essay evaluation discrimination

Essays About Discrimination: Top 5 Examples and 8 Prompts

You must know how to connect with your readers to write essays about discrimination effectively; read on for our top essay examples, including prompts that will help you write.

Discrimination comes in many forms and still happens to many individuals or groups today. It occurs when there’s a distinction or bias against someone because of their age, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability.

Discrimination can happen to anyone wherever and whenever they are. Unfortunately, it’s a problem that society is yet to solve entirely. Here are five in-depth examples of this theme’s subcategories to guide you in creating your essays about discrimination.

1. Essay On Discrimination For Students In Easy Words by Prateek

2. personal discrimination experience by naomi nakatani, 3. prejudice and discrimination by william anderson, 4. socioeconomic class discrimination in luca by krystal ibarra, 5. the new way of discrimination by writer bill, 1. my discrimination experience, 2. what can i do to stop discrimination, 3. discrimination in my community, 4. the cost of discrimination, 5. examples of discrimination, 6. discrimination in sports: segregating men and women, 7. how to stop my discrimination against others, 8. what should groups do to fight discrimination.

“In the current education system, the condition of education and its promotion of equality is very important. The education system should be a good place for each and every student. It must be on the basis of equal opportunities for each student in every country. It must be free of discrimination.”

Prateek starts his essay by telling the story of a student having difficulty getting admitted to a college because of high fees. He then poses the question of how the student will be able to get an education when he can’t have the opportunity to do so in the first place. He goes on to discuss UNESCO’s objectives against discrimination. 

Further in the essay, the author defines discrimination and cites instances when it happens. Prateek also compares past and present discrimination, ending the piece by saying it should stop and everyone deserves to be treated fairly.

“I thought that there is no discrimination before I actually had discrimination… I think we must treat everyone equally even though people speak different languages or have different colors of skin.”

In her short essay, Nakatani shares the experiences that made her feel discriminated against when she visited the US. She includes a fellow guest saying she and her mother can’t use the shared pool in a hotel they stay in because they are Japanese and getting cheated of her money when she bought from a small shop because she can’t speak English very well.

“Whether intentional or not, prejudice and discrimination ensure the continuance of inequality in the United States. Even subconsciously, we are furthering inequality through our actions and reactions to others… Because these forces are universally present in our daily lives, the way we use them or reject them will determine how they affect us.”

Anderson explains the direct relationship between prejudice and discrimination. He also gives examples of these occurrences in the past (blacks and whites segregation) and modern times (sexism, racism, etc.)

He delves into society’s fault for playing the “blame game” and choosing to ignore each other’s perspectives, leading to stereotypes. He also talks about affirmative action committees that serve to protect minorities.

“Something important to point out is that there is prejudice when it comes to people of lower class or economic standing, there are stereotypes that label them as untrustworthy, lazy, and even dangerous. This thought is fed by the just-world phenomenon, that of low economic status are uneducated, lazy, and are more likely to be substance abusers, and thus get what they deserve.”

Ibarra recounts how she discovered Pixar’s Luca and shares what she thought of the animation, focusing on how the film encapsulates socioeconomic discrimination in its settings. She then discusses the characters and their relationships with the protagonist. Finally, Ibarra notes how the movie alluded to flawed characters, such as having a smaller boat, mismatched or recycled kitchen furniture, and no shoes. 

The other cast even taunts Luca, saying he smells and gets his clothes from a dead person. These are typical things marginalized communities experience in real life. At the end of her essay, Ibarra points out how society is dogmatic against the lower class, thinking they are abusers. In Luca, the wealthy antagonist is shown to be violent and lazy.

“Even though the problem of discrimination has calmed down, it still happens… From these past experiences, we can realize that solutions to tough problems come in tough ways.”

The author introduces people who called out discrimination, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Barbara Henry – the only teacher who decided to teach Ruby Bridges, despite her skin color. 

He then moves on to mention the variations of present-day discrimination. He uses Donald Trump and the border he wants to build to keep the Hispanics out as an example. Finally, Bill ends the essay by telling the readers those who discriminate against others are bullies who want to get a reaction out of their victims. 

Do you get intimidated when you need to write an essay? Don’t be! If writing an essay makes you nervous, do it step by step. To start, write a simple 5 paragraph essay .

Prompts on Essays About Discrimination

Below are writing prompts that can inspire you on what to focus on when writing your discrimination essay:

Have you had to go through an aggressor who disliked you because you’re you? Write an essay about this incident, how it happened, what you felt during the episode, and what you did afterward. You can also include how it affected the way you interact with people. For example, did you try to tone down a part of yourself or change how you speak to avoid conflict?

List ways on how you can participate in lessening incidents of discrimination. Your list can include calling out biases, reporting to proper authorities, or spreading awareness of what discrimination is.

Is there an ongoing prejudice you observe in your school, subdivision, etc.? If other people in your community go through this unjust treatment, you can interview them and incorporate their thoughts on the matter.

Tackle what victims of discrimination have to go through daily. You can also talk about how it affected their life in the long run, such as having low self-esteem that limited their potential and opportunities and being frightened of getting involved with other individuals who may be bigots.

For this prompt, you can choose a subtopic to zero in on, like Workplace Discrimination, Disability Discrimination, and others. Then, add sample situations to demonstrate the unfairness better.

What are your thoughts on the different game rules for men and women? Do you believe these rules are just? Cite news incidents to make your essay more credible. For example, you can mention the incident where the Norwegian women’s beach handball team got fined for wearing tops and shorts instead of bikinis.

Since we learn to discriminate because of the society we grew up in, it’s only normal to be biased unintentionally. When you catch yourself having these partialities, what do you do? How do you train yourself not to discriminate against others?

Focus on an area of discrimination and suggest methods to lessen its instances. To give you an idea, you can concentrate on Workplace Discrimination, starting from its hiring process. You can propose that applicants are chosen based on their skills, so the company can implement a hiring procedure where applicants should go through written tests first before personal interviews.

If you instead want to focus on topics that include people from all walks of life, talk about diversity. Here’s an excellent guide on how to write an essay about diversity .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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A systematic review and meta-analysis of the Everyday Discrimination Scale and biomarker outcomes

Jourdyn a. lawrence.

a Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

b Population Health Sciences, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, MA, USA

c François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

Ichiro Kawachi

Kellee white.

d Department of Health Policy and Management, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD, USA

Mary T. Bassett

Naomi priest.

e Centre for Social Research and Methods, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

f Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

Joan Gakii Masunga

g Center for Bioethics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

h Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Hannah J. Cory

i Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

j Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

David R. Williams

k Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Associated Data

Discrimination has consistently been associated with multiple adverse health outcomes. Like other psychosocial stressors, discrimination is thought to impact health through stress-related physiologic pathways including hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activation, dysregulation of inflammation responses, and accelerated cellular aging. Given growing attention to research examining the biological pathways through which discrimination becomes embodied, this systematic review and meta-analysis synthesizes empirical evidence examining relationships between self-reported discrimination and four biomarker outcomes (i.e., cortisol, C-reactive protein (CRP), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and telomere length) among studies that have used the Everyday Discrimination Scale. We conducted a systematic review of studies discussing self-reported, everyday, or chronic discrimination in the context of health by searching Medline / PubMed (National Library of Medicine, NCBI), PsycInfo (APA, Ebsco) and Web of Science Core Collection (Clarivate). Twenty-five articles met the criteria for meta-analysis, with several reporting on multiple outcomes. Discrimination was associated with elevated CRP levels ( r = 0.11; 95% CI: 0.01, 0.20, k = 10 ), though not cortisol ( r = 0.05 ; 95% CI: −0.06, 0.16, k = 9), IL-6 ( r = 0.05 ; 95% CI: − 0.32, 0.42, k = 5 ), or telomere length ( r = 0.03; 95% CI: − 0.01, 0.07, k = 6 ). We identify several points of consideration for future research including addressing heterogeneity in assessment of biomarker outcomes and the need for longitudinal assessments of relationships between discrimination and biomarker outcomes.

1. Introduction

In addition to the inequitable access to opportunities, resources, and power due to structural oppression at structural, cultural, and institutional levels, discrimination acts as the behavioral expression of oppression, resulting in inequitable treatment for marginalized groups ( Priest et al., 2020a ; Tajfel and Turner, 2004 ). As one of the most frequently assessed domains of discrimination, self-reported discrimination is often conceptualized as a stressor that adversely affects health, with a large proportion of the literature examining the impacts of self-reported racial discrimination ( Dolezsar et al., 2014 ; Gilbert and Zemore, 2016 ; Goosby et al., 2018 ; Krieger, 2014 ; Lewis et al., 2015 , 2014 ; Pascoe and Smart Richman, 2009 ; Williams et al., 2019a , 2019b ; Williams and Mohammed, 2009 ). The study of discrimination as a type of psychosocial stressor that adversely affects health and as a contributor to race/ethnic disparities in health has grown in the last two decades ( Krieger, 2014 ). A recent review documented 29 reviews of the literature that were published between 2013 and 2019 which examined relationships between discrimination and mental and physical health outcomes ( Williams et al., 2019b ). Most early research on the relationship between discrimination and health documented associations with mental health, indicators of health behavior, or self-reported measures of physical health ( Williams and Mohammed, 2009 ). However, research has begun to elucidate the biological pathways through which societal and psychosocial stressors, like discrimination, are embodied to affect health ( Cuevas et al., 2020 ; Priest, 2021 ).

A growing body of evidence suggests that experiences of discrimination may affect physical and mental health through multiple biological pathways ( Clark et al., 1999 ; Epel, 2009 ; Lewis et al., 2015 ). The conceptual model of allostatic load, developed by McEwen and Stellar, suggests that frequent exposure to psychosocial stressors – such as discrimination – results in the activation of multiple axes involved in the stress response, e.g., the neuroendocrine system (HPA axis, sympathetic-adreno-medullar axis), the autonomic nervous system, immune and inflammatory processes, and metabolism ( McEwen, 2000 ; McEwen and Stellar, 1993 ; Seeman et al., 2001 ). As a result of societal processes of social marginalization and devaluing, individuals from marginalized groups experience increased exposure to discrimination which is posited to be embodied through the activation of HPA axis (i.e., cortisol) and inflammation (i.e., interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein) cascades or accelerated cellular aging (i.e., shortened telomere length). These outcomes capture distinct, but inter-related processes through which discrimination may affect health. These systems interact with each other, suggesting a coordinated physiological response to stress. For example, chronic elevation of HPA axis and inflammation mediators result in interactions which yield chronic elevations in blood pressure that can contribute to adverse cardiovascular outcomes such as heart attacks and stroke ( McEwen, 2008 ). Much of the literature supports this framework, with researchers identifying relationships between discrimination and increased HPA axis activation, ( Clark et al., 1999 ) dysregulation of inflammatory responses, ( Cuevas et al., 2020 ) and accelerated cellular aging. ( Epel, 2009 ) Studies have also found biomarkers associated with these pathways (e.g., cortisol, CRP, telomere length) to have documented associations with increased morbidity across several health outcomes and mortality ( Cuevas et al., 2020 ; McEwen, 2008 , 2012 ).

Indeed, closer examination of the relationship between discrimination and biomarkers provides an opportunity to advance our mechanistic understanding of how chronic experiences of differential treatment become embodied or “get under the skin” to contribute to poor psychological and physiological health ( Krieger, 2005 ; McEwen, 2012 ). The use of biomarkers measures also circumvents the issue of common source bias that may arise when both the exposure (discrimination) and health outcome are self-reported. However, a comprehensive assessment of the association between experiences of discrimination and biomarkers of physiologic stress, inflammation, and accelerated aging has not been performed to date.

Studies assessing biological pathways are a small proportion of the total literature on discrimination but are increasing in recent years. A recent systematic review of discrimination and systemic inflammation identified 28 articles published since 2009 ( Cuevas et al., 2020 ). These measures were not included in previous meta-analyses of the health implications of discrimination. Prior meta-analyses have examined the relationship between discrimination and health across several measures of discrimination, with much heterogeneity in the timing and type of discrimination experienced ( Paradies et al., 2015 ; Pascoe and Smart Richman, 2009 ; Pieterse et al., 2012 ). Results from previous meta-analyses suggest that the associations between discrimination and health outcomes vary by instruments used to assess discrimination ( Dolezsar et al., 2014 ; Paradies et al., 2015 ). Reducing heterogeneity in meta-analysis by limiting variations across measures of discrimination, for example, is also important statistically when combining estimates across studies in meta-analysis ( Bourabain and Verhaeghe, 2021 ; Imrey, 2020 ).

The larger literature on stress and health suggests that incidents of racial discrimination, like other self-reported stressors, can be classified into several types of stressful life experiences ( Williams and Mohammed, 2009 ). Similar to research on stress and health, interpersonal experiences of discrimination can be divided into acute major discriminatory life events (e.g. being unfairly fired from a job), chronic discrimination in major domains life (e.g. at work, school, or in one’s neighborhood), traumatic discriminatory experiences (e.g. being beaten by the police) and more minor but ongoing events, somewhat analogous to daily hassles in the larger stress literature ( Williams and Mohammed, 2009 ). Different measures of discrimination assess various aspects of these stressful experiences. The Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS) captures only the latter class of relatively minor, but recurrent instances of discrimination ( Williams et al., 1997 ). Enhancing our understanding of the ways in which discrimination can affect health requires greater research attention to understanding how specific types of discrimination are related to health outcomes. Social Identity Theory provides a framework that allows for an understanding of how social contexts and identities facilitate differential treatment, devaluing, and withholding of resources by members of the “in-group” can result in the disadvantage that members of marginalized groups face. ( Tajfel and Turner, 2004 ) In this context, marginalized groups are more likely to encounter experiences of discrimination, which have long been theorized to be “assaults to [B]lack dignity and [B]lack hope [that] are incessant and cumulative” in their adverse impacts on health ( Pierce, 1974 ). Understanding the everyday encounters of discrimination marginalized groups face facilitates an understanding of how recurrent exposure to differential treatment becomes embodied and how the EDS remains a strong predictor of the onset and progression of adverse health outcomes ( Kershaw et al., 2016a ; Lewis et al., 2006 ; Williams et al., 2003 ).

A sufficient number of studies have been conducted utilizing the EDS to permit a review of the association of discrimination with biomarkers (i.e., HPA axis, inflammation, and cellular aging). To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first meta-analysis that examines the association of discrimination on stress-related biomarkers among studies that have used the same measure. Accordingly, this paper sought to synthesize existing literature, provide deeper insight into methodological and measurement challenges, and identify future research directions.

1.1. Study objectives

This systematic review and meta-analysis examined the relationship between experiences of discrimination and molecular biomarker outcomes, with quantitative focus on interleukin-6 (IL-6), CRP, cortisol, and leukocyte telomere length, among studies that have used the EDS to measure exposure to discrimination. We characterized the existing body of literature that has included the EDS – highlighting study design and methodology, sample characteristics, operationalization of the EDS, and outcomes examined. We examined relationships between the EDS and individual biomarker measures of stress, inflammation, and cellular aging (e.g., telomere length) – to increase the comparability of findings across studies that have used the same assessment of exposure to discrimination.

Specifically, the overarching research aims of the systematic review were to:

• Meta-analyze associations between the EDS and stress-related biomarkers. We hypothesize that increased discrimination is associated with adverse levels of biomarker measures (i.e., shorter telomere length; higher IL-6, CRP, and cortisol levels).
• Descriptively map the mediators (e.g., smoking, excess drinking) of the associations between discrimination and molecular biomarkers across studies that have used the EDS. This provides context as to what factors have been considered as mediating variables in studies assessing discrimination and biomarker outcomes.

This meta-analysis followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) and the Meta-analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (MOOSE) guidelines and criteria ( Moher et al., 2009 ; Stroup et al., 2000 ).

2.1. Search strategy

Studies discussing self-reported, everyday, or chronic discrimination in the context of health were identified by searching Medline / PubMed (National Library of Medicine, NCBI), PsycInfo (APA, Ebsco) and Web of Science Core Collection (Clarivate). Controlled vocabulary terms (i.e., MeSH; Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms) were included when available and appropriate. The search strategies were designed and executed by a research librarian (CM) at the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University. Publication date was limited to studies published in 1997 or later. No language restriction was applied. The exact search terms used for each of the databases are provided in the Supplementary materials ( Supplemental Table 1 ). Reference lists of identified papers were examined for additional relevant articles for inclusion.

2.2. Inclusion criteria

For consideration of inclusion, studies must have used quantitative methodology reporting an estimate of the relationship between the EDS and a disease-related molecular biomarker (e.g., telomere length, IL-6) ( Broza et al., 2019 ; Epel, 2009 ; Laterza et al., 2007 ). As such, studies using qualitative methods were not included. All collection methods for molecular biomarkers were included (e.g., blood, saliva, hair, urine) ( Broza et al., 2019 ). All study designs were eligible (i.e., cross-sectional, longitudinal, case-control, and experimental). Given that the EDS was first utilized in 1997, ( Williams et al., 1997 ) studies were eligible for inclusion if published in 1997 or later.

Exclusion restrictions were not placed upon study populations, such that studies including participants from any age group, racial/ethnic/cultural identity, ability, and other sociodemographic factors were included.

