Institutional Problems for Latinos and Blacks

Institutional Problems for Latinos and Blacks

American inner cities—where many minorities live and thus where minority leaders spend a disproportionate amount of political capital—have been profoundly impacted by a series of sweeping structural changes over the past thirty to forty years.

During the past 20 years or so, a heated debate among scholars, policymakers, and politicians has taken place regarding what is often referred to as reverse discrimination. Reverse discrimination tends to be defined as practices and policies of institutions that discriminate in favor of Blacks, members of various non-White ethnic groups, and in some cases women (Fredrickson, 2007).

Critics such as (Mayers, 2007) argue that such practices and policies grew out of what may have been well-intentioned efforts by institutions to either ensure that they no longer discriminated against Blacks or members of certain ethnic groups or to compensate for past discrimination. Some universities, for example, acknowledge that they had in the past systematically failed to admit qualified Black students solely because of their race. In an effort to make up for this discrimination, they devised plans to admit more Blacks than might have been admitted via the normal admissions process (Barone, 2006).

Other universities were less concerned with past acts of discrimination than with whether their current policies had a negative impact on the admission of Blacks or members of certain ethnic groups, including and especially Latinos. The belief is that Blacks and Latinos are just as intelligent, just as capable as Whites of being admitted to universities, and just as capable of doing well in those universities as Whites, but the admissions numbers suggest that they have not been admitted in numbers proportionate to their numbers in the society or among college-age students. To some, the numbers alone suggest institutional discrimination and require adjustments by ...