RESEARCH STARTER

Covert racism in the United States

Covert racism, also known as racial bias, is a subtle form of racial discrimination that operates within society, often going unnoticed by both the perpetrators and the victims. It can manifest in various ways, from microaggressions—small, everyday slights or insults—to systemic inequalities in sectors such as education, employment, and law enforcement. Unlike overt racism, which is openly expressed and socially condemned, covert racism is often disguised and perpetuated through societal norms and unconscious biases.

The impact of covert racism is significant, creating barriers that oppress minority groups and maintain social inequities. Research has shown that implicit biases can influence decision-making and behavior, affecting interactions in both personal and professional settings. High-profile incidents, such as the deaths of individuals like George Floyd and Michael Brown, have highlighted the ongoing issues of racial profiling and discrimination in law enforcement, prompting nationwide discussions and protests.

Covert racism also includes practices like mortgage lending discrimination and media misrepresentation, which contribute to broader socioeconomic disparities. While some argue for ignoring microaggressions to avoid a "culture of victimhood," others assert that these subtle forms of bias accumulate over time, causing psychological distress and reinforcing systemic inequalities. Understanding covert racism is essential for addressing its pervasive effects and fostering genuine equity in society.

Full Article

Covert racism, or racial bias, refers to a form of racial discrimination practiced within society that is subtle as opposed to obvious. Covert racism can be either unintentionally or intentionally constructed and is systematically maintained through societal acceptance. Covert racism is often disguised, and is not always apparent to either the actors or the targets. Covert racism can range from microaggressions (small repeated, common transgressions) to larger socioeconomic biases practiced in business, education, employment, housing, journalism, the media, and law enforcement.

Some analysts have argued that race has decreased in importance in contemporary America. Other social scientists have maintained that a new racial structure has developed in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in which discrimination based on assumed racial biases through passive methods and coded racial appeals has been accepted and unquestioned by society at large, thereby constructing debilitating barriers that oppress certain racial groups.

Background

With a history of slavery and immigration that predate the formation of the country, the United States has always faced issues of racism. Even in contemporary times, overt racism has been espoused by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and other White nationalist movements.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed legal explicit discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin within the United States. It officially ended the unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and by facilities that served the public. The act nullified Jim Crow laws, or racist, segregationist laws previously adhered to in the American South. Subsequently, in most places, expressions of overt racism—such as use of racial slurs or support for White supremacy—also became considered socially unacceptable.

Even with the dismantling of overt racist laws, however, covert racism has developed a framework in which to exist. Inequity occurs when the conditions and opportunities provided to marginalized groups are not equal to those provided to the rest of Americans. One notable area in particular is in the field of law enforcement, where covert racial profiling has led to abuse of power. With the advent of video technology, gross discrepancies in police conduct toward Black Americans have come into public view. In 1991, the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers was captured on video by bystanders and broadcast globally. This brought local and federal law enforcement practices into question. Documentation of the deaths of citizens including Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland in the 2010s continued to lead to investigations regarding racial bias, unreasonable force, and other practices against Black Americans.

The 2014 death of Michael Brown by the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, and subsequent civil unrest led President Barack Obama to create a commission to make recommendations for broad police reform. On March 4, 2015, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) released a report that concluded that police officers in Ferguson consistently violated the constitutional rights of the city's residents. The department was found to discriminate against Black Americans, rely upon racial stereotypes, and violate the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. The DOJ stated that Ferguson police practices disproportionately harmed Ferguson's Black citizens and that these practices were driven by racial biases.

The successful 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump and his subsequent time in office during his first term drew much attention to issues of race in the United States, including covert racism. Trump campaigned on a strongly anti-immigrant platform, and many observers argued that he frequently used coded or inflammatory language and other hallmarks of covert racism to rally his base of White, conservative voters. Both before and after his election, he criticized protests against racial injustice and police brutality by athletes such as football player Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement, claiming that they were unpatriotic. These and other comments earned Trump much support from overt White supremacists, and, though he eventually disavowed such supporters, many human rights advocates noted that his language emboldened and mainstreamed hate groups. For example, he implied an equivalence between White supremacists demonstrating in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and counterprotesters. In another incident, Trump was widely criticized for stating in 2019 that four Democratic congresswomen of color should "go back" to the countries they came from—a common racist trope—despite the fact that three of them were born in the US.