2.2.1. Exposure

Self-reported discrimination was measured using the EDS, which includes the frequency of self-reported discrimination in the respondent’s day-to-day life ( Williams et al., 1997 ) The original scale includes nine-items: “In your day-to-day life, how often do any of the following things happen to you?” (1) You are treated with less courtesy than other people are; (2) You are treated with less respect than other people are; (3) You receive poorer service than other people at restaurants or stores; (4) People act as if they think you are not smart; (5) People act as if they are afraid of you; (6) People act as if they think you are dishonest; (7) People act as if they’re better than you are; (8) You are called names or insulted; and (9) You are threatened or harassed. Responses for each item include “almost every day,” “at least once a week,” “a few times a month,” “a few times a year,” less than once a year,” and “never”. Respondents reporting “a few times a year” or more frequent experiences of discrimination may be asked a follow up question: “What do you think is the main reason for these experiences?” Participants can select one or more of the following attributions: (1) your ancestry or national origins; (2) your gender; (3) your race; (4) your age; (5) your religion; (6) your height; (7) your weight; (8) some other aspect of your physical appearance; (9) your sexual orientation; (10) your educational or income level.

A short form of the EDS was developed for the Chicago Community Adult Health Study (CCAHS) ( Sternthal et al., 2011 ) in which respondents were asked: “”In your day-to-day life, how often have any of the following things happened to you?” (1) You are treated with less courtesy or respect than other people; (2) You receive poorer service than other people at restaurants or stores; (3) People act as if they think you are not smart; (4) People act as if they are afraid of you; (5) You are threatened or harassed. The follow-up question and response categories of the shortened EDS are the same as the original. Other adapted versions of the scale were considered eligible for inclusion if they were not major adaptations beyond the original scope of the EDS (e.g., studies that created summary scores that joined the EDS with other measures or studies that only include one item from the EDS were not included).

2.2.2. Outcomes

All stress-related biomarker outcomes were eligible for inclusion. These included IL6, CRP, cortisol, DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone, also DHEA-S), DNA methylation, E-selectin, fibrinogen, nerve growth factor, alpha amylase, HSP-70 (heat shock protein-70), HbA1c levels, and telomere length.

Several outcomes were only examined in one or two articles and were excluded from the meta-analysis but are included in our narrative synthesis of the findings (N = 5, Fig. 1 ). For example, DNA methylation was only assessed as an outcome in two identified studies. The three remaining outcomes meeting the inclusion criteria were only assessed in one manuscript each.

Study identification and selection process.

2.3. Screening

Search results were imported into Endnote X9, and duplicate entries were removed. The Endnote library was exported into Covidence ( Veritas Health Innovation, 2017 ), a web-based systematic review software. Two reviewers (JL, GM) independently conducted title and abstract screening to assess studies for eligibility (inter-reviewer reliability (κ) = 0.78, indicating good agreement).

Full texts of studies considered for inclusion were obtained. Discrepancies between reviewers regarding study inclusion was resolved by discussion with a third reviewer (HC) and/or consensus (JL, GM) [κ = 0.74]. The study selection process is outlined in full in Fig. 1 .

2.4. Data extraction and analysis

Data from identified studies were independently extracted into an Excel document by one reviewer (JL) with another reviewer randomly checking 20% of the extracted data (HC). Inconsistencies were resolved by consensus and/or discussion with a third reviewer (GM). Extracted data included information regarding the EDS (e.g., version used, operationalization) and biomarker assessed, demographic characteristics of participants (e.g., age, gender, educational attainment), study attributes (e.g., study design, location [country and region], period and duration of study (if relevant), sample size), most and minimally adjusted estimates, covariates adjusted for, psychometric properties of the scale (if assessed), mediators (if explicitly mentioned) and potential sources of bias (e.g., attrition, missing data). For articles using the same dataset to examine relationships with the same outcome, we extracted data from papers with the most information reported (e.g., both minimally and fully adjusted models reported). If multiple papers included the same amount of information, the earliest publication was included in the meta-analysis.

Minimally adjusted estimates include data from the least adjusted model reported or correlations between EDS and biomarkers. Fully adjusted estimates include data from the most adjusted model reported with all covariates included. Efforts were made to contact study authors for additional information; however, if only one estimate was available, it was used as both the minimally and most adjusted estimate.

Most studies reported regression coefficients. To incorporate regression coefficients into the present meta-analysis, we use a derived formula developed by Peterson and Brown to estimate correlation coefficients ( r ) ( Peterson and Brown, 2005 ). After extracting over 1500 β and r values, the authors fit several models to assess the relationships between the two measures. They found that r = 0.98 β + 0.05 λ yielded the best fit, where β is the coefficient reported and λ is an indicator variable that is 0 when β is negative and 1 when β is positive ( Peterson and Brown, 2005 ). After testing this efficacy of this formula against several alternatives, the authors found little difference between results. However, the authors note that this imputation is best used among β estimates within the interval of − 0.50–0.50, given an observed tight joint distribution of β and r values in that range. Given that most estimates from eligible studies were within that range, we imputed r values from reported β values in eligible studies where r values were not reported using r = 0.98 β + 0.05 λ .

Estimates were coded such that greater experiences of discrimination are associated with poorer outcomes (negative for telomere length, positive for inflammation and stress biomarkers (e.g., IL-6)).

Weighted correlation sizes were calculated using large-sample approximation to compute sampling variance ( Viechtbauer, 2010 ). Random effects models were fit utilizing the minimally adjusted associations reported using the “metafor” package ( Viechtbauer, 2010 ) available in R ( R Core Team, 2013 ). Random effect models essentially relax the assumption of fixed-effect models, which assume that there is one ”true” effect estimated in all studies and that variations only occur due to chance (i.e., variations in samples) ( Borenstein et al., 2010 ). Instead, random effects models assume a distribution of correlation sizes allowing for variations in the correlation size across studies, where factors beyond sampling variation may influence the association (e.g., age of sample) ( Borenstein et al., 2010 ). Cochran’s Q test was conducted to test for heterogeneity. Forest plots are presented to illustrate study-specific and overall correlation sizes by outcome and 95% CIs. Sensitivity analyses included estimating the weighted correlation sizes using the most adjusted estimates reported in eligible articles.

2.5. Quality assessment

Study quality was assessed in terms of potential for bias. Similar to Paradies et al. (2015) , we use sampling procedure, data type (e.g., cross-sectional, longitudinal), and instrument (i.e., full scale, short form), and covariates included in a narrative assessment of study quality. Funnel plots were created to illustrate potential publication bias and asymmetry was tested using Egger’s tests ( Egger et al., 1997 ).

Database searches on 03/24/2020 yielded 2803 references, resulting in 1867 unique references for screening. Relevant outcomes were found in 33 articles included in the narrative review and 25 studies were identified for inclusion in the quantitative synthesis of associations in the present study. The number of studies excluded from the quantitative analysis, with reasons, are provided in detail in Fig. 1 . Overall descriptive data for the articles included in the quantitative assessment are summarized in Supplemental Table 2 .

Most studies were published between 2016 and March 2020, with all articles having publication dates between 2010 and 2020. Nearly all articles examined associations among populations in the United States, with one assessing associations among a sample in New Zealand. Nearly 36% of studies implemented representative sampling procedures, with 64% of studies reporting non-representative sampling methods. Many articles reported findings from cross-sectional analyses (72%) with the remainder being longitudinal (24%) or other (4%).

Sample sizes ranged from 49 to 12,624, with a total sample of 37,763 respondents included across all eligible studies. All articles reported some information on participant age (e.g., average age of population), race/ethnicity, and sex; however, two did not report the number of participants within each racial/ethnic group in the analytic samples. Articles were mostly conducted among adults (nearly 99% of the sample size), though populations under 18 were included in three articles, yielding 419 young adult or adolescent participants (< 18 years of age) to the total sample. One study did not report the age range of study participants to discern whether young adults could have been included in the study population. Data on participant educational attainment was reported in 19 studies.

The full version of the EDS was employed in most articles (N = 17), with fewer using the short-form (N = 5) or a modified version of the EDS (N = 3). Attribution of experiences was assessed in 7 studies, with most assessing attributions of experiences to both racial and non-racial reasons (N = 4). The remaining three studies that captured attributions assessed only racial or non-racial attributions. Operationalization of the EDS remained consistent across studies with most measuring experiences as the sum (N = 11) or the average (N = 10) of the frequency of experiences. Other means of operationalizing the EDS included a count of yes responses to experiences, dichotomizing beyond a certain threshold. How the measure was operationalized was unclear in one analysis. Among studies that examined the reliability of the EDS, it exhibited very good reliability using a Cronbach’s alpha cutoff of greater than 0.80 in 18 of the 25 articles.

Cortisol and CRP were the most frequently assessed biomarker outcomes (N = 9 and N = 10, respectively), followed by telomere length (N = 6) and IL-6 (N = 5). Approximately 16% (N = 4) of articles reported associations between the EDS and multiple biomarker outcomes.

Supplemental Table 3 presents the summary of study and sample characteristics by outcome. Weighted correlation sizes from the most adjusted associations reported between the EDS and each biomarker outcome are presented in Figs. 2 , ​ ,3, 3 , ​ ,4, 4 , and ​ and5 5 .

Associations between EDS and (a) all cortisol outcomes; (b) cortisol awakening response (CAR); and (c) waking levels (minimally adjusted).

Associations between EDS and C-reactive protein (CRP, minimally adjusted).

Associations between EDS and (a) interleukin-6 (IL-6) across all studies; (b) plasma samples; and (c) salivary samples (minimally adjusted).

Associations between EDS and telomere length (minimally adjusted).

3.1. Cortisol

Nine studies examined relationships between discrimination and cortisol. Most frequently, the EDS was operationalized as the mean (N = 4) or sum of frequencies (N = 3). Another study used the count of yes responses, though one study did not clearly specify how the measure was operationalized. Studies were primarily cross-sectional (N = 7) and conducted among adults (N = 6). Black participants comprised nearly 29.4% of the cortisol study population, followed by Latinx/Hispanic (18.6%) and Asian (7.7%) participants; however, white participants (38.6%) comprised the largest proportion of the study population across all 9 studies. Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, or Māori, multiracial, and individuals categorized as “other” racial groups together comprised the remaining 5.7% of the pooled study population.

Assessments of cortisol varied across studies. Given the evidence of changes in cortisol levels throughout the day, ( Levine et al., 2007 ; Weitzman et al., 1971 ) some studies assessed salivary cortisol by collecting multiple samples per day at different time points (≥4) over several days (≥3) ( Doane and Zeiders, 2014 ; Fuller-Rowell et al., 2012 ; Huynh et al., 2016 ; Zeiders et al., 2014 ). Others collected two saliva samples (morning and evening) over two consecutive days Thayer and Kuzawa, 2015 ), three salivary samples in one day, ( Incollingo Rodriguez et al., 2019 ) salivary samples before, during and after exposure to a stress task ( Lucas et al., 2017 ) and the average of duplicate samples collected in one afternoon ( Ratner et al., 2013 ). Another study assessed cortisol concentration through hair cortisol, using 3 cm of hair closest to the scalp to assess retrospective cortisol levels ( Lehrer et al., 2020 ). In the main analysis, the reported assessment of cortisol levels varied, with articles assessing associations between the EDS and waking cortisol levels in five studies, baseline cortisol, average cortisol from one measurement, total daily cortisol, and hair cortisol concentration. Five studies reported both minimally and fully adjusted estimates, while the remaining reported only unadjusted (N = 2) or adjusted (N = 2).

The mean correlation coefficient for associations between EDS and cortisol was r = 0.05 [95% CI: − 0.06, 0.16, k = 9; Q= 19.83, df= 8, p = 0.011] ( Fig. 2A ), suggesting no observed association with cortisol levels. Patterning in the direction of responses was observed, where larger studies showed null or negative associations while smaller studies typically had associations indicating greater cortisol levels with increased discrimination. Minimally adjusted models included four correlations and models that accounted for factors including age, race, sex or gender, BMI, socioeconomic indicators (i.e., household income, educational attainment, material deprivation), health behaviors (i.e., exercise, food, alcohol and caffeine consumption, cigarette use), daytime sleep, daily wake and sleep time, psychological factors (i.e., stress level, emotional stability), and medication (i.e., cortisol medication, other medication use) or medical history (i.e., C-section delivery).

Several studies reported estimates between the EDS and cortisol outcomes using the same measure (i.e., cortisol awakening response [CAR], waking levels). To minimize the impact of heterogeneity in the measurement of cortisol on the pooled estimate, we estimated mean correlation sizes for studies that examined the CAR ( Doane and Zeiders, 2014 ; Fuller-Rowell et al., 2012 ; Huynh et al., 2016 ; Incollingo Rodriguez et al., 2019 ; Zeiders et al., 2014 ) (defined as the change in cortisol from waking to a defined time period after waking) and waking cortisol levels ( Doane and Zeiders, 2014 ; Fuller-Rowell et al., 2012 ; Huynh et al., 2016 ; Thayer and Kuzawa, 2015 ; Zeiders et al., 2014 ). Among studies that evaluated the relationship between the EDS and waking cortisol, the mean correlation size was r = 0.01 ( Fig. 2B , 95% CI: − 0.18, 0.19). Whereas the mean correlation size among studies reporting associations between the EDS and CAR was r = 0.00 ( Fig. 2B , 95% CI: − 0.22, 0.22 ). These findings suggest that discrimination is not associated with cortisol levels, specifically waking and the cortisol awakening response.

Sensitivity analyses were conducted using the most or fully adjusted estimates reported in each study. The mean correlation size did not differ greatly across fully adjusted estimates ( r = 0.06; 95% CI: − 0.06, 0.18) compared to the minimally adjusted models. Associations between discrimination and CAR ( r = 0.02; 95% CI: − 0.24, 0.29 ) and waking cortisol ( r = 0.00; 95% CI: − 0.19, 0.18 ) remained null. Beyond covariates included in the minimally adjusted models, fully adjusted models also included factors such as psychological factors (i.e., neuroticism risk, public and private esteem), average hours of sleep, medication (i.e., contraceptive use), waist-to-hip ratio, and attributions of discrimination.

3.2. C-reactive protein (CRP)

Among the ten eligible studies assessing the association between discrimination and CRP, the EDS was frequently implemented as the sum (N = 5) or mean (N = 4) of the frequencies of experiences of discrimination. One study operationalized the EDS as the sum of the experiences ( Lewis et al., 2010 ). Nine of the ten studies reported the racial/ethnic composition of the analytic samples, with 38% identifying as Black, 7% as Latinx/Hispanic, 2% as Asian and 52% as white/European. A small percentage of participants were classified as “Other” race (1%). Most studies were cross-sectional in design (50%) and conducted among adult populations (N = 9). CRP was assessed consistently, with most studies using blood/serum levels of CRP (N = 9) and one using a measure of salivary CRP levels.

The pooled correlation size for the associations between discrimination and CRP was r = 0.11 [95% CI: 0.01, 0.20; k = 10; Q = 69.90, df= 9, p < 0.001 ] . Correlation sizes appear to be larger in smaller studies, though larger studies also show relationships between discrimination and CRP. Minimally adjusted estimates included one unadjusted correlation and models which accounted for factors such as age, race/ethnicity, lifetime experiences of discrimination, measures of socioeconomic status (e.g., income, educational attainment, employment status), BMI and medications (e.g., statin use, hormone replacement therapy, anti-inflammatory use). Three articles did not report unadjusted associations, ( Beatty Moody et al., 2014 ; Saban et al., 2018 ; Zahodne et al., 2019 ) though one only accounted for age, BMI and statin use in the adjusted estimate reported ( Saban et al., 2018 ).

Supplemental Fig. 2 illustrates the reported associations and mean correlation size using the most adjusted estimates reported. Significant associations were observed [ r = 0.09; 95% CI: 0.01, 0.17, k = 10]. These associations remain considering the covariates included in the most adjusted models reporting these associations. One paper only reported a minimally adjusted association (correlation), however other articles accounted for factors such as race, age, sex, BMI, measures of socioeconomic status (e.g., financial strain, educational attainment, income), psychological factors (e.g., depressive symptoms, cynicism) and lifetime experiences of discrimination, health behaviors (e.g., physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption), measures of physiological functioning (e.g., blood pressure, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, HbA1c, vital capacity, adiponectin), health conditions (e.g., heart attack, other vascular diseases, diabetes), and medications (e.g., statin use, anti-hypertensives, diabetes management medications). The similarities in mean correlation sizes from the most and minimally adjusted estimates reported suggest that the relationship between discrimination and CRP is robust to covariate adjustment and may not be strongly mediated by health behaviors (e.g., smoking, drinking).

3.3. Interleukin-6 (IL-6)

Among the 5 studies examining IL-6, the EDS was operationalized as the sum of frequencies (N = 3) or mean of frequencies (N = 2). White/European participants comprised over 80% of the sample across studies reporting data on race/ethnicity (N = 4). Measurement of IL-6 levels was captured through blood (N = 3) or saliva (N = 3). One study assessed both blood and salivary IL-6 levels, though only the adjusted association was reported for the blood IL-6 outcomes ( Saban et al., 2018 ). Eligible studies used in the meta-analysis were all cross-sectional in design and conducted among adult populations.

The mean weighted correlation size between discrimination and IL-6 suggests discrimination may not be correlated with elevated IL-6 levels ( r = 0.05 ; 95% CI: −0.32, 0.42, k = 5; Q = 47.01, df = 4, p < 0.001). Minimally adjusted estimates included an unadjusted correlation (N = 1) and models (N = 4) that accounted for factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, age, measures of socioeconomic status (i.e., income, educational attainment, employment status), medication use (i.e., anti-inflammatory, hormone replacement therapy), and time. Larger correlation sizes were observed among two smaller studies; while one association went in the opposite direction, indicating an inverse relationship between discrimination and IL-6 levels.

