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Quincy Stewart, Northwestern University

  • When: February 1, 2012, 12 pm
  • Where: 12-1:30pm, Woods Conference Room, 750 N. Lake Shore Dr., 4th Floor, Chicago, IL 60611

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Quincy Stewart

Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research

“Big Bad Racists, Subtle Prejudice and Minority Victims: An Agent-Based Model of the Dynamics of Racial Inequality.”

How many racists does it take to maintain racial inequality?  Historical evidence from the Jim Crow era suggests one needs a large number of racist advocates in various social arenas.  More recent social scientific research, however, cites a significant decline in racist beliefs that have not been paralleled by declines in racial inequality.  Hence, the strong hypothesized connection between racist attitudes and racial inequality was erroneous.  Researchers have responded to this change by asserting that racial inequality does not require an abundance of racists, but only a system of biased (i.e., racialized) social institutions— or patterns of interaction—which can maintain racial inequality with a few/no racists.  This solution, however, leads one to question how widespread systemic bias must be to maintain racial inequality—a derivative of the initial question.  This paper examines these questions regarding how many racists—or biased institutional actors—it takes to create and maintain racial inequality using an agent based model of a Nash Bargaining game.   The results reveal that one needs an enormous amount discrimination to create and maintain racial inequality.  However, when we allow non-discriminating agents (i.e., non-racists) to use the race of competitors in decision making via social learning, the need for discriminatory agents to maintain inequality is reduced to nil.

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