. Attitudinal discrimination is the sort of discrimination cited as having been reduced or eliminated. Attitudinal or individual discrimination is discrimination fueled by certain attitudes about the minority group which causes the individual to target that group, seeing them as lazy, unproductive, harmful, or otherwise unwanted. Racism that is embedded in the system may involve no racist bigotry at all but may have become institutionalized, with policies that appear benign but that are in fact discriminatory toward minority persons (Ransford 36).
Such institutionalized racism can be seen as operating in the Diana Pearce Study on housing discrimination. She demonstrated that some forms of institutionalized racism could focus on racial characteristics. She conducted experimental studies which demonstrated that when black and white couples of identical economic profiles (including such characteristics as educational background, work experience, and salary) approach real estate agents, black couples are less likely to get to see a house and more likely to be directed toward areas of black concentration. This is institutional discrimination because a consensus exists among real estate agents as to which areas are to remain all white and which areas are more acceptable for blacks. The motivation may derive from economic issues and from a fear of reducing sales to white buyers. The process involves organizational agreements and patterned inequalities that go beyond individual actions and persons, and such discrimination has been directed at blacks, Mexican Americans, and American Indians (Ransford 37).
2. The high Mexican-American school dropout rate, as high as 50 percent, has been ascribed to a number of causes or explanations. One of the prime reasons involves language problems. Many of the students are Spanish speakers who are not performing satisfactorily in English. They are most often sent to bilingual programs. The ...