Additionally, when assessed by measurement of IL-6 (i.e., plasma, salivary), we find the direction of the mean correlation size for the minimally adjusted estimates to be similar among both measures ( r = 0.03; 95% CI: − 0.03, 0.09 and r = 0.06; 95% CI: − 0.99, 1.12 for plasma and salivary measures, respectively). However, the confidence interval is larger among studies using salivary measures of IL-6, possibly indicating greater variability in estimates derived from salivary samples. These assessments should be interpreted with caution given the small sample size for these assessments (k = 3 for each) and that one study reported only fully adjusted associations between discrimination and plasma IL-6 levels.

Supplemental analysis of the most adjusted estimates reported resulted in a stronger correlation between increased experiences of discrimination and IL-6 levels [ r = 0.07; 95% CI: − 0.28, 0.42, k = 5], however, the confidence interval is wide and crosses the null. Examining the forest and tree plot, we observed null associations in studies of varying sample sizes (two, relatively large and one small), though the remaining two studies find lower and elevated IL-6 levels to be associated with increased discrimination. The observed null associations may be a function of covariates included in each model. In most adjusted models, several studies accounted for what could be potential mediators or moderators of the relationship between discrimination and IL-6 levels. Covariates included age, race, marital status, measures of socioeconomic status (i.e., income, employment status, educational attainment), psychological factors (i.e., measures of depression, anxiety, reactivity), perceived social status, reported childhood trauma, medication use (i.e., cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, hormone replacement), public and private esteem, BMI, and alcohol consumption.

One study explicitly assessed BMI as a potential mediator of the relationship between discrimination and IL-6 in a sample of men and women ( Kershaw et al., 2016b ). Among women, the authors found the positive relationship between everyday discrimination and IL-6 to be attenuated by BMI. However, the inability to establish temporality given the cross-sectional analysis does not provide insight as to whether BMI is subsequent to exposures to discrimination or whether it may increase experiences of discrimination ( Kershaw et al., 2016b ).

3.4. Telomere length

Three of the six eligible studies operationalized the EDS as the sum of reported frequency of discrimination. Assessments also included the mean of frequency of experiences of discrimination (N = 2) and a dichotomized assessment of if a respondent ever experienced everyday discrimination and attributed it to a personal characteristic (yes/no). The racial/ethnic breakdown of analytic samples were provided in 5 of the 6 studies, with white participants comprising 60% of the overall study populations. Black participants comprised approximately 33% of the overall sample size, followed by Latinx/Hispanic participants (7.4%). Asian, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Island, multiracial or “Other” racial/ethnic individuals were not represented in the studies eligible for inclusion. All eligible studies used quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) to assess and quantify telomere length, which is optimal for large studies given the small sample needed to replicate DNA and assess telomere length ( Montpetit et al., 2014 ). Additionally, all studies utilized leukocyte samples to ascertain telomere length. Three studies examined associations between discrimination and telomere length using the ratio of telomeric length of DNA to a single-copy control gene (T/S ratio) which is correlated with telomere length, ( Hailu et al., 2020 ; Liu and Kawachi, 2017 ; Lu et al., 2019 ) while others converted the T/S ratio to kilobase or base pairs to compare differences in length ( Beatty Moody et al., 2019 ; Geronimus et al., 2015 ; Sullivan et al., 2019 ).

Everyday discrimination was not associated with telomere length when minimally adjusted models were assessed ( r = 0.03; 95% CI: − 0.01, 0.07, k = 6; Q =7.26, df = 5, p = 0.202 ) . Examining the forest and tree plot, we observe that most studies indicate a null association, with larger studies finding discrimination to be associated with longer telomere length. Minimally adjusted estimates included unadjusted regression coefficients (N = 2), estimates from an age-adjusted model (N = 1), and two adjusted estimates that accounted for age, race, sex, measures of socioeconomic status (i.e., poverty-to-income ratio; educational attainment); and psychosocial stress (i.e., safety stress, physical environment, and negative social interactions).

Supplemental analyses of fully adjusted estimates exhibited similar associations. The mean correlation size using the most adjusted estimates reported were not statistically significant [r = 0.02; 95% CI: − 0.02; 0.06]. Models accounted for factors such as age, race, sex, measures of socioeconomic status (i.e., poverty-to-income ratio; educational attainment); and psychosocial stress (i.e., safety stress, physical environment, negative social interactions, perceived stress); psychological factors (i.e., depression, reaction type); smoking status; BMI; health conditions (e.g., diabetes, hypertension, myocardial infarction, cancer), Census region of birth; childhood health; lifetime substance use and physical activity.

Two studies explicitly examined potential mediators of the relationship between discrimination and telomere length. Work by Liu and Kawachi assessed whether physical activity, smoking status, and having a BMI ≥ 30 kg/m 2 mediated the relationship between discrimination and telomere length ( Liu and Kawachi, 2017 ). The authors found evidence that suggested these factors mediate the relationship between everyday discrimination and telomere length, observing attenuated associations when these factors were included in regression analyses. Sullivan et al. examined whether depressive symptoms and perceived stress mediated the relationship between discrimination and telomere length ( Sullivan et al., 2019 ). The authors found that observed associations between everyday discrimination and telomere length among Black and white women remained after accounting for mediating variables, with correlation sizes remaining larger (i.e., shorter telomere length) for Black women; though no associations were observed among men.

Across three of the four analyzed outcomes, between study heterogeneity was high and statistically significant as measured by the Cochran’s Q test. Results from the Q-test reject the null hypothesis of the “true” effect being the same across studies and only differing due to sampling variability, indicating that other factors may influence biomarker outcomes.

3.5. Quality assessment

The limited availability of longitudinal assessments of the relationship between the EDS and biomarker outcomes leaves us unable to assess the temporality of associations. Across all outcomes, most studies were cross-sectional (77.8%, 50%, 100%, and 100% for cortisol, CRP, IL-6, and telomere length respectively). Several studies utilized nonrepresentative sampling procedures (N = 7, 7, 3, and 1 for cortisol, CRP, IL-6, and telomere length, respectively). This may raise concerns regarding potential bias such that correlation sizes may be estimated from samples that may not be generalizable, however they do provide context to the experiences of individuals from similar backgrounds (i.e., communities with similar sociodemographic characteristics). However, most studies assessing representative samples contributed greater weights to the estimated mean correlation size given the small variances across all outcomes. Most studies used the full EDS or short form (N = 8, 10, 4, 4), with few utilizing modified versions. Among studies reporting the Cronbach’s alpha (N = 22), α was greater than or equal to 0.70 suggesting acceptable or better internal consistency of the measure. Studies reporting adjusted models accounted for several socioeconomic, demographic, and health-related covariates that may confound the relationship between discrimination and biomarker outcomes. Adjusted models sometimes accounted for potential mediators of the relationship (i.e., perceived stress) that may have partially accounted for the effect of discrimination.

3.6. Assessment of publication bias

Funnel plots ( Fig. 6 ) and Egger’s tests were used to evaluate the possibility of publication bias. Among studies that examined cortisol, eligible studies tended to have smaller standard errors, but eligible studies had positive, negative, and null associations. Results from the Egger’s test to assess funnel plot asymmetry in funnel plots were not statistically significant (t = 1.91, df = 7, p = 0.098), suggesting that the funnel plot for cortisol is not imbalanced (i.e., no publication bias). Assessment of the funnel plot for CRP outcomes appears to be asymmetric. Eligible studies tend to have small standard errors or larger correlation sizes. Results from the Egger’s test were statistically significant (t = 4.57, df = 8, p = 0.002), suggesting potential publication bias. Fewer studies examined IL-6 and telomere length. The funnel plot for IL-6 appears to be relatively symmetric, with eligible studies having variations in correlation size and standard error. One study was included that documented associations in the opposite direction for IL-6 (i.e., lower IL-6 levels for increased report of discrimination). Eligible studies examining telomere length had varying directions (i.e., null, and positive associations reported). The Egger’s test for IL-6 was not statistically significant, suggesting that publication bias may not be a concern (t = 0.30, df = 3, p = 0.785); however, Egger’s test for telomere length was significant (t = −3.00, df = 4, p = 0.040) indicating the possibility of publication bias. These results should be interpreted with caution as the Egger’s test has limited power when used in a small sample of studies.

Funnel plots for A) cortisol; B) CRP; C) IL-6; and D) telomere length.

3.7. Narrative review

Five studies that were relevant to our review but were not included in the meta-analysis are narratively synthesized here. Friedman et al. found that everyday discrimination was associated with greater E-selectin levels, an indicator of inflammation response, among men, but not women in a sample of adults in the Midlife in the United States study (MIDUS) ( Friedman et al., 2009 ). Using data from a community sample of adults with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes, Potter et al. found that everyday discrimination attributed to weight was associated with elevated HbA1c levels ( Potter et al., 2015 ). Relationships between everyday discrimination and DNA methylation, an indicator of stress, were assessed in two studies ( Santos et al., 2018 ; van der Laan et al., 2020 ). Among a sample of Latina mothers, Santos et al. found that everyday discrimination was inversely associated with DNA methylation (less methylation with increased discrimination), ( Santos et al., 2018 ) while van der Laan et al. found everyday discrimination to be positively associated with DNA methylation among participants in the Research on Obesity and Diabetes among African Migrants (RODAM) study ( van der Laan et al., 2020 ) Saban and colleagues examined the relationship between several social factors – including everyday discrimination – and heat shock protein-70 (HSP-70), another stress-related biomarker, in a small sample of Black and white women with atherosclerosis ( Saban et al., 2014 ) The authors did not observe an association between discrimination and HSP-70 levels, though this association should be examined in a larger study population.

4. Discussion

Though previous meta-analyses have examined the relationship between discrimination and several health outcomes, variations in the measurement of discrimination have made cross-study comparisons difficult. Evidence from the most recent meta-analysis suggests that the relationship between discrimination and health outcomes vary according to the measure of discrimination used ( Paradies et al., 2015 ). This current systematic review and meta-analysis is the first to standardize the measure of discrimination to assess the association of discrimination and health by restricting the analysis to studies that have used the Everyday Discrimination Scale. These findings also contribute to the literature by estimating the pooled correlation coefficient across studies that have examined the relationship between discrimination and molecular biomarkers of stress, inflammation, and cellular aging.

We found that most eligible studies operationalized the EDS as the mean or sum of reported frequency (N = 21 of 25). Our findings also suggest that increased self-report of discrimination is associated with higher CRP levels, though we did not observe evidence of associations between discrimination and cortisol, IL-6, or telomere length when using the EDS. We also observed patterns in the magnitude of associations by sample size. For example, larger positive correlation sizes were observed among two smaller studies examining associations between the EDS and IL-6 while more modest positive correlations were observed among two larger studies. One small study had a large negative association, which may have influenced the null finding for IL-6.

Null associations between discrimination and cortisol and telomere measures were not surprising as neither of these biomarkers have been consistently associated with other types of stress ( Chida and Steptoe, 2009 ; Fogelman and Canli, 2018 ; Korous et al., 2017 ; Mathur et al., 2016 ). However, we identified associations between discrimination and CRP, consistent with associations observed in other systematic reviews and meta-analyses of self-report measures and stress tasks ( Cuevas et al., 2020 ; Steptoe et al., 2007 ). The correlation of discrimination with higher CRP, but not IL-6 suggests that more studies are needed on the latter, given that IL-6 stimulates the production of CRP ( Papanicolaou et al., 1998 ). This may also reflect a need to examine alternative measures of cumulative and chronic inflammation, such as glycoprotein acetyls (GlycA), instead of acute phase inflammatory markers ( Priest, 2021 ). However, studies have identified both IL-6 and CRP to have independent relationships with several adverse health outcomes and risk factors ( Bermudez et al., 2002 ; Pradhan et al., 2001 ).

We noted three factors (1) heterogeneity in outcome measurement; (2) study design; and (3) sample demographics that could have contributed to our mixed findings. First, the observed findings between discrimination and cortisol, IL-6, and telomere length may be influenced by several factors related to outcome measurement. Specifically, eligible studies differed in their operationalization of biomarker outcomes. Among studies that examined cortisol, differences in both the number of samples captured and cortisol outcomes assessed (e.g., momentary cortisol, hair cortisol concentration) were observed. For example, heterogeneity may be introduced by including hair cortisol in this analysis given that hair samples capture cortisol levels over a period ranging from several weeks to months ( Iob and Steptoe, 2019 ). Additionally, cortisol levels fluctuate throughout the day, typically with higher levels at waking and lower during the evening ( Levine et al., 2007 ; Weitzman et al., 1971 ) and are sensitive to the method of collection (i.e., blood, saliva) ( Levine et al., 2007 ). Collecting sufficient data to understand individual cortisol fluctuations and utilizing measures of diurnal cortisol may be useful contributions to future research ( Adam et al., 2017 ).

We also observed differences in how inflammation was assessed among eligible studies assessing IL-6. IL-6 samples were collected through blood (N = 3) or saliva (N = 3), with one study assessing both. While the mean correlation size across studies that used either measure was similar ( r = 0.03; r = 0.06 , plasma and saliva respectively), we observed a wider confidence interval across studies using salivary assessments. This could reflect greater variability in salivary assessments of IL-6; however, the intervals may also be wide given the limited number of studies available. These differences suggest consideration of the means of assessment of inflammatory markers. This is especially relevant given that salivary assessments of inflammation may capture oral rather than systemic inflammation ( Priest et al., 2020b ). Previous research has concluded that plasma and salivary samples of inflammatory biomarkers (i.e., IL-6, CRP) may not be strongly correlated, and that blood samples – though relatively invasive – are preferred to salivary measures to assess systemic inflammation ( Cullen et al., 2015 ; Williamson et al., 2012 ).

Optimal assessments of telomere length are still being explored. All eligible studies used qPCR to assess telomere length which has several strengths that have been summarized in detail elsewhere ( Montpetit et al., 2014 ). These strengths include that qPCR requires a small sample of DNA, is easily implemented in large studies, and has a reference to compare samples to. However, this method is sensitive to the quality of the DNA sample and the reference is not standardized which makes cross-study comparisons difficult ( Montpetit et al., 2014 ). Additionally, qPCR provides an estimate of the telomere amplification product (T) as compared to that of a reference single-copy gene (S) ( Aviv et al., 2011 ; Montpetit et al., 2014 ). This is used to create a T/S ratio that correlates with average telomere length, but does not yield a base pair estimate ( Montpetit et al., 2014 ). While qPCR has been widely accepted as an approach to assess telomere length, other techniques exist to determine telomere length ( Montpetit et al., 2014 ). These include flow-fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and Southern blot, which is often referred to as the golden standard ( Aviv et al., 2011 ). The FISH method is labor intensive and is likely not useful for large scale epidemiologic studies, as obtaining needed samples can be difficult compared to qPCR and Southern blot ( Aviv et al., 2011 ; Montpetit et al., 2014 ). However, both qPCR and Southern blot yield reproducible results though the measurement error is greater in qPCR analyses ( Aviv et al., 2011 ). Both qPCR and Southern blot come with a set of tradeoffs that should be explored regarding their ability to impact cross-study comparisons. Across all biomarkers used, differences in sample types and quality, frequency of measurement, as well as methodology used highlight a need to identify “gold standard” measures of biomarker levels and implement consistency in biomarker operationalization across studies.

Second, study design may have influenced our findings. Several studies employed non-representative sampling. This may reflect populations that are more or less likely to report experiences of discrimination and are willing to have their biomarkers sampled (e.g., have a blood draw) which is likely to introduce further selection bias. While these findings may not be generalizable to a broader population, they still provide insight into the experiences of individuals and communities with similar characteristics. The preponderance of cross-sectional studies in our review limits the ability to establish a temporal order between exposure to discrimination and biomarker changes, although the use of biomarkers reduces the possibility of reverse causality (i.e., people are generally unaware of their levels of circulating inflammatory biomarkers and hence biomarkers are unlikely to influence reports of discrimination). The longitudinal assessment of experiences of discrimination also makes it possible to examine trajectories of experiences over time and the cumulative impacts of discrimination on biomarker outcomes. Priorities for future research on discrimination and health include the need for more longitudinal assessments and representative sampling, particularly of marginalized groups that may be most susceptible to experiencing discrimination and the differential health, social, and economic burden of such experiences.

Though not quantifiable in the present analysis given the limited number of studies, findings from individual studies suggest there may be heterogeneity in the associations of discrimination and biomarkers according to race/ethnicity, gender, and/or sexual orientation ( Doyle and Molix, 2016 ; Kershaw et al., 2016b ; Ratner et al., 2013 ; Saban et al., 2018 ). Specifically, studies that examined associations among marginalized groups observed more nuanced associations than the average correlation obtained from our pooled estimates. For example, Lehrer et al. found that everyday discrimination was associated with hair cortisol concentration among Black participants, though not white participants ( Lehrer et al., 2020 ). Differential relationships among marginalized groups may be obscured in assessments where their experiences are not centered or when included in study populations where those groups are less represented. These relationships should be explored in future research. Additionally, while the literature on discrimination and health is global and spans across the lifecourse, ( Paradies, 2006 ; Williams et al., 2019b ) assessments of the association between discrimination and biomarkers that use the EDS have been predominantly carried out in the United States (N = 24) and among adult populations. Associations between discrimination and biomarkers should be examined in other national contexts and lifecourse periods to assess comparability. While the underlying mechanisms may not differ, cross-context studies can help to elucidate causal mechanisms and effect modifiers useful to understanding relationships between discrimination and health. Associations between discrimination and biomarkers across the lifecourse may vary at different periods (i.e., early life, adolescence, mid-life, older age). Relatedly, items in the EDS may not perform the same in different countries and populations. For example, to extend the use of the measure, the EDS has recently been adapted for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to capture experiences and attributions relevant to Indigeneity in Australia ( Thurber et al., 2021 ).

