Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice

Discrimination in the United States

Samuel Lucas

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781592139149
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite several decades of attention, there is still no consensus on the effects of racial or sexual discrimination in the United States. In this landmark work, the well-known sociologist Samuel Lucas shows how discrimination is not simply an action that one person performs in relation to another individual, but something far more insidious: a pervasive dynamic that permeates the environment in which we live and work.

Challenging existing literature on the subject, Lucas makes a clear distinction between prejudice and discrimination. He maintains that when an era of "condoned exploitation" ended, the era of "contested prejudice, " as he terms it, began. He argues that the great strides made in the 1950s and 1960s repudiated prejudice, but not discrimination. Drawing on critical race theory, feminist theory, and a critique of dominant perspectives in the social sciences and law, Lucas offers a new understanding of racial and sexual discrimination that can guide our actions and laws into a more just future.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Evidently
• 1 Discrimination in the Era of Contested Prejudice: Fundamental Bases
• 2 Experiential Realities and Public Contestation
• 3 From Condoned Exploitive Relations to the Era of Contested Prejudice
• 4 Defining, Finding, and Remedying Discrimination: Dominant Legal Perspectives
• 5 Defining, Finding, and Remedying Discrimination: Critical Legal Perspectives and the Critique of the Dominant Legal View
• 6 Defining Discrimination Effects: An Asocial Scientific Method
• 7 Discrimination as a (Damaged) Social Relation
• 8 Epistemological Foundations for Studying Effects of Discrimination as a Social Relation
• 9 Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice
• Appendix A: Commentary on Methods of Data Analysis for Chapter 2
• Appendix B: Commentary on Simulation for Chapter 5
• References
• Index