural-vs-personal bias distinction central to the conviction-vs-measured-bias question. — connects to: Segregated space silently perpetuates stratification even with no active racists
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 398; Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 351