It should also be noted that there is a body of literature that suggests that psychosocial factors and coping strategies may influence reports and impacts of experiences of discrimination ( Berjot and Gillet, 2011 ; Brondolo et al., 2009 ; Pascoe and Smart Richman, 2009 ). Unhealthy coping strategies (e.g., suppressing responses) or “negative” psychosocial factors have maintained fairly consistent associations with worsened health impacts of discrimination, ( Brondolo et al., 2009 ; Himmelstein et al., 2015 ; Krieger and Sidney, 1996 ; Nuru-Jeter et al., 2009 ) though findings regarding the overall health impacts of active or health-promoting coping strategies and positive psychosocial factors have been mixed ( Brondolo et al., 2009 ; James, 1994 ; Pascoe and Smart Richman, 2009 ). While insight into how individual-level coping behaviors and resources is useful and can inform individual-level interventions, the focus should extend beyond the individual-level. Though these measures may be useful in understanding how marginalized people respond to and cope with discrimination – and should be further explored – focus on individual coping strategies without intervening on the structural and cultural factors that pattern these experiences may do little to mitigate adverse health outcomes and sustain wellbeing ( Bailey et al., 2020 , 2017 ; Homan, 2019 ; James, 1994 ).

Our search found that CRP, cortisol, IL-6, and telomere length were outcomes that were assessed with reasonable frequency. However, in addition to studies in the meta-analysis, the narrative review revealed a broader range of biomarkers for future research. In addition to those identified in our narrative synthesis of relevant papers, several inflammatory markers such as IL-1β, TNF-α, and inflammatory mechanisms such as the Conserved Transcriptional Response to Adversity (CTRA) have been identified in a recent review of the relationship between discrimination and inflammation ( Cuevas et al., 2020 ). Measures such as GlycA may be more accurate measures of cumulative inflammation and have been associated with several chronic and acute health outcomes in adults ( Priest, 2021 ). This literature suggests that future research should examine relationships between discrimination and these understudied indicators of biological functioning to better understand and intervene upon the health implications of societal conditions and contexts.

While future research should increase focus on relationships between discrimination and biomarkers (as well as potential interventions), it should also consider whether these associations differ when other measures of discrimination are used (e.g., Experiences of Discrimination, ( Krieger, 1990 ; Krieger and Sidney, 1996 ) Major Experiences of Discrimination Scale, ( Williams et al., 1997 ) or Schedule of Racist Events (SRE) ( Landrine and Klonoff, 1996 )). Studies using the Experiences of Discrimination (EOD) scale have found positive associations with IL-6 levels ( Giurgescu et al., 2016 ). A cross-sectional analysis by Chae and colleagues found the main effect of EOD on telomere length to be null in a sample of Black men ( Chae et al., 2014 ), though, in a recent longitudinal assessment, they found evidence of greater 10-year telomere shortening among a sample of Black adults in the CARDIA study ( Chae et al., 2020 ). Differences in findings of these assessments may reflect differences in 1) study design (i.e., cross-sectional vs. longitudinal) or 2) study population (e.g., middle-aged Black men in the Bay Area vs. a broader sample of middle-aged Black adults across 4 cities). Research examining the relationship between discrimination using the SRE and cytokine levels (i.e., indicators of inflammation) found increased discrimination to be associated with elevated cytokines ( Brody et al., 2015 ; Simons et al., 2021 ). An eligible study also assessed associations between discrimination and telomere length using the Major Experiences of Discrimination Scale finding null associations ( Hailu et al., 2020 ). It seems that the direction of relationships is relatively consistent across measures, though these are comparisons to individual studies. However, each measure captures different domains and frequencies in which discrimination occurs and offers considerations of different policy suggestions and interventions to mitigate their impacts. Future research estimating the pooled correlation size between various indicators of discrimination and biomarker outcomes across studies that use measures that capture different forms, severity, and specific attributions of discrimination could contribute to understanding how discrimination adversely affects indicators of health status across the continuum of disease. It may also be useful to understand whether these associations differ among measures of discrimination that do not rely on the willingness of an individual to report compared to those which require self-report ( Krieger et al., 2010 ). Additionally, this work can contribute to an evidence base that emphasizes the importance of policy and programs in tandem with research to intervene prior to the development of diseases to prevent and reduce disease burden among marginalized groups.

The present meta-analysis is not without its limitations. In examining the relationship between discrimination and biomarkers using the EDS, we rely on a measure of discrimination that captures general experiences of unfair and differential treatment. While useful, the EDS is distinct from measures that capture discrimination occurring within institutional contexts (e.g., the EOD scale), those that capture specific forms of oppression (e.g., the SRE), measures that capture discrimination as a result of an individual’s multiple marginalized identities (e.g., Multiple Discrimination Scale ( Bogart et al., 2010 )), and those capturing experiences which result in material, opportunity, and political deprivation irrespective of whether an individual was aware of such experiences and reported them as discriminatory or harmful ( Bailey et al., 2017 ; Krieger, 2011 , 2012 ; Williams and Mohammed, 2009 ). Additionally, we only include findings from published manuscripts, which may differ from associations reported in unpublished works. Specifically, results from the Egger’s test suggests publication bias among studies that assessed CRP, though not for cortisol, telomere length, or IL-6. This may reflect a trend of not publishing null findings for CRP and may also reflect the need for more research on IL-6, telomere length, and cortisol given the smaller number of studies identified. We estimated mean correlation sizes from minimally adjusted associations reported in each article, however we also examine associations reported in most adjusted models to account for potential confounders of the association.

The biomarkers included in our review are linked with each other, resulting in a cascade of physiological responses to stress. For example, chronic inflammation (measured through IL-1β and IL-6) may lead to shortened telomeres, ( Baylis et al., 2014 ) acting as a potential mediator between discrimination and telomere length. However, our review did not consider the complex, inter-relationships between biomarkers representing different systems. Instead, we have focused on summarizing the associations with individual components of the stress response, as well as reveal gaps in the evidence.

This study also has several strengths. It quantifies the relationship between discrimination and molecular biomarkers, which provide evidence for some of the pathways that discrimination may become embodied. We also examine the relationship among studies that use the same measure of discrimination, the EDS, thus increasing the comparability across studies. The EDS is a widely used measure in both domestic and international contexts. Full, abbreviated, or modified versions of the EDS are included in many major epidemiologic studies in the United States and elsewhere (See for example: ( Bild et al., 2002 ; Heeringa and Connor, 1995 ; Jackson et al., 2004 ; Radler, 2014 ; Rosenberg et al., 1995 ; Steptoe et al., 2013 ; Taylor et al., 2005 ; Williams et al., 2004 )). The frequent inclusion of EDS in cross-national studies to examine the implications of discrimination on health allows for the systematic examination of the strength of associations between discrimination and health using a standardized exposure. Additionally, the utility of the EDS in capturing, reasonably accurately, the experiences of discrimination has been documented across a wide range of populations, with good internal consistency and validity ( Gonzales et al., 2016 ; Kim et al., 2014 ; Krieger et al., 2005 ; Lewis et al., 2012 ). We also evaluate, where possible, the relationship between discrimination and biomarkers among studies that have utilized similar means of outcome assessment (i.e., CAR, waking cortisol, blood, and salivary IL-6) to further increase the comparability across studies.

Overall, our results provide information on the relationships between discrimination and several molecular biomarkers. The number of studies was limited, but we did find associations consistent with discrimination having an adverse effect, though evidence can be strengthened. There is a need of research using a broader range of biomarkers to better characterize the relationships between discrimination and physiological indicators. This study identifies associations between discrimination and biological indicators that have been identified as possible precursors to adverse health outcomes using a consistent measure of discrimination. We also provide considerations for future research utilizing biomarker outcomes to strengthen ongoing efforts.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental tables and figures.

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Appendix A. Supporting information

Supplementary data associated with this article can be found in the online version at doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2022.105772 .

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Reflections on Eriksen’s seminal essay on discrimination, performance and learning without awareness

• Published: 15 September 2020
• Volume 83 , pages 546–557, ( 2021 )

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• Randolph Blake 1  

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Early in his career C.W. Eriksen published in Psychological Review what turned out to be a highly impactful critique on methods and findings on the topic of unconscious influences on discrimination and awareness. His incisive commentary on extant methodology employed at that time – especially the heavy dependence on subjective reports – clearly was heard by others moving forward, as evidenced by the subsequent, lively discussions within the literature concerning the very definition of the notion of unconscious processing. Of equal importance, Eriksen’s paper provided an impetus for the development of more refined techniques for manipulating perceptual awareness and for measuring the consequences of those manipulations. My purpose in this essay is to ensure that Eriksen’s seminal contributions concerning unconscious phenomena remain within the awareness of the many current investigators working on this popular topic.

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Introduction

Charles Eriksen’s many lasting contributions being honored in this special issue rightfully include his trenchant essay titled “Discrimination and learning without awareness: A methodological survey and evaluation” (Eriksen, 1960 ). This essay (hereafter referred to as DLWA ) deserves prominence in the unfolding – and unfinished – saga of subliminal perception: the mind’s propensity to be swayed by sensory information about environmental objects and events that fall outside our awareness. I am grateful for the opportunity to remind myself and other contemporary researchers about this paper and the role it has played in the evolution of our thinking about perception outside of awareness and about the challenges we face when trying to study that problem.

To start on a personal note, my appreciation of this paper dates back to my early years as a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. My mentors at that time were the late Robert Fox (one of Eriksen’s close professional friends) and Joseph Lappin (one of Eriksen’s accomplished graduate students). Their admiration for Eriksen’s ideas were infectiously transmitted to me during my graduate training. In fact, it was Fox who introduced me to this Psychological Review paper, realizing that I was becoming infatuated with the study of binocular rivalry as a psychological scalpel for dissecting aspects of visual processing transpiring outside of awareness (Blake & Fox, 1974 ). Eriksen’s paper was Fox’s constant reminder to me that one must maintain a healthy skepticism about subjective reports of what can be seen and what cannot, meaning that one must redouble the effort to validate “invisibility” when claiming that people do not see things that nonetheless influence their performance on behavioral tasks involving putatively “invisible” stimuli.

Based on its citation count, DLWA should qualify as a citation classic by Google Scholar standards, and the lessons taught in that paper have certainly not been lost in the mists of time. Indeed, a series of influential papers published over the second half of the twentieth century credit this particular paper in kindling a lively debate about perceptual processing outside of awareness (Erdelyi, 1974 ; Dixon 1971 ; Holender, 1986 ; Kihlstrom, 1987 ; Merikle & Daneman, 1998 ). Those contributions, in turn, set the stage for a flood of papers published during the past 20 years on the inter-related topics of awareness and consciousness. Footnote 1 The message voiced in the 1960 DLWA paper has become so ingrained in our thinking that the original citation is no longer deemed necessary. But, thankfully, this special issue gives us opportunity to revisit the essay’s prescient ideas and to appreciate how its influence can be felt in contemporary research.

As a prelude, it is worth noting that this legendary figure in experimental psychology was trained in clinical psychology, with a dissertation awarded in 1950 (published the following year as Eriksen, 1951 ) in which Eriksen endorsed the existence of perceptual defense. Footnote 2 Over that decade, however, this clinically trained psychologist increasingly embraced the mature methods and healthy skepticism of an experimental psychologist, transforming himself into a pioneer in the nascent field dubbed experimental clinical psychology. Upon assuming his first academic position at Johns Hopkins, Eriksen’s interests broadened to other forms of unconscious processing including subception and learning outside of awareness. It was also while at Johns Hopkins that Eriksen partnered with his colleagues Wendall Garner and Harry Hake to create and publish their highly influential Psychological Review paper (Garner, Hake, & Eriksen, 1956 ) questioning the strict operational definition of perception as discriminatory responses to given stimulus conditions (Allport, 1955 ). Rejecting that sterile view, Garner, Hake, and Eriksen argued that perception is a process whose properties “are induced from objectively determined relations between stimuli and responses (p. 150),” with those relations emerging from multiple, convergent operations. That paper, incidentally, justifiably can be characterized as an opening salvo in the cognitive revolution and, by extension, a harbinger of psychology’s enlistment into the quest to understand the nature of consciousness (Koch, 2004 ; Chalmers, 1996 ).

In 1956, Eriksen moved to the University of Illinois where he developed into a full-blown experimental psychologist, leaving the clinical moniker off his credentials. Still early in his career trajectory, Eriksen announced his arrival on the scene with the publication of DWLA , to which we now turn.

The central message in DLWA

Eriksen introduces his essay by questioning the usefulness of the notion of consciousness as it was being used in the literature of his day. In so doing, Eriksen was foreshadowing what others have since echoed about the vagueness of that term, including philosopher Ned Block ( 1995 ), who has colorfully characterized consciousness as a “mongrel concept.” In DLWA , Eriksen instead opined that his aim was to focus on discrimination and awareness, an approach more amenable to the rigor of convergent operational definition (Garner et al., 1956 ). At the risk of putting words in Eriksen’s mouth, my impression is that his conceptualization of awareness included the appearance of things (“content consciousness” as philosophers would call it) as well as the implications of what that appearance conveyed about the opportunities afforded by things we’re looking at. But there’s no getting around the limitation that the contents of awareness are inherently subjective (Koenderink, 2012 ). Dissenting opinions are welcome.

To set the stage for the lessons appearing in DLWA , let’s begin by considering what Eriksen wrote in the concluding section of his essay:

“…at present there is no convincing evidence that the human organism can discriminate or differentially respond to external stimuli that are at an intensity level too low to elicit a discriminated verbal response….There is a great need to spell out explicitly the assumed characteristics of the unconscious and to search for explanations of so called unconscious phenomena in terms of more common-place psychological variables.” p. 298

In reaching this conclusion, Eriksen critiqued several methodological strategies that had been used to assess subliminal discrimination (i.e., dissociations between verbal report and other measures of the impact of weak sensory stimulation). The following subsections summarize those strategies and Eriksen’s reservations about them. In those subsections, I also give selective examples of more recent work that arguably sidesteps some of those reservations and, thus, allows more refined tests for the existence of discrimination outside of awareness (see Text Box 1).

Indirect, physiological measures

As described by Eriksen, this strategy involves using an involuntary physiological response such as the galvanic skin response (GSR) or the pupillary reflex together with verbal report to ask if those two response modes – autonomic and behavioral - can be dissociated. The two versions of this strategy were to use classical conditioning to determine whether: (1) a conditioned, autonomic reflex could be established using subthreshold stimulation (Wilcott, 1953 ), or (2) whether a previously conditioned autonomic reflex established using a suprathreshold conditioned stimulus could then be evoked by subthreshold intensity levels of the conditioned stimulation (e.g., Newhall & Sears, 1933 ). With the latter version of this strategy, it was further possible to ascertain whether an autonomic response still occurred on trials when the behavioral response was incorrect, in effect generating a pair of psychometric measures obtained concurrently (Lazarus & McCleary, 1951 ). Without going into specific reasons, suffice it to say that Eriksen was generally skeptical of the implementation of these strategies and the oversimplified analyses of the partial correlations of data comprising those two response categories. Eriksen was unconvinced that indirect, autonomic responses are more sensitive at discriminating stimulus presentations than are verbal responses, in part because he was skeptical about the validity of verbal responses.

The approach highlighted in the previous paragraph relied on classical conditioning to empower mundane visual stimuli (e.g., flashes of light) with the capability to evoke autonomic reactions such as GSR. But not all stimuli require preconditioning – some are inherently arousing (e.g., a straight flush hand in poker) as evidenced by the autonomic responses they provoke (e.g., brisk pupillary dilation, as savy poker players recognize). Footnote 3 Moreover, in the laboratory the visibility of such stimuli can be removed from awareness by any one of several psychophysical tricks, as summarized in a subsequent section, that can be deployed to address this question: Does a normally visible, affectively charged image still evoke reflexive autonomic responses when suppressed from awareness? During recent years contemporary work has attempted to answer that question. Thus, for example, there is evidence that an emotionally charged visual stimulus viewed by one eye (e.g., a picture of a spider) tends to dominate in binocular rivalry when pitted against a neutral stimulus viewed by the other eye (Sheth & Pham 2008 ; Gerdes & Alpers, 2014 ). In a similar vein, images of angry faces initially suppressed from awareness during rivalry emerge into dominance more quickly than do neutral or happy faces, an effect that may be traced to the salience of the widened eyes accompanying threatening facial expressions (Gray et al., 2010 ; Whalen et al., 2004 ; Yang et al., 2007 ). And pictures of nude human bodies continue to serve as effective cues guiding spatial attention even when they are suppressed from awareness by the potent form of interocular masking called continuous flash suppression (CFS), (Jiang et al., 2006 ). Tamietto and de Gelder B ( 2010 ) and Hedger et al. ( 2016 ) provide good reviews of this controversial literature on affective processing outside of awareness.

