CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Much of the field of sociology treats systemic racism as its default explanation for racial disparities rather than as the subject of an open question that requires further investigation and evidence, according to a recent position paper. The assumptions and moralization surrounding the origins of race-based disparities have undermined the discipline and made it difficult — and professionally costly — to challenge the concept, says author Ilana Redstone , a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
In the paper, published in the journal Theory and Society, Redstone explicitly states that she is neither claiming that systemic racism is nonexistent nor that it cannot produce inequities. Redstone's argument is about what treating the assumption as a given licenses. For instance, once it is considered the definitive cause of inequality, scholars have no reason to explore alternative causes and every reason to suspect the motives of the people who do. The author said that the assumption has become so foundational to the practice and teaching of sociology in the U.S. that it steers research agendas, shapes student training, defines what counts as serious scholarship and silences debate.
Redstone said that, while the idea that racism lives in systems had been around for a long time, a major catalyst for the ideological shift was the Supreme Court's 1971 decision in Griggs vs. Duke Power Co. In that landmark case the court ruled that the energy company's employment policy, which predicated hiring and job transfers on holding a high school diploma and passing two written tests, violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, limiting job opportunities for Black candidates.
"The court's decision functionally embedded a causal claim — that disparate outcomes are produced by discrimination — into law, and attached a moral valence to that claim," Redstone said. "Labeling an outcome 'discriminatory' is not merely describing a pattern — it's assigning blame, even if the practice that produced it was adopted without any intent to exclude. Once a causal claim is treated as established fact rather than a hypothesis, it removes the question of whether there might be an alternative explanation for a disparity."
According to Redstone, the court's decision justified treating as "settled the question of whether disparate outcomes were caused by discrimination or other factors" and had far-reaching implications for academia — altering conceptions of harm, justice, group identity and knowledge. Prior to the court's decision, the sociology research of the 1960s and 1970s was pluralistic enough methodologically that researchers who investigated racial disparities could and did explore alternative explanations, and the hypothesis that institutional racism might be causing some or all of these differing outcomes was one possibility among many used in their analyses, the author said.
In examining the effects on sociology scholarship, Redstone refers to the findings of several studies that were published in the past 25 years. The authors of those studies, who explored racial disparities in student discipline, health outcomes, criminal justice and generational wealth accumulation, concluded in each project that the differences found were indicative of institutional racism, Redstone wrote.
"My point isn't that any of these conclusions are necessarily wrong, as each of them may be capturing something real about institutions' resource allocations and how disadvantage persists or grows," Redstone wrote. However, once it became widely accepted that inequities were evidence that institutional racism produced them, the implications compounded — changing what discrimination looked like and how pervasive it was believed to be.
Accordingly, injustice became organized and measured around group identity, such that "any negative outcome associated with a group that could be categorized as disadvantaged … is presumptively attributed to the disadvantage that the identity carries," according to Redstone. "Not only does the identity convey who experiences that outcome, it also explains why they experience it."
The causal and moral weight attached to group identity reorganized scholarship across virtually every area of sociological research — including health, education, criminal justice, culture and labor markets, according to the study.
Conversely, the outcomes experienced by majority groups came to be viewed as the fruits of the same rotten system operating in reverse — as unearned advantage, disregarding that these results might be caused by other complex factors, Redstone wrote.
Challenging the assumption that institutional discrimination is the primary explanation for racial disparities carries different costs depending on who does it, she said, and, for anyone, dissent can be read as indifference to injustice or complicity in it. Dissenters also risk being seen as blaming the victim or having their skepticism treated as evidence of the very bias they are questioning.
"Once we treat as a given that disparities are produced by discrimination, proposing a non-discriminatory explanation for them is by definition denying that discrimination is occurring," she wrote. "This moral logic cannot be softened or set aside while still treating the original claim as settled because it follows from the claim itself. This is why the claim's status — whether it is treated as a hypothesis or as a fact — matters so much for everything built on top of it."
The irony of sociology's wholesale adoption of this central framework is that it has compromised its own capacity to examine its institutional processes and their impact, Redstone concludes.
Redstone explores these issues in greater detail in her forthcoming book, "Presumption of Guilt, How Equating Inequality with Injustice Fractured American Democracy," to be published in April 2027 by Pitchstone Publishing. In the book, Redstone analyzes the implications of the broader ideological shift for American democratic institutions, arguing that they undermined a key element of their survival by treating the contested moral claim that inequality is inherently unjust as a settled question.
"Once you equate inequality with injustice, it actually morally recodes an entire worldview about how you think about justice, oppression, identity and a wide range of topics that go much further than just inequality," Redstone said.
