WASHINGTON — Although the nation’s social policies and laws have evolved to the point where blatant racial discrimination against its Black population is largely a thing of the past, social scientists need to come up with better language that describes the racial inequalities that nevertheless persist in contemporary American society.
That was the crux of the message delivered Monday by Robert C. Lieberman, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Johns Hopkins University and a noted scholar on issues of race and American politics.
“What we need to do is find a way of understanding and deciding and thinking about the ways in which things that look like racially neutral institutions, racially neutral policies, racially neutral practices can result in dramatically unequal outcomes,” Lieberman said during a Black History Month lecture titled “Race Relations in the United States.”
“That’s the fundamental conundrum, that’s the challenge of social scientists and the challenge of political scientists to understand,” Lieberman said in a lecture that was largely a historical overview of racial attitudes and discriminatory practices in the United States but that also delved into other topics that ranged from fatal encounters between Black men and police to the racially tinged politics that have colored much of President Barack Obama’s presidency and the 2016 presidential election.
Apprised of Lieberman’s remarks, several Black political scientists expressed varying degrees of agreement and dissension with some of Lieberman’s conclusions about the lack of language to describe the racial inequalities that persist.
“He needs to read more widely and particularly read political scientists, African American political scientists who are doing this kind of work,” said Kathie Golden, associate vice president of Academic Affairs at Mississippi Valley State University and executive director of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, which plans to meet later this month in Jackson, Mississippi.
In fairness, when questioned further by Diverse, Lieberman acknowledged that social scientists and political scientists are “thinking very hard and very carefully and rigorously about these issues.”