Dual-report strategy

Another methodological approach critiqued by Eriksen in DLWA is the dual-report procedure wherein each detection trial entails collecting a participant’s trial-by-trial report about detectability of a stimulus together with a numerical confidence rating about the correctness of the participant’s judgment on each trial. Detection tasks typically required a yes/no answer or a forced-choice response about some characteristic of the stimulus (e.g., in which one of two intervals was it presented). Eriksen was aware that in a number of studies (e.g., Adams, 1957 ) the dual report method revealed that participants can perform above chance under conditions where they indicate having zero confidence in their judgment on a significant number of trials. For Eriksen, this pattern of results further undermined the utility of verbal report for building a science of awareness. Eriksen also expressed skepticism about the validity of scaling based on verbal descriptors as operational definitions of awareness (e.g., see the Perceptual Awareness Scale devised by Ramsøy and Overgaard, 2004 ) because rating scales were difficult to standardize across experiments or to normalize across participants. Rating scales, in his opinion, were a starting point but, nonetheless, do not uniquely constitute the “operational specification” needed to nail down awareness.

In the contemporary literature on awareness we find multiple instances where versions of the dual-report procedure have been utilized (see, e.g., the paper titled “Blindsight in normal observers” by Kolb & Braun, 1995 , and the rejoinders to this paper by Morgan et al., 1997 and by Robichaud & Stelmach, 2003 ). Moreover, there have been important advances in quantifying the relation between sensory discrimination and judgment confidence that, in my opinion, go some way toward redressing the concerns voiced by Eriksen. I would particularly urge readers to read the theoretical paper by Galvin et al. ( 2003 ) in which the authors derive an operational definition of perception without awareness within the context of statistical decision theory. Their formulation is based on the distinction between Type 1 judgments (“which one of n possible events is most likely to have happened on a given trial”) and Type 2 judgments (“what is the likelihood that my Type 1 judgment was correct on that trial”). Galvin et al. develop a strong case for the conclusion that evidence implicating perception without awareness can be derived by comparing the prediction of Type 2 performance based on Type 1 performance. Without going into details of that derivation, their theory posits that if participants can discriminate between signal and noise but cannot discriminate between their own incorrect and correct decisions, this constitutes evidence for perception without awareness.

To be sure, the debate about the validity of dual-report procedures for dissociating awareness (e.g., confidence rating, wagering) from perceptual performance has endured in the literature and remains a topic of controversy (see, e.g., Dienes and Seth, 2010 ; Overgaard et al., 2010 ; Soto et al., 2011 ).

Subsequent impact of subliminal stimulation

The last class of methods critiqued in DLWA are ones that entail two successive phases: (1) a presentation period during which a complex, meaningful stimulus is viewed under conditions that temporarily disrupt perceptual awareness of that stimulus, and (2) a subsequent behavioral assay of the residual effectiveness of that lack of awareness. To what extent, in other words, does a stimulus retain its effectiveness when a person is unaware of its presence?

During the period of time that Eriksen was working, studies tended to rely on reductions in the intensity, contrast, or exposure duration of stimuli to render them perceptually invisible. To exemplify this strategy, DLWA refers to a study (Dixon, 1958 ) in which participants were shown a series of 12 different words, some neutral (e.g., “barn”) and others with emotional connotation (e.g., “penis”), and each word was presented at a luminance and exposure duration rendering the words unidentifiable. After each presentation, which was signaled by a visible spot of light, participants were forced to guess what the word was, based on the first thought that came to mind. During this phase of the experiment, participants received four repetitions of this series of subliminal exposures of the 12 words, and on no trials were their guesses the correct answer. A week later participants returned to the lab and were given a randomly ordered list of the subliminally presented words, all of which they reported as being unfamiliar. They were then read, one at a time, a word drawn from the list of the participant’s own responses during the previous, subliminal presentation phase and told to pick from the list of words they held the one most likely to match a particular response based on any associative connection that came to mind. Data pooled over participants revealed that the incidence of “correctly” pairing a subliminal word with the response guess made a week before to that word was significantly greater than that predicted based on chance, leading Dixon to conclude that subliminal words could be unconsciously perceived. Moreover, Dixon recorded GSRs during the subliminal phase of the experiment, and those measures revealed that the emotionally valenced, unseen words evoked stronger autonomic reactions than did neutral words.

In a replication and extension of Dixon’s behavioral study (Fuhrer & Eriksen, 1960 ), Eriksen confirmed the behavioral result but also included control conditions (e.g., brief exposure of inverted words) showing that it was structural, not semantic, aspects of the subliminal words (e.g., number of letters) that were likely deployed when participants formulated their “guesses” about word associations. Eriksen nonetheless acknowledged that “there are most likely circumstances where a nonverbal response may be a better indicator than verbalization” (p. 291) when it comes to assaying the residual effectiveness of a stimulus that escapes one’s awareness. The following section summarizes Eriksen’s prescient thoughts on that possibility, and it highlights some of the ways in which those circumstances have been created in contemporary work.

Learning without awareness

Eriksen highlighted another class of studies that he lumped under the rubric “discrimination without awareness.” The gist of these phenomena is a participant’s acquisition over trials of knowledge about some seemingly irrelevant, non-obvious property of visual stimuli that are the focus of a task unrelated to that property. Examples of this kind of unintentional learning can be drawn from the contemporary literature showing that people unwittingly acquire information about statistical regularities in arrays of complex figures as evidenced by their performance on tasks involving visual search (Chun & Jiang, 1998 ) and shape familiarity (Fiser & Aslin, 2001 ). This kind of acquired knowledge about stimulus contingencies has also been demonstrated under conditions where a critical aspect of visual stimulation supporting successful associative learning was blocked from awareness by a camouflage maneuver (Di Luca et al., 2010 ). These findings on incidental perceptual learning fit neatly into conceptualizations of perception that emphasize the importance of learning statistical regularities about our world, especially in situations where vital visual information is missing or is ambiguous (Purves & Lotto, 2003 ; Geisler, 2008 ).

Notable developments following publication of DLWA

By the second half of the DLWA essay, we readily understand that Eriksen reserves the term “subliminal” for situations where a stimulus is degraded in visibility to a point where it cannot be detected or identified. And for him, studies with appropriate control conditions find no demonstrable impact of subliminal stimuli on discrimination. At the same time, he acknowledges the likelihood that ordinarily visible, supraliminal stimuli can and often do retain their effectiveness in shaping perception even when those stimuli fall outside of one’s awareness. These conclusions are summed up in this quote:

“While we have been unable to find evidence for a supersensitive discriminating unconscious, the evidence that behavior can be directed by above threshold cues of which the S is unaware is not only more plausible but somewhat more substantial. Common sense tells us that we are constantly utilizing cues of which we are unaware in our perception of depth, of shape and size constancy…” p. 293, DLWA.

See Text Box 2 for some additional thoughts on “essential cues” that operate outside of awareness.

In the years following publication of DLWA , new strategies have been developed and refined that permit manipulation of visual awareness and, thus, evaluation of the extent to which an ordinarily visible object or event retains some degree of effectiveness to influence our reactions to those objects or events. The next subsection highlights several of the most popular tactics and illustrates ways in which those tactics have been deployed.

Contemporary strategies for rendering the visible “invisible”

Some years ago Chai-Youn Kim and I published an essay evaluating a variety of popular psychophysical phenomena characterized by induced fluctuations in visual awareness (Kim & Blake, 2005 ). Footnote 4 Among the phenomena evaluated were visual masking (e.g., Kouider & Dehaene, 2007 ), visual crowding (e.g., Levi, 2008 ), attentional blink (e.g., Dux & Marois, 2009 ), bistable figures (e.g., Sterzer et al., 2009 ), and binocular rivalry (e.g., Blake & Logothetis, 2002 ). Figure 1 reproduces the Table summarizing our interpretation of the strengths and weaknesses of each of these phenomena as tools for studying perception outside of awareness. Our essay concluded that the most compelling and effective phenomena were those characterized by robust fluctuations in perception relatively unconstrained by exposure duration, retinal location, or stimulus complexity. For assaying visual processing outside of awareness, we further singled out phenomena evoked by unchanging physical stimulation: in other words, what you are looking at remains the same but what you are seeing changes over time (i.e., phenomena exhibiting multistability).

Two prominent phenomena – bistable figures and binocular rivalry – satisfy that criterion, but the two differ in two important respects: (1) when viewing bistable figures (e.g., vase/face figure), the inducing stimulus and its constituent features do not disappear and, instead, it’s your interpretation of what you’re seeing that changes unpredictably; (2) during binocular rivalry, however, one of two dichoptically viewed, dissimilar stimuli, constituent features included, can be erased from awareness for several seconds at a time while the other stimulus is perceptually dominant. With bistable figures, in other words, the inducing figure persists in your awareness but you’re confused about what it portrays; with binocular rivalry the two dissimilar inducing figures themselves replace one another in awareness over time. But in both instances, the brain is confused, figuratively speaking, about what object the eyes are looking at, and the brain resolves this confusion by entertaining each possibility alternately over time. It also appears that volitional control over what you see is easier to achieve when viewing bistable figures than it is when experiencing binocular rivalry (Meng & Tong, 2004 ), a relevant consideration when deciding which psychophysical “trick” to deploy for a given purpose. For more on binocular rivalry from one person’s perspective, see Text Box 3.

Based on the number of citations to studies employing binocular rivalry during the years spanning 1960–2010, rivalry qualified as the favorite procedure for inducing fluctuations in visual awareness, edging out visual masking (Fig. 1 in Hedger et al., 2016 ). But in 2005 (Fang & He, 2005 ; Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005 ) rivalry was displaced in popularity by introduction of a new, remarkably robust phenomenon called continuous flash suppression (CFS). A form of interocular suppression, this technique entails presenting to one eye a montage of different patterns one after the other at a steady, brisk rate while the other eye views a stationary pattern. A variety of CFS montages have been successfully deployed, including Mondrian-like arrays of different sized, colored rectangles (Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005 ), arrays of small geometric figures (Fang & He, 2005 ), extended series of natural scene images (Kim et al., 2017 ), and arrays of pointillist like pictures (Cha et al., 2019 ). These dynamic animations using densely contoured figures can effectively suppress a monocular stimulus presented to the other eye, with durations of suppression lasting considerably longer than ordinary suppression durations associated with conventional rival displays while, at the same time, minimizing the incidence of mixed dominance states that can corrupt states of dominance during binocular rivalry (Blake et al., 2019 ). Footnote 5 Not surprisingly, CFS was eagerly adopted for studies of visual processing outside of awareness (see reviews by Gayet, Van der Stigchel, & Paffen, 2014 ; Hedger et al., 2016 ; Prioli & Kahan, 2015 ; Sterzer, Stein, Ludwig, Rothkirch, & Hesselmann, 2014 ; Yang, Brascamp, Kang, & Blake, 2014 ). And more recently, CFS has been utilized to tackle a diverse set of questions ranging from the ability to process multiple-word verbal expressions and solve arithmetic equations outside of awareness (Sklar et al., 2012 ) to identifying perceptual concomitants of developmental disorders such as autism (Madipakkam et al., 2017 ) and schizophrenia (Seymour et al., 2016 ).

Neurological conditions affecting awareness

Eriksen’s 1960 Psychological Review article made no mention of neuropsychological results that potentially bear on the question of perception without awareness, a rich literature dating back to the late nineteenth century (LeDoux et al., 2020 ). In his defense, Eriksen did not concern himself with the neural concomitants of visual awareness, so he cannot be faulted for this omission. Still, Eriksen’s strong opinions voiced in DLWA about methodological flaws in extant studies of discrimination without awareness surely would have aroused his interest in the emerging work on blindsight, a syndrome that burst on the scene just over a decade after DLWA was published (Weiskrantz et al., 1974 ). This notable clinical condition was characterized by accurate visually guided behavior achieved in the absence of visual awareness of the object guiding the response (Cowey & Stoerig, 1991 ; Stoerig et al., 2002 ; Weiskrantz, 1980 ), and in later studies blindsight has been extended to unconscious registration of other visual dimensions ranging from color (Cowey & Stoerig, 2001 ) to facial expressions (de Gelder et al., 1999 ). The lack of awareness defining this syndrome is attributable to visual field defects caused by geniculo-cortical brain damage, and for that reason blindsight has provided grist for the mill among those who quarrel about the necessity of primary visual cortex for conscious visual experience (e.g., Barbur et al., 1993 ; Silvanto & Rees, 2011 ; Tong, 2003 ). Originally derived to characterize a clinical condition associated with hemianopia, the term “blindsight” has now crept into the lexicon of papers describing healthy individuals whose performance is relatively unimpaired on tasks where normally visible objects retain their effectiveness despite being erased from awareness by transcranial magnetic stimulation (Boyer et al., 2005 ; Christensen et al., 2008 ), by visual camouflage (Kolb & Braun, 1995 ), by metacontrast masking (Lau & Passingham, 2006 ), or by CFS (Vieira et al., 2017 ).

In a related vein, studies of patients with damage to restricted areas within the occipital, the parietal, or the temporal lobes can exhibit patterns of selective visual deficits that suggest dissociation of awareness of different qualitative aspects of object perception. This literature has spawned impactful ideas about visual specialization within multiple areas identified within dorsal and ventral cortical streams (de Han & Cowey, 2011 ; Goodale & Milner, 1992 ; Kravitz et al., 2011 ; Mishkin et al., 1983 ). Pertinent to the topic of this essay, patients have been described who are unable to perform normal visual discriminations based on certain object properties such as object shape (i.e., they exhibit “shape blindness”) but are reasonably accurate at reaching and appropriately grasping those objects with a facility that belies their shape blindness. This line of research has been generalized to normal individuals tested behaviorally under conditions that putatively isolate functions identified with those different visual streams (e.g., Breitmeyer, 2014 ; Ludwig et al., 2015 ), and in brain imaging studies where activations within select visual areas of the human brain can be correlated with the degree of awareness of given visual qualities of objects (e.g., Fang & He, 2005 ; Tettamanti et al., 2017 ; Tong et al., 1998 ).

Perceptual awareness evoked by intrinsically arising neural activity

Eriksen’s essay did not dwell on neural concomitants of awareness other than to point to physiological measures (e.g., GSR) as proxies for awareness. But he did delineate what was called the concurrent response model (Eriksen, 1956 ) to account for partial correlations between physiological measures and verbal reports. How might that be related to contemporary work? I think they might be related, so bear with me as we work through the following line of reasoning.

These days we take it as a given that the necessary ingredients for the emergence of perceptual awareness are distinctive patterns of neural activity. The question of what constitutes those unique activity patterns remains an ongoing debate (Brascamp et al., 2018 ), and Maier and Tsychiya’s essay in this special issue provides an updated account of this debate. Whatever those brain states supporting awareness may be, they are arising within a larger sea of neural activity that fluctuates intrinsically (i.e., even in the resting state the brain is not inactive). It is not unreasonable to assume that those fluctuations may at times – in the absence of external sensory input – achieve levels and patterns sufficient to provoke a state of awareness that is indistinguishable from the state associated with genuine, externally triggered awareness. Willfully generated eidetic images could be construed as an example of these kinds of intrinsically generated states of awareness, as could unbidden hallucinations. Indeed, brain imaging studies confirm that both visual imagery (Pearson & Kosslyn, 2015 ) and auditory hallucinations (Diederen et al., 2012 ) can be accompanied by activation patterns distributed within modality-specific sensory brain areas.

The same broad conclusion has been advanced by some investigators as an explanation of chromatic synesthesia, the vivid visual experience that achromatic test figures, typically alphanumeric characters, appear distinctly colored (see reviews by Kim & Blake, 2013 ; Ward, 2013 ). In this unusual but non-pathological condition, one component of a person’s perceptual awareness (e.g., the form of the letter A) is readily traceable to an external stimulus while a concomitant, obligatory sensory quality of that stimulus (e.g., the letter’s redness: A ) arises from intrinsic neural events unrelated to specific wavelengths of light received by the eyes. In some studies, but certainly not all, synesthetic experience is accompanied by concomitant, intrinsically arising neural activity within sensory brain areas, including the putative color areas within the ventral stream network (e.g., Hubbard et al., 2005 ). As an aside, people who possess synesthesia often go years before realizing to their great surprise that their extra-colorful visual world is highly exceptional and not the norm – they are unaware that their color awareness is illusory.

Finally, consider the following scenario and what it implies about intrinsically generated visual awareness. Those of us who have spent time in a dark, quiet test room attempting to detect faint sounds or near-threshold visual events have learned that on occasional trials stimulus awareness can be evoked even when no external stimulus has been presented. When testing is structured in the form of a yes/no detection experiment, these mistaken judgments are dubbed “false alarms” and are chalked up to the confluence of internal noise and a liberal criterion for saying “yes, I detected it.” The judgment is deemed objectively incorrect, because the experimenter knows for certain that no stimulus was actually presented. But from the standpoint of awareness, false alarms can provide grist for the mill, so to speak. Consider, for example, the study performed by Ress and Heeger ( 2003 ). They used fMRI to monitor BOLD signals associated with neural activity arising within a person’s visual cortex while, at the same time, that person was making present/absent judgments about the brief presentation of faint, low-contrast spatial patterns presented on some, but not all, trials on a video screen being viewed by the person while lying inside the scanner. By design, this behavioral signal-detection task generated hits, misses, correct rejections, and false alarms, allowing Ress and Heeger to analyze separately the BOLD signals associated with those various categories of responses. As expected, the BOLD signal was significantly larger in amplitude (i.e., neural responses were stronger) on trials when the person reported detection of the actual presentation of a low-contrast pattern compared to the BOLD signal measured on trials when the person responded “no” in the presence of that same weak stimulus. The remarkable finding, however, was that the BOLD response on false-alarm trials – i.e., when the stimulus was not presented but the person said “present” - was significantly larger than the BOLD signal measured when the stimulus was presented but reported as “absent” by the participant. In a real sense, this finding corroborates a central tenet of SDT: owing to fluctuations in neural noise, we can occasionally perceive things that are not really there!

