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. Introduction A simple question that has puzzled scholars for decades is: how many racists does it take to maintain racial inequality? In the past, many believed that it required an overwhelming number of racists to More recently, in response to research citing a decline in racist attitudes amidst persistent racial inequality, many have questioned the notion that maintaining racial inequality requires an abundance of racists These scholars propose that racial inequality is perpetuated via a complex network of biased social institutions (i.e., structural race theory) and/or minority disinvestments (i.e., victim theory) which weakens the need for an abundance of racists to maintain racial inequality. While these alternative theories point to different agents of inequality to re-answer the original question, one is still left to ponder how complete structural discrimination—or blocked opportunity in the case of victim theory—must be to maintain racial inequality. The aim of this paper is to examine this simple question regarding how many racists—or how much discrimination—it takes to create and maintain racial inequality. Drawing on Ridgeway's (1991) research on status construction theory, I use an agent-based model (i.e., computational simulation) of a Nash bargaining game to examine the emergence and maintenance …