Variations in awareness of visual appearance

The focus in DLWA was on situations where awareness was abolished from consciousness, for example, a designated visual “target” cannot be seen. But as we know, the vision literature is chock-full of instances where the appearance of an object (or an event), while not blocked from awareness, is nonetheless conspicuously altered as a consequence of (1) the context in which that object appears, (2) our expectations about what we’re looking at, and (3) our prior experience including exposure to other objects or events. These alterations in appearance can pertain to low-level visual features such as contour orientation (Gibson & Radnor, 1937 ), surface color (Purves & Lotto, 2000 ), contour width (Blakemore & Sutton, 1969 ), or direction of visual motion (Wohlgemuth, 1911 ), as well as to high-level interpretations of appearance such as perceived facial expression (Thompson, 1980 ), apparent size (Kaufman & Kaufman, 2000 ), or visual event perception (Sekuler et al., 1997 ). This should serve as a reminder that the term “awareness” can have multiple meanings and that we need to be mindful of what aspects of awareness we are focusing on when considering perception outside of awareness. I was vividly reminded of this distinction upon seeing that a colored visual pattern subjected to CFS was fractionated into distinct features: the spatial configuration of the pattern could not be discerned under forced-choice testing but its color could be accurately reported (Hong & Blake, 2009 ). Color information survived CFS but form information did not. In a subsequent study a few years later, colleagues and I observed another instance of fractionation by CFS, this one involving form and flicker (Zadbood et al., 2011 ; see also Carlson & He, 2000 , for an example of form/flicker fractionation in the case of binocular rivalry). CFS, in other words, has the intriguing ability to disrupt unitary awareness of seemingly integrated features (Moors et al. 2017 ).

This is an appropriate place to acknowledge that “awareness” may not always be an all-or-none mental state but, instead, may at times be graded in terms of qualitative clarity (e.g., Dubois & Faivre, 2014 ; Lau & Passingham, 2006 ). As mentioned earlier, efforts have been made to construct scales (Ramsøy, et al., 2004 ; Zeki & Ffytche, 1998 ) and standardized inventories (Niikawa, Nishida & Miyahara, in press) that capture the graded quality of awareness. Moreover, awareness – like attention and visual working memory – has a given channel capacity that can be uniquely quantified by deriving the rate of change in the survival function of yet to be detected items within arrays differing in the number of items (Lappin et al., 2016 ). Lappin et al. ( 2020 ) speculate that this property of awareness may contribute to well-known failures of perceptual awareness documented in the laboratory (e.g., Simons & Chabris, 1999 ) as well as in important real-life situations (Drew et al., 2013 ).

To wrap up this essay succinctly, Charles Eriksen was an influential force in the emergence of our thinking about discrimination and learning outside of awareness, both in terms of his healthy skepticism about the literature on that topic during his nascent career and in terms of his subsequent contributions to the literature on attention and the flanker effect, as documented in other essays in this special issue. It can be said with confidence that the impetus for the recently developed techniques and more sophisticated analytic techniques for exploring visual processing outside of awareness were propelled by the skepticism voiced by DLWA as well as the avowed confidence of DLWA in the rigor of psychophysics to overcome skepticism about the potency of unconscious processes in shaping perception: visually important objects and events can indeed be processed in psychologically meaningful ways even though they have not been consciously identified. Eriksen’s skeptical prodding was an essential impetus in guiding us to a confirmation of that intuition. Indeed, the message contained in DLWA is in the DNA of contemporary thinking about awareness and its neural concomitants. In that respect Eriksen satisfied the aim he expressed in the concluding sentence of this classic paper:

“..to search for explanations of so called unconscious phenomena in terms of more common-place psychological variables. To do so may destroy the titillating mystery that the unconscious seems to hold, but then that is the business of science.” p. 298

The word consciousness, according to Web of Science, appears in the titles of more than 23,000 publications during the period 2000–2020, with those publications distributed among diverse disciplines including philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, clinical neurology, and the humanities.

Some of the biographical observations in this paragraph were harvested from the essay authored by colleagues and former students of Eriksen (Kramer et al., 1994 ) in honor of his retirement from the Editorship of Perception & Psychophysics .

One could write an article on the fascinating studies that have been published recently on the pupillary reflex and its sensitivity to non-photic, psychological factors, some of which exert their influence outside of consciousness (see, e.g., Binda et al., 2013 ; Jagiello et al., 2019 ; Naber & Nakayama, 2013 ; Laeng & Sulutvedt, 2014 ; Schwiedrzik & Sudmann, 2020 ).

Several subsequent review papers used our paper as a point of departure for expanding on aspects of some of these phenomena (Blake, 2014 ; Breitmeyer et al., 2008 ; Dubois & Faivre, 2014 ; Lin & He, 2009 ).

Nao Tsuchiya wowed people with his poster introducing CFS at the 2004 meetings of the Vision Sciences Society (Tsuchiya & Koch 2004 ). Interested readers can experience CFS for themselves by viewing the animation at this website through red/green anaglyphic filters: http://users.monash.edu.au/~naotsugt/Tsuchiya_Labs_Homepage/Demo_1.html

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Acknowledgements

This essay is dedicated to the memory of the late Robert Fox, my mentor who ingrained in me the lessons Charles Eriksen expressed in DWLA . Gordon Logan and Joseph Lappin, along with two anonymous reviewers, provided helpful comments on the essay. Support for this writing project was provided by the Centennial Research Fund, Vanderbilt University.

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Blake, R. Reflections on Eriksen’s seminal essay on discrimination, performance and learning without awareness. Atten Percept Psychophys 83 , 546–557 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02098-9

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Racial Discrimination and Justice in Education Essay

The impact of racism in schools and on the mental health of students.

Funding is one of the main factors that ensure racial segregation and exacerbation of the plight of the black population. Being initially in a more disastrous economic situation, racial minority populations fall into a vicious circle. Low-funded schools in poor areas have low academic ratings, which further contributes to the reduction of the material base. Due to their poor academic performance and the need to earn a living, many minorities are deprived of the opportunity to receive prestigious higher education. They are left with low-skilled jobs, which makes it impossible for their children to go to private school or move to a prestigious area with well-funded public schools. In institutions with little funding, unfortunately, manifestations of racism still prevail.

A significant factor in systemic racism in modern schools is the theory of colorblindness as the prevailing ideology in schools and pedagogical universities. The total avoidance of racial topics in schools has led to a complete absence of material related to the culture of racial minorities in the curricula. An example is the complaint of the parents of one of the black students that, during the passage of civilizations, the Greeks, Romans, and Incas were discussed in the lessons, but nothing was said about Africa. However, there were a few African American students in the class (Yi et al., 2022). The white director justified herself by saying that this was the curriculum and that it was not customary at school to divide people by skin color. In response, the student’s mother stated that children have eyes, and they see everything. And she would like them to see that we had a strong and fruitful culture. This state of affairs is justified by the proponents of assimilationism and American patriotism, built mainly around the honoring of the merits of white settlers and the founding fathers.

Meanwhile, the works of many researchers provide evidence that a high level of colorblindness among students correlates with greater racial intolerance. One study on race relations was conducted among young “millennials”. As a result, thousands of reports were recorded of openly racist statements and actions of white people from the field of view of these students (Plaut, et al., 2018). Another study on colorblindness found that white students who avoid mentioning racial issues were less friendly on assignments with black partners. This could be because they have less eye contact.

The shortcomings of the described situation affect not only black students but also white teachers who have not received proper training in their time on how best to take into account the characteristics of students from racial minorities. One researcher writes that in his entire experience in multicultural education, he faced the almost universal embarrassment that racial issues caused to white teachers. A common complaint is: I feel helpless. What am I, as a white teacher, to do? One educator remarked that he had never seen African-American teachers say that they did not distinguish between races (Mekawi et al., 2017). This is further proof that racism and the factors leading to it contribute only to the split of social ties at school. Students from racial minorities feel this burden the most, which leads to their feeling of constant alienation. During the school years, conflicts with children “not like the rest” are especially aggravated – the state of affairs described above provides the basis for constant skirmishes, fights, and tension in institutions.

Suggestions for Creating an Inclusive School Environment

Among the educational factors supporting the status quo of widespread structural racism are the following. This is the system of financing public schools and the dominance of the ideology of colorblindness in schools and pedagogical universities. In the opposite direction, there is such a factor as the peculiarity of keeping educational statistics (Welton, et al., 2018). By providing up-to-date information on the state of affairs of students of various racial and ethnic groups, statistics give rise to the search for optimal solutions in the field of school policy.

The inclusion of racial and ethnic dimensions in educational statistics is intended to provide an objective assessment of the current situation regarding racial differences in American society in order to develop and improve racially relevant policies. In recent years, the ideas of culturally relevant pedagogy have been actively promoted in the US educational sphere. American citizens are becoming more interested and enlightened in the field of racial issues, which can be seen in activist speeches and anti-racist public actions.

It is crucial to teach racism in schools so that all pupils may understand what it is, how it affects, and how to stop tolerating it. There are many publications and learning experience plans that address racism. It is essential to ask teachers and principals to integrate lessons on racism into the syllabus. One can also request that your teachers incorporate novels with a variety of subjects (Welton, et al., 2018). Then, it is important to request that the school draft an inclusion and zero-tolerance statement. Counselors can encourage the instructors and administration to implement these policies at the school if they do not already exist in the code of conduct or other policies (Pizarro & Kohli, 2020). It is critical that schools have clear policies about race and how individuals are treated on campus.

Resources for the School Counselor to Deal With Prejudice and Its Impact at the School

Mekawi, Y., Bresin, K. & Hunter, C.D. (2017). Who is more likely to “not see race”? individual differences in racial colorblindness. Race and Social Problems, 9 (1), 207–217. Web.

The authors claim that many Americans support a colorblind racial philosophy, which emphasizes sameness and the equitable allocation of resources without regard to race. The current study looked at the relationships between aggressiveness, and empathy in white undergraduates and three distinct types of racial colorblindness, including ignorance of racial privilege, ignorance of institutional discrimination, and ignorance of overt racism. The findings showed two distinct trends. In contrast to ignorance of overt racism and institutional discrimination, which were linked to poorer cooperativeness, cognitive flexibility, and empathic concern, ignorance of racial privilege was associated with lower openness and viewpoint-taking. These findings are addressed in light of a larger body of research on bias and personality.

Pizarro, M., & Kohli, R. (2020). “I stopped sleeping”: Teachers of color and the impact of racial Battle Fatigue. Urban Education, 55 (7), 967–991. Web.

According to the authors, an operational definition of racial battle fatigue (RBF) is the mental, emotional, and physical costs of fighting racism. RBF is employed in this article to examine the effects of racism on educators of color who work in a predominately “White profession.” The scholars share counterstories of urban academics of color who confront racism on a regular basis in their workplaces. This has a negative effect on their well-being and ability to stay in the profession. The authors also discuss their resiliency and resistance tactics since they depend on a supportive community to persevere and change their schools.

Plaut, V. C., Thomas, K. M., Hurd, K., & Romano, C. A. (2018). Do Color blindness and multiculturalism remedy or foster discrimination and racism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27 (3), 200–206. Web.

This article gives psychology science’s perspective on the question of whether multiculturalism and colorblindness are more likely to prevent prejudice and racism than they are to promote it. The authors first concentrate on the results of a color-blind model. The study in this area reveals that while colorblindness may be appealing to certain people, it can also make people less sensitive to racism and prejudice. Additionally, according to the literature, color blindness generally has detrimental effects on intergroup relationships, minorities’ perceptions and results, and the promotion of diversity and inclusion in organizational settings. In the second section, the scholars look at the situations in which a multicultural perspective has beneficial or bad effects on intergroup relations, organizational diversity initiatives, and discrimination.

Welton, A. D., Owens, D. R., & Zamani-Gallaher, E. M. (2018). Anti-racist change: A conceptual framework for educational institutions to take systemic action. Teachers College Record, 120 (14), 1–22. Web.

In order to attain racial justice in education, people’s mindsets must also be changed to embrace a more anti-racist worldview. In order to investigate whether behaviors and leadership qualities could really encourage institutional change for racial justice, the authors review two sets of literature: studies on anti-racism and institutional transformation. However, they admit the constraints of each set of studies. The organizational transformation research often ignores equity concerns, notably racial conversations, while anti-racism research is more ideological and theoretical. The scholars combine essential ideas from the literature on organizational change and anti-racism to propose a conceptual framework that may be utilized to create a systematic anti-racist change at a wide level.

Yi, J., Neville, H. A., Todd, N. R., & Mekawi, Y. (2022). Ignoring race and denying racism: A meta-analysis of the associations between colorblind racial ideology, anti-Blackness, and other variables antithetical to racial justice . Journal of Counseling Psychology . Web.

The authors sought to comprehend how colorblind racial ideology (CBRI), or the rejection and minimizing of race and racism, can act as an obstacle to engaging in antiracist practice by relying on antiracism research. To find out if color evasion (ignorance of race) and power evasion (defiance of structural racism) CBRI were differently connected with anti-Blackness and mechanisms related to antiracism, the scholars specifically performed a meta-analysis. Results from 83 research with more than 25,000 participants and 375 effects reveal that varied effects depend on the kind of CBRI. The area of counseling psychology may be pushed by this meta-analysis to construct a bridge between different ideologies and the development of systemic reform.

Plaut, V. C., Thomas, K. M., Hurd, K., & Romano, C. A. (2018). Do color blindness and multiculturalism remedy or foster discrimination and racism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27 (3), 200–206. Web.

Yi, J., Neville, H. A., Todd, N. R., & Mekawi, Y. (2022). Ignoring race and denying racism: A meta-analysis of the associations between colorblind racial ideology, anti-Blackness, and other variables antithetical to racial justice. Journal of Counseling Psychology . Web.

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1. IvyPanda . "Racial Discrimination and Justice in Education." November 25, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/racial-discrimination-and-justice-in-education/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Racial Discrimination and Justice in Education." November 25, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/racial-discrimination-and-justice-in-education/.

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Critical analysis of racism, discrimination, and affirmative action.

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Race is an ongoing issue within the United States and an essential issue in the study of sociology . For a nation that was founded with the institution of slavery, the issue has not left since. Several important concepts related to racism are often confused with each other due to the fact that the differences between them (while very important) are relatively subtle. One of the custom writing services available from Ultius is critical analysis and the intent of this sample essay is to compare and contrast the specific concepts of racism, discrimination, and affirmative action.

Racism, discrimination, and affirmative action in America

Properly speaking, the concept of racism always refers to treating a given person badly as a result of his/her racial/ethnic background. Essentially, racism consists of the belief that a given human being is not as fully or equally a "person" as another human being, due solely to his racial/ethnic descent or heritage. Within the United States, racism has unfortunately been a major aspect of the very foundations of the national society.

Slavery, for example, was crucial to the economy of the nation up until the Civil War. It was explicitly based on the ideological belief that Black people were inferior and thus deserved to be owned by White people (Horton). This kind of explicit racism has generally become culturally unacceptable within the modern United States, except among certain fringe groups (such as the Ku Klux Klan) in the Deep South. Nevertheless, it is a disturbing component of the general American heritage. 

Society propagates modern racism

Racism still exists within society, even in the event that there is no person within the society who holds racist values per se. For example, Sanchez has indicated that the recent police brutality events such as those in Ferguson, Missour i are emotionally charged precisely because they are embedded within a broader context of, not personal, but rather societal or structural racism. The entire structure of American society may be such that Blacks have never been able to achieve the status of full citizens among others within the nation.

Likewise, Richardson and Norris have pointed out that Blacks and Hispanics continue to experience proportionally inadequate access to the national healthcare system. Racism may thus be a matter of personal beliefs and sentiments, but it can also have to do with the general structure of a society as such. Society is implicitly structured in such a way that certain groups do not have the same degree of access to social resources as other groups. 

Discrimination

In general, discrimination simply refers to giving special treatment to a given person or object as a result of his/its special intrinsic properties. Within the context under racism, though, discrimination has exclusively negative connotations. It means barring or restricting a given person from opportunities as a result of their demographic properties. For example, it would be discrimination of an employer were to reject the application of a highly qualified Black applicant simply because of their race.

Such discrimination has been deemed unlawful within the United States by the Civil Rights Acts that were passed in the 1960s and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has delineated several different demographic categories along which discrimination is unlawful, including:

Constitutional protection from discrimination

All American laws against discrimination ultimately have their basis in the Constitution of the United States . The Constitution ensures all citizens of the nation equal protection under the law. That is, it ensures that as far as the law is concerned, a given person must be treated first and foremost as a citizen, and not as the representative of one demographic category or another.

In principle, for example, it should not matter whether an applicant for a job is a Black or a White, or a man or a woman; the only thing that should matter is the simple question of who is in fact most qualified to do the job. Anti-discrimination laws essentially mandate that this kind of impartiality is a legal requirement within the United States, and not just a matter of personal preference. Freedom from discrimination, at least at the societal or professional level, is seen as a fundamental right of every American citizen, independent from what any given person's personal preference may or may not be. 

Affirmative action

Turning to affirmative action now, the main idea is certain demographic groups should be granted a competitive advantage (or positive handicap) within society, due to the fact that they have sociologically suffered a negative handicap for a very long time (Leadership Conference). It can be suggested that the Black population has been consistently placed at a disadvantage over the course of American history, as a result both of the institution of slavery and the failures of the Reconstruction era to truly address concerns pertaining to race within the nation.

If this premise is accepted, then the conclusion must also be accepted that there is a structural racism built into the very fabric of modern American society, and that policy initiatives would be needed in order to counteract this structural racism and produce a level playing field. Affirmative action is the general name for such policy initiatives. 

Does affirmative action help or hinder both sides?

Affirmative action is a very difficult subject precisely because depending on one's sociological perspective, it could be seen as either as a remedy against structural discrimination, or as a form of virulent discrimination in its own right. Clegg, for example, has provocatively suggested that " affirmative discrimination " would be a good synonym for affirmative action. Discrimination consists of treating someone in a (negatively) special way simply as a result of his demographic background.

But this is exactly what affirmative action proposes to do. All else being equal, under affirmative action, a Black person will be given a competitive advantage over a White person—which is the same as saying that the White person will be discriminated against relative to the Black person. In principle, then, the people who oppose affirmative action generally do so on the grounds that it is in fact a form of discrimination, and that such a practice is thus unacceptable within the United States. 

A reaction to existing discrimination

Everything hinges upon how one perceives the baseline situation:

• According to the doctrine of affirmative action, society is already discriminatory at the structural level, therefore, affirmative action would be not a form of discrimination in its own right but rather an antidote against the discrimination that already exists.  
• In the event that it is acknowledged to exist, there is controversy over whether it would really be appropriate to enhance and/or diminish the life prospects of individual persons in order to address a problem that, in reality, would exist only at the level of entire populations.

However, the extent to which structural discrimination exists is a contested point.

• If one believes that the structural problem is very serious and that affirmative action does, in fact, address it in a meaningful way, then it follows that affirmative action is policy strategy for ending discrimination within the United States.
• On the other hand, if one disagrees with either of those premises, then affirmative action could only look like its own form of discrimination. 

Comparative Analysis

On the basis of the delineation of concepts conducted above, three main points can be made:

Racism is essentially one specific form of discrimination.

Discrimination consists of treating a person negatively because of demographic factors. Racism consists of treating someone badly specifically because of the demographic factor of race/ethnicity. Discrimination can thus be conceptualized as a circle, and racism can be conceptualized within that circle. All racism is discrimination, but not all discrimination is racism.

This is because discrimination can occur along various demographic axes not related to race/ethnicity, as has been clearly expressed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Gender discrimination, for example , would be another circle within the larger circle of discrimination. 

Affirmative action is essentially meant to combat racism and discrimination in general within American society.

Again, racism can exist at both the personal and the structural levels. The idea of affirmative action is that racism does in fact exist at the structural level, and that policy level solutions are thus both appropriate and necessary for addressing the problem. This can include, for example, establishing quotas for minority persons in universities and corporation.

If a White male were to have better objective credentials than a Black female for a given position, the Black female would be granted the position due to the fact that her demographic background bestows upon her a sociological handicap that ought to give her a positive handicap against her rival. At the level of individual persons, this seems obviously discriminatory and unjust. The point of affirmative action, though, is that the playing field itself is already discriminatory and unjust and that efforts must thus be taken to address this matter. 

Most modern Americans oppose both racism and discrimination.

Only extremist fringe groups really suggest nowadays that these phenomena are good things. Most people tend to believe that these are archaic feelings that should be overcome by rational and modern persons. Again, though, this is why affirmative action is truly such a contention issue. Let it be granted that everyone opposes discrimination. The question that emerges, then, is:

Is affirmative action a form of discrimination?

The answer to this question would depend entirely on the breadth and validity of one's sociological perspective. The vast majority of people in the upcoming generation, for example, oppose affirmative action on the grounds that every individual person should be treated just the same as every other individual person (Clegg). This obviously just conclusion, however, ignores structural factors and biases that may intrinsically grant a competitive advantage to certain persons over other persons. 

Need your own comparative analysis? Buy an essay from Ultius today, custom written for your exact needs.

A key conclusion that has emerged here is that, despite seemingly increasing racial tensions , most modern Americans probably oppose both racism and discrimination, on simple moral grounds. However, this still leaves affirmative action a highly problematic subject within the nation. This is for the simple fact that it is ambiguous whether affirmative action is an antidote against discrimination, or whether it is a form of discrimination itself.

Following the principle of anti-discrimination itself and considering structural factors, radically different conclusions are possible regarding this matter. Depending on how seriously one takes the reality and/or nature of these structural factors, it can be concluded that affirmative action is either a way of combating discrimination, or a form of discrimination in itself. Whatever your perspective, there is tremendous value to be gained for this vital discussion when studies are conducted and research papers written toward the goal of educating citizens about the world around them.

Works Cited

Clegg, Roger. "Affirmative Discrimination in Higher Education." National Review . 10 Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Jul. 2015. <http://www.nationalreview.com/education-week>. 

Horton, James Oliver. Slavery and the Making of America . New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print. 

Leadership Conference. "Affirmative Action." 2015. Web. 24 Jul. 2015. <http://www.civilrights.org/resources/civilrights101/affirmaction.html>. 

Richardson, L. D., and M. Norris. "Access to Health and Health Care: How Race and Ethnicity Matter." Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine 77 (2010): 166-177. Print. 

Sanchez, Ray. "Why Ferguson Touched a Raw, National Nerve." CNN 29 Nov. 2014. Web. 2 Dec. 2014. <http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/29/us/ferguson-national-protests/index.html>.

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. "Discrimination by Type." n.d. Web. 26 Jul. 2015. <http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/>. 

United States. "Constitution of the United States." The Avalon Project . 1789. Web. 24 Jul. 2015. <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/usconst.asp>.

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Black americans have a clear vision for reducing racism but little hope it will happen, many say key u.s. institutions should be rebuilt to ensure fair treatment.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand the nuances among Black people on issues of racial inequality and social change in the United States. This in-depth survey explores differences among Black Americans in their views on the social status of the Black population in the U.S.; their assessments of racial inequality; their visions for institutional and social change; and their outlook on the chances that these improvements will be made. The analysis is the latest in the Center’s series of in-depth surveys of public opinion among Black Americans (read the first, “ Faith Among Black Americans ” and “ Race Is Central to Identity for Black Americans and Affects How They Connect With Each Other ”).

The online survey of 3,912 Black U.S. adults was conducted Oct. 4-17, 2021. Black U.S. adults include those who are single-race, non-Hispanic Black Americans; multiracial non-Hispanic Black Americans; and adults who indicate they are Black and Hispanic. The survey includes 1,025 Black adults on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) and 2,887 Black adults on Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel. Respondents on both panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

Recruiting panelists by phone or mail ensures that nearly all U.S. Black adults have a chance of selection. This gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole population (see our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling). Here are the questions used for the survey of Black adults, along with its responses and methodology .

The terms “Black Americans,” “Black people” and “Black adults” are used interchangeably throughout this report to refer to U.S. adults who self-identify as Black, either alone or in combination with other races or Hispanic identity.

Throughout this report, “Black, non-Hispanic” respondents are those who identify as single-race Black and say they have no Hispanic background. “Black Hispanic” respondents are those who identify as Black and say they have Hispanic background. We use the terms “Black Hispanic” and “Hispanic Black” interchangeably. “Multiracial” respondents are those who indicate two or more racial backgrounds (one of which is Black) and say they are not Hispanic.

Respondents were asked a question about how important being Black was to how they think about themselves. In this report, we use the term “being Black” when referencing responses to this question.

In this report, “immigrant” refers to people who were not U.S. citizens at birth – in other words, those born outside the U.S., Puerto Rico or other U.S. territories to parents who were not U.S. citizens. We use the terms “immigrant,” “born abroad” and “foreign-born” interchangeably.

Throughout this report, “Democrats and Democratic leaners” and just “Democrats” both refer to respondents who identify politically with the Democratic Party or who are independent or some other party but lean toward the Democratic Party. “Republicans and Republican leaners” and just “Republicans” both refer to respondents who identify politically with the Republican Party or are independent or some other party but lean toward the Republican Party.

Respondents were asked a question about their voter registration status. In this report, respondents are considered registered to vote if they self-report being absolutely certain they are registered at their current address. Respondents are considered not registered to vote if they report not being registered or express uncertainty about their registration.

To create the upper-, middle- and lower-income tiers, respondents’ 2020 family incomes were adjusted for differences in purchasing power by geographic region and household size. Respondents were then placed into income tiers: “Middle income” is defined as two-thirds to double the median annual income for the entire survey sample. “Lower income” falls below that range, and “upper income” lies above it. For more information about how the income tiers were created, read the methodology .

More than a year after the murder of George Floyd and the national protests, debate and political promises that ensued, 65% of Black Americans say the increased national attention on racial inequality has not led to changes that improved their lives. 1 And 44% say equality for Black people in the United States is not likely to be achieved, according to newly released findings from an October 2021 survey of Black Americans by Pew Research Center.

This is somewhat of a reversal in views from September 2020, when half of Black adults said the increased national focus on issues of race would lead to major policy changes to address racial inequality in the country and 56% expected changes that would make their lives better.

At the same time, many Black Americans are concerned about racial discrimination and its impact. Roughly eight-in-ten say they have personally experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and most also say discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead (68%).  

Even so, Black Americans have a clear vision for how to achieve change when it comes to racial inequality. This includes support for significant reforms to or complete overhauls of several U.S. institutions to ensure fair treatment, particularly the criminal justice system; political engagement, primarily in the form of voting; support for Black businesses to advance Black communities; and reparations in the forms of educational, business and homeownership assistance. Yet alongside their assessments of inequality and ideas about progress exists pessimism about whether U.S. society and its institutions will change in ways that would reduce racism.

These findings emerge from an extensive Pew Research Center survey of 3,912 Black Americans conducted online Oct. 4-17, 2021. The survey explores how Black Americans assess their position in U.S. society and their ideas about social change. Overall, Black Americans are clear on what they think the problems are facing the country and how to remedy them. However, they are skeptical that meaningful changes will take place in their lifetime.

Black Americans see racism in our laws as a big problem and discrimination as a roadblock to progress

Black adults were asked in the survey to assess the current nature of racism in the United States and whether structural or individual sources of this racism are a bigger problem for Black people. About half of Black adults (52%) say racism in our laws is a bigger problem than racism by individual people, while four-in-ten (43%) say acts of racism committed by individual people is the bigger problem. Only 3% of Black adults say that Black people do not experience discrimination in the U.S. today.

In assessing the magnitude of problems that they face, the majority of Black Americans say racism (63%), police brutality (60%) and economic inequality (54%) are extremely or very big problems for Black people living in the U.S. Slightly smaller shares say the same about the affordability of health care (47%), limitations on voting (46%), and the quality of K-12 schools (40%).

Aside from their critiques of U.S. institutions, Black adults also feel the impact of racial inequality personally. Most Black adults say they occasionally or frequently experience unfair treatment because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and two-thirds (68%) cite racial discrimination as the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead today.

Black Americans’ views on reducing racial inequality

Black Americans are clear on the challenges they face because of racism. They are also clear on the solutions. These range from overhauls of policing practices and the criminal justice system to civic engagement and reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the United States.

Changing U.S. institutions such as policing, courts and prison systems

About nine-in-ten Black adults say multiple aspects of the criminal justice system need some kind of change (minor, major or a complete overhaul) to ensure fair treatment, with nearly all saying so about policing (95%), the courts and judicial process (95%), and the prison system (94%).

Roughly half of Black adults say policing (49%), the courts and judicial process (48%), and the prison system (54%) need to be completely rebuilt for Black people to be treated fairly. Smaller shares say the same about the political system (42%), the economic system (37%) and the health care system (34%), according to the October survey.

While Black Americans are in favor of significant changes to policing, most want spending on police departments in their communities to stay the same (39%) or increase (35%). A little more than one-in-five (23%) think spending on police departments in their area should be decreased.

Black adults who favor decreases in police spending are most likely to name medical, mental health and social services (40%) as the top priority for those reappropriated funds. Smaller shares say K-12 schools (25%), roads, water systems and other infrastructure (12%), and reducing taxes (13%) should be the top priority.

Voting and ‘buying Black’ viewed as important strategies for Black community advancement

Black Americans also have clear views on the types of political and civic engagement they believe will move Black communities forward. About six-in-ten Black adults say voting (63%) and supporting Black businesses or “buying Black” (58%) are extremely or very effective strategies for moving Black people toward equality in the U.S. Smaller though still significant shares say the same about volunteering with organizations dedicated to Black equality (48%), protesting (42%) and contacting elected officials (40%).

Black adults were also asked about the effectiveness of Black economic and political independence in moving them toward equality. About four-in-ten (39%) say Black ownership of all businesses in Black neighborhoods would be an extremely or very effective strategy for moving toward racial equality, while roughly three-in-ten (31%) say the same about establishing a national Black political party. And about a quarter of Black adults (27%) say having Black neighborhoods governed entirely by Black elected officials would be extremely or very effective in moving Black people toward equality.

Most Black Americans support repayment for slavery

Discussions about atonement for slavery predate the founding of the United States. As early as 1672 , Quaker abolitionists advocated for enslaved people to be paid for their labor once they were free. And in recent years, some U.S. cities and institutions have implemented reparations policies to do just that.

Most Black Americans say the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in the U.S. either a great deal (55%) or a fair amount (30%), according to the survey. And roughly three-quarters (77%) say descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way.

Black adults who say descendants of the enslaved should be repaid support doing so in different ways. About eight-in-ten say repayment in the forms of educational scholarships (80%), financial assistance for starting or improving a business (77%), and financial assistance for buying or remodeling a home (76%) would be extremely or very helpful. A slightly smaller share (69%) say cash payments would be extremely or very helpful forms of repayment for the descendants of enslaved people.

Where the responsibility for repayment lies is also clear for Black Americans. Among those who say the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid, 81% say the U.S. federal government should have all or most of the responsibility for repayment. About three-quarters (76%) say businesses and banks that profited from slavery should bear all or most of the responsibility for repayment. And roughly six-in-ten say the same about colleges and universities that benefited from slavery (63%) and descendants of families who engaged in the slave trade (60%).

Black Americans are skeptical change will happen

Even though Black Americans’ visions for social change are clear, very few expect them to be implemented. Overall, 44% of Black adults say equality for Black people in the U.S. is a little or not at all likely. A little over a third (38%) say it is somewhat likely and only 13% say it is extremely or very likely.

They also do not think specific institutions will change. Two-thirds of Black adults say changes to the prison system (67%) and the courts and judicial process (65%) that would ensure fair treatment for Black people are a little or not at all likely in their lifetime. About six-in-ten (58%) say the same about policing. Only about one-in-ten say changes to policing (13%), the courts and judicial process (12%), and the prison system (11%) are extremely or very likely.

This pessimism is not only about the criminal justice system. The majority of Black adults say the political (63%), economic (62%) and health care (51%) systems are also unlikely to change in their lifetime.

Black Americans’ vision for social change includes reparations. However, much like their pessimism about institutional change, very few think they will see reparations in their lifetime. Among Black adults who say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid, 82% say reparations for slavery are unlikely to occur in their lifetime. About one-in-ten (11%) say repayment is somewhat likely, while only 7% say repayment is extremely or very likely to happen in their lifetime.

Black Democrats, Republicans differ on assessments of inequality and visions for social change

Party affiliation is one key point of difference among Black Americans in their assessments of racial inequality and their visions for social change. Black Republicans and Republican leaners are more likely than Black Democrats and Democratic leaners to focus on the acts of individuals. For example, when summarizing the nature of racism against Black people in the U.S., the majority of Black Republicans (59%) say racist acts committed by individual people is a bigger problem for Black people than racism in our laws. Black Democrats (41%) are less likely to hold this view.

Black Republicans (45%) are also more likely than Black Democrats (21%) to say that Black people who cannot get ahead in the U.S. are mostly responsible for their own condition. And while similar shares of Black Republicans (79%) and Democrats (80%) say they experience racial discrimination on a regular basis, Republicans (64%) are more likely than Democrats (36%) to say that most Black people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.

On the other hand, Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to focus on the impact that racial inequality has on Black Americans. Seven-in-ten Black Democrats (73%) say racial discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead in the U.S, while about four-in-ten Black Republicans (44%) say the same. And Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to say racism (67% vs. 46%) and police brutality (65% vs. 44%) are extremely big problems for Black people today.

Black Democrats are also more critical of U.S. institutions than Black Republicans are. For example, Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to say the prison system (57% vs. 35%), policing (52% vs. 29%) and the courts and judicial process (50% vs. 35%) should be completely rebuilt for Black people to be treated fairly.

While the share of Black Democrats who want to see large-scale changes to the criminal justice system exceeds that of Black Republicans, they share similar views on police funding. Four-in-ten each of Black Democrats and Black Republicans say funding for police departments in their communities should remain the same, while around a third of each partisan coalition (36% and 37%, respectively) says funding should increase. Only about one-in-four Black Democrats (24%) and one-in-five Black Republicans (21%) say funding for police departments in their communities should decrease.

Among the survey’s other findings:

Black adults differ by age in their views on political strategies. Black adults ages 65 and older (77%) are most likely to say voting is an extremely or very effective strategy for moving Black people toward equality. They are significantly more likely than Black adults ages 18 to 29 (48%) and 30 to 49 (60%) to say this. Black adults 65 and older (48%) are also more likely than those ages 30 to 49 (38%) and 50 to 64 (42%) to say protesting is an extremely or very effective strategy. Roughly four-in-ten Black adults ages 18 to 29 say this (44%).

Gender plays a role in how Black adults view policing. Though majorities of Black women (65%) and men (56%) say police brutality is an extremely big problem for Black people living in the U.S. today, Black women are more likely than Black men to hold this view. When it comes to criminal justice, Black women (56%) and men (51%) are about equally likely to share the view that the prison system should be completely rebuilt to ensure fair treatment of Black people. However, Black women (52%) are slightly more likely than Black men (45%) to say this about policing. On the matter of police funding, Black women (39%) are slightly more likely than Black men (31%) to say police funding in their communities should be increased. On the other hand, Black men are more likely than Black women to prefer that funding stay the same (44% vs. 36%). Smaller shares of both Black men (23%) and women (22%) would like to see police funding decreased.

Income impacts Black adults’ views on reparations. Roughly eight-in-ten Black adults with lower (78%), middle (77%) and upper incomes (79%) say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should receive reparations. Among those who support reparations, Black adults with upper and middle incomes (both 84%) are more likely than those with lower incomes (75%) to say educational scholarships would be an extremely or very helpful form of repayment. However, of those who support reparations, Black adults with lower (72%) and middle incomes (68%) are more likely than those with higher incomes (57%) to say cash payments would be an extremely or very helpful form of repayment for slavery.

• Black adults in the September 2020 survey only include those who say their race is Black alone and are non-Hispanic. The same is true only for the questions of improvements to Black people’s lives and equality in the United States in the October 2021 survey. Throughout the rest of this report, Black adults include those who say their race is Black alone and non-Hispanic; those who say their race is Black and at least one other race and non-Hispanic; or Black and Hispanic, unless otherwise noted. ↩

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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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House Passes The Equality Act: Here's What It Would Do

Danielle Kurtzleben

Protesters gather outside the Supreme Court in Washington where the Court on Oct. 8, 2019, as the court heard arguments in the first case of LGBT rights since the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Susan Walsh/AP hide caption

Protesters gather outside the Supreme Court in Washington where the Court on Oct. 8, 2019, as the court heard arguments in the first case of LGBT rights since the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Updated Feb. 25, 4:39 p.m. ET

The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to pass the Equality Act, a bill that would ban discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It would also substantially expand the areas to which those discrimination protections apply.

It's a bill that President Biden said on the campaign trail would be one of his top legislative priorities for the first 100 days of his presidency. The House vote was largely along party lines, passing with the support of all Democrats and just three Republicans. The bill now goes to the Senate, where its fate is unclear.

When House Democrats introduced the bill last week, Biden reiterated his support in a statement: "I urge Congress to swiftly pass this historic legislation," he wrote. "Every person should be treated with dignity and respect, and this bill represents a critical step toward ensuring that America lives up to our foundational values of equality and freedom for all."

But it's also controversial — while the Equality Act has broad support among Democrats, many Republicans oppose it, fearing that it would infringe upon religious objections.

Here's a quick rundown of what the bill would do, and what chance it has of becoming law.

What would the Equality Act do?

The Equality Act would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to explicitly prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The bill has been introduced multiple times before and previously passed the House in 2019. However, the law's impact would be different in practical terms now than it was then.

That's because the Supreme Court ruled in June of last year , in Bostock v. Clayton County , that the protections guaranteed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the basis of sex also extend to discrimination against lesbian, gay, and transgender Americans. The logic was that a man who, for example, loses his job because he has a same-sex partner is facing discrimination on the basis of sex — that, were he a woman, he wouldn't have faced that discrimination.

Supreme Court Delivers Major Victory To LGBTQ Employees

This act would explicitly enshrine those nondiscrimination protections into law for sexual orientation and gender identity, rather than those protections being looped in under the umbrella of "sex." However, the Equality Act would also substantially expand those protections.

The Civil Rights Act covered discrimination in certain areas, like employment and housing. The Equality Act would expand that to cover federally funded programs, as well as "public accommodations" — a broad category including retail stores and stadiums, for example.

("Public accommodations" is also a category that the bill broadens, to include online retailers and transportation providers, for example. Because of that, many types of discrimination the Civil Rights Act currently prohibits — like racial or religious discrimination — would now also be explicitly covered at those types of establishments.)

One upshot of all of this, then, is that the Equality Act would affect businesses like flower shops and bakeries that have been at the center of discrimination court cases in recent years — for example, a baker who doesn't want to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding .

In Narrow Opinion, Supreme Court Rules For Baker In Gay-Rights Case

Importantly, the bill also explicitly says that it trumps the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (commonly known by its acronym RFRA). The law, passed in 1993, set a higher bar for the government to defend laws if people argued those laws infringed upon religious freedom.

Under the Equality Act, an entity couldn't use RFRA to challenge the act's provisions, nor could it use RFRA as a defense to a claim made under the act.

What proponents say

Supporters say that the Equality Act simply extends basic, broadly accepted tenets of the Civil Rights Act to classes of people that the bill doesn't explicitly protect.

"Just as [a business] would not be able to turn away somebody for any other prohibited reason in the law, they would not be able to do that for LGBTQ people either. And we think that's a really important principle to maintain," said Ian Thompson, senior legislative representative at the ACLU.

The bill also would be national, covering states that do not have LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws. According to the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, 27 states do not have those laws.

Supporters additionally say the bill would cement protections that could otherwise be left up to interpretation.

Biden Signs Most Far-Reaching Federal Protections For LGBTQ People Yet

"President Biden issued an executive order directing agencies to appropriately interpret the Bostock ruling to apply not just to employment discrimination, but to other areas of law where sex discrimination is prohibited, including education, housing, and health care," the Human Rights Campaign wrote in support of the bill . "However, a future administration may refuse to interpret the law this way, leaving these protections vulnerable."

And with regard to RFRA, proponents argue that the bill would keep entities from using that law as a "license to discriminate," wording echoed by Human Rights Watch and many other Equality Act supporters.

What opponents say

The question of religious freedom is the main issue animating people against the Equality Act.

Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has criticized the Equality Act since its 2019 introduction. He told NPR in an email that the law is "less necessary" now, after the Bostock decision.

Furthermore, while he supports adding sexual orientation and gender identity to federal anti-discrimination statutes, Laycock believes that this bill goes too far in limiting people's ability to defend themselves against discrimination claims.

"It protects the rights of one side, but attempts to destroy the rights of the other side," he said. "We ought to protect the liberty of both sides to live their own lives by their own identities and their own values."

How The Fight For Religious Freedom Has Fallen Victim To The Culture Wars

Another key fear among opponents of the Equality Act is that it would threaten businesses or organizations that have religious objections to serving LGBTQ people, forcing them to choose between operating or following their beliefs.

Could it pass?

The Democratic-led House passed the Equality Act in 2019 with unanimous support from Democrats (as well as support from eight Republicans), and it passed in similar fashion in the current Democratic House.

The Senate is more uncertain. Democrats in the Senate broadly support the bill. Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, among the most moderate Democratic senators, signed a letter in support of it last year .

But the bill would need 60 votes to avoid a filibuster in the Senate. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins cosponsored the bill in 2019, but not all of her fellow, more moderate Republicans are on board. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, for example, told the Washington Blade that he won't support the act, citing religious liberty.

"Sen. Romney believes that strong religious liberty protections are essential to any legislation on this issue, and since those provisions are absent from this particular bill, he is not able to support it," his spokesperson told the Blade.

It's uncertain how other moderate Republicans might vote. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who supported the narrower Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA) in 2013, has yet to respond to NPR's questions about her support of the Equality Act.

And while Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, who likewise supported ENDA, didn't give a definitive answer on his support, his response made it clear that he could object to it on religious grounds.

"Rob opposes discrimination of any kind, and he also believes that it's important that Congress does not undermine protections for religious freedom," his office said in a statement. "He will review any legislation when and if it comes up for a vote in the Senate."

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• How to write an argumentative essay | Examples & tips

How to Write an Argumentative Essay | Examples & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An argumentative essay expresses an extended argument for a particular thesis statement . The author takes a clearly defined stance on their subject and builds up an evidence-based case for it.

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Table of contents

When do you write an argumentative essay, approaches to argumentative essays, introducing your argument, the body: developing your argument, concluding your argument, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about argumentative essays.

You might be assigned an argumentative essay as a writing exercise in high school or in a composition class. The prompt will often ask you to argue for one of two positions, and may include terms like “argue” or “argument.” It will frequently take the form of a question.

The prompt may also be more open-ended in terms of the possible arguments you could make.

Argumentative writing at college level

At university, the vast majority of essays or papers you write will involve some form of argumentation. For example, both rhetorical analysis and literary analysis essays involve making arguments about texts.

In this context, you won’t necessarily be told to write an argumentative essay—but making an evidence-based argument is an essential goal of most academic writing, and this should be your default approach unless you’re told otherwise.

Examples of argumentative essay prompts

At a university level, all the prompts below imply an argumentative essay as the appropriate response.

Your research should lead you to develop a specific position on the topic. The essay then argues for that position and aims to convince the reader by presenting your evidence, evaluation and analysis.

• Don’t just list all the effects you can think of.
• Do develop a focused argument about the overall effect and why it matters, backed up by evidence from sources.
• Don’t just provide a selection of data on the measures’ effectiveness.
• Do build up your own argument about which kinds of measures have been most or least effective, and why.
• Don’t just analyze a random selection of doppelgänger characters.
• Do form an argument about specific texts, comparing and contrasting how they express their thematic concerns through doppelgänger characters.

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An argumentative essay should be objective in its approach; your arguments should rely on logic and evidence, not on exaggeration or appeals to emotion.

There are many possible approaches to argumentative essays, but there are two common models that can help you start outlining your arguments: The Toulmin model and the Rogerian model.

Toulmin arguments

The Toulmin model consists of four steps, which may be repeated as many times as necessary for the argument:

• Make a claim
• Provide the grounds (evidence) for the claim
• Explain the warrant (how the grounds support the claim)
• Discuss possible rebuttals to the claim, identifying the limits of the argument and showing that you have considered alternative perspectives

The Toulmin model is a common approach in academic essays. You don’t have to use these specific terms (grounds, warrants, rebuttals), but establishing a clear connection between your claims and the evidence supporting them is crucial in an argumentative essay.

Say you’re making an argument about the effectiveness of workplace anti-discrimination measures. You might:

• Claim that unconscious bias training does not have the desired results, and resources would be better spent on other approaches
• Cite data to support your claim
• Explain how the data indicates that the method is ineffective
• Anticipate objections to your claim based on other data, indicating whether these objections are valid, and if not, why not.

Rogerian arguments

The Rogerian model also consists of four steps you might repeat throughout your essay:

• Discuss what the opposing position gets right and why people might hold this position
• Highlight the problems with this position
• Present your own position , showing how it addresses these problems
• Suggest a possible compromise —what elements of your position would proponents of the opposing position benefit from adopting?

This model builds up a clear picture of both sides of an argument and seeks a compromise. It is particularly useful when people tend to disagree strongly on the issue discussed, allowing you to approach opposing arguments in good faith.

Say you want to argue that the internet has had a positive impact on education. You might:

• Acknowledge that students rely too much on websites like Wikipedia
• Argue that teachers view Wikipedia as more unreliable than it really is
• Suggest that Wikipedia’s system of citations can actually teach students about referencing
• Suggest critical engagement with Wikipedia as a possible assignment for teachers who are skeptical of its usefulness.

You don’t necessarily have to pick one of these models—you may even use elements of both in different parts of your essay—but it’s worth considering them if you struggle to structure your arguments.

Regardless of which approach you take, your essay should always be structured using an introduction , a body , and a conclusion .

Like other academic essays, an argumentative essay begins with an introduction . The introduction serves to capture the reader’s interest, provide background information, present your thesis statement , and (in longer essays) to summarize the structure of the body.

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how a typical introduction works.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

The body of an argumentative essay is where you develop your arguments in detail. Here you’ll present evidence, analysis, and reasoning to convince the reader that your thesis statement is true.

In the standard five-paragraph format for short essays, the body takes up three of your five paragraphs. In longer essays, it will be more paragraphs, and might be divided into sections with headings.

Each paragraph covers its own topic, introduced with a topic sentence . Each of these topics must contribute to your overall argument; don’t include irrelevant information.

This example paragraph takes a Rogerian approach: It first acknowledges the merits of the opposing position and then highlights problems with that position.

Hover over different parts of the example to see how a body paragraph is constructed.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

An argumentative essay ends with a conclusion that summarizes and reflects on the arguments made in the body.

No new arguments or evidence appear here, but in longer essays you may discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your argument and suggest topics for future research. In all conclusions, you should stress the relevance and importance of your argument.

Hover over the following example to see the typical elements of a conclusion.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
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An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

The majority of the essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Unless otherwise specified, you can assume that the goal of any essay you’re asked to write is argumentative: To convince the reader of your position using evidence and reasoning.

In composition classes you might be given assignments that specifically test your ability to write an argumentative essay. Look out for prompts including instructions like “argue,” “assess,” or “discuss” to see if this is the goal.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Gender Discrimination — Modern Examples of Discrimination and Possible Solutions

Modern Examples of Discrimination and Possible Solutions

• Categories: Discrimination Gender Discrimination

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Words: 911 |

Published: Feb 9, 2022

Words: 911 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited:

• Kubitschek, M. D. (2018). “Everyday Use” and the Black Power Movement. The Alice Walker Review, 4(1), 22-36.
• Meyer, M. (2017). Mama's Voice and Perspective in Alice Walker's “Everyday Use.” Explicator, 75(4), 247-251.
• Morris, P. M. (2019). Black History, Culture, and Identity in Alice Walker's “Everyday Use.” Mississippi Quarterly, 72(2), 229-247.
• Nguyen, N. (2020). Feminism and heritage preservation in Alice Walker's “Everyday Use.” Academic Research Journal, 3(1), 24-29.
• Nnoromele, S. A. (2017). Alice Walker's “Everyday Use”: An Analysis of Heritage and Culture. Journal of Black Studies, 48(7), 649-667.
• Pierce, A. C. (2017). “Everyday Use”: Defining African-American Heritage through Material Culture. The Southern Literary Journal, 49(1), 60-74.
• Plato, A. (2019). The Quilts of Alice Walker's “Everyday Use”: Transforming the Domestic into the Cosmic. Western Journal of Black Studies, 43(3), 196-209.
• Ramos, S. L. (2017). Heritage and Culture in Alice Walker's “Everyday Use.” Journal of Ethnic American Literature, 7(2), 64-74.
• Sarabia, C. (2018). Alice Walker's “Everyday Use”: The Black Woman's Inheritance. Sargasso, 2018(1), 37-50.
• Walker, A. (1973). Everyday Use. In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (pp. 103-115). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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UCCS shooting suspect found incompetent to stand trial, 2nd competency evaluation requested

Arrest papers share details on what investigators know about a deadly shooting on the uccs campus..

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) - The defense for a man suspected of shooting and killing two people on the UCCS campus is claiming incompetency.

On March 18, Jordan appeared before a judge and the judge decided a state psychologist would complete a competency evaluation for Jordan. The first evaluation found Jordan was found incompetent to stand trial. On Friday, prosecutors filed a request for a second competency evaluation. The judge granted a second competency evaluation. The receipt for the second evaluation is required by May 31.

Nicholas Jordan is charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Samuel Knopp, 24, and Celie Rain Montgomery, 26.

Jordan had a history of disputes with one of the victims, according to arrest papers released.

According to arrest papers posted publicly, UCCS Police received a call at about 6 a.m. on Feb. 16 from a witness saying there was a shooting in his dorm pod located on the UCCS campus. Officers located the deceased victims. There were three residents of this pod including Knopp and Jordan. The witness explained to police there were “significant” issues and complaints about Jordan smoking marijuana, and cigarettes and his living area’s cleanliness, according to the arrest affidavit.

CSPD joined the investigation and helped secure the scene. The arrest papers add investigators didn’t see any signs of forced entry into the POD. Investigators then confirmed Jordan had electronic access to the pod where the shooting occurred and that Jordan had accessed the building just before 4 that morning and again at about 5:42.

“No other persons accessed the east door overnight,” the arrest papers add.

The only key that had access to the pod that wasn’t on the scene was Jordan’s when police began investigating. The arrest papers add that surveillance video shows someone in dark clothing entering the building, and that a vehicle associated with Jordan was in Colorado Springs the morning of the shooting.

A witness told investigators there had been “multiple instances” where Jordan was reported for unsafe living conditions and smoking in the room. The witness added there was an argument between Knopp and Jordan in January over a bag of trash.

“Mr. Knopp collected [the bag of trash] and placed [it] near Mr. Jordan’s door,” the arrest papers read tied to the reported incident in January. “Mr. Jordan threatened Mr. Knopp and told him that he would ‘kill him’ and there would be consequences if Mr. Jrodan was asked to take out the trash again.”

The interaction was reportedly confirmed by UCCS Police and Housing documents.

According to statements made in court earlier this year, Jordan had a fully loaded AK-47 in his vehicle the day he was arrested by police.

The arrest papers didn’t elaborate on the relationship Montgomery may have had with the victim or suspect.

Copyright 2024 KKTV. All rights reserved.

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