In 2020 protests broke out once again following the death of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The widespread and long-lasting demonstrations were seen by many as a turning point in debates over covert racism and systemic discrimination, especially in law enforcement; investigations into municipal police departments continued. Many activists characterized silence or apathy by White citizens on issues of racial injustice as a form of covert racism.

Impact

Covert racism has a significant adverse impact on American culture in many areas. Covert racism constructs barriers that, over time, debilitate and oppress marginalized racial groups and relies upon the unconscious participation of both aggressors and their targets. Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, more overt forms of racism were largely replaced with subtle, covert racist socioeconomic tactics, allowing racial inequalities to persist in areas of consumer markets, credit, employment, and housing. Upon taking office for a second term as president in 2025, Trump began issuing executive orders that, in part, targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that had been integrated into institutions across the nation by the early 2020s. Many critics argued that as more federal agencies, companies, departments, organizations, and schools subsequently began reducing or ending such initatives, which included the removal of barriers to racial social equity, in accordance with the orders or due to intimidation, this type of agenda was a form of covert racism. At the same time, the administration began employing anti-immigration policies such as deportations.

According to David Amodio, professor of psychology at New York University, brain science research using an implicit association test has suggested that implicit bias, or unconscious racism, can inform most people's thinking processes and shape their actions. A 2001 study in the Journal of Attitudes and Social Cognition found that video game participants consistently shoot armed Black men faster than they shoot armed White men, and are less likely to shoot armed White game villains at all. A 2002 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that this implicit bias existed in participants regardless of their racial background, affecting Black and White participants equally.

Microaggressions, including being ignored or treated differently, are pervasive forms of covert racism that reflect larger socioeconomic biases within society. Microaggressions are everyday verbal and nonverbal slights, remarks, questions, negative messages, or insults that rely on stereotypes and target people in marginalized groups. These brief, commonplace exchanges can be intentional or unintentional. Often the people perpetrating the microaggressions are unaware that the behavior is racist or discriminatory and would feel surprised or offended for it to be labeled as such.

Opinions on how to react to this kind of covert racism have varied. Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning argued that microaggressions are best ignored and that discourse relating to the issue leads to a "culture of victimhood." Others, including Derald Wing Sue and colleagues, argued that microaggressions subtly demean marginalized groups over time. Sue identified eight distinct areas of racial microaggression, including assumptions people from the dominant culture make about minorities. According to a 2010 study conducted by Professor Alvin Alvarez published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology, denying or ignoring racial discrimination can lead to psychological distress, including anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Sociology professor Meghan Burke argued, in her 2018 book Colorblind Racism, that treating race as if it does not matter denies the realities of racism in this way and can end up perpetuating systemic inequalities.

Covert racism includes many other ways in which individuals are singled out, overlooked, ignored, or otherwise discounted based on race, including racial profiling, stereotypes, and coded racial appeals. Mortgage lending discrimination has continued to demoralize marginalized individuals, as was evidenced in 2015 when the US Supreme Court ruled that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs had proliferated segregated housing patterns by allocating too many tax credits to housing in predominantly Black inner-city areas and too few in predominantly White suburban neighborhoods. In addition to law enforcement and mortgage lending discrimination, racial bias inequities for marginalized populations has continued to exist in access to quality education, health care, employment, and media coverage. Though some researchers have pointed to various other social factors behind such disparities, many experts have suggested that the complexities of covert racism play a significant role.


Bibliography

Alvarez, Alvin N., and Linda P. Juang. "Filipino Americans and Racism: A Multiple Meditation Model of Coping." Journal of Counseling Psychology, vol. 57, no. 2, Apr. 2010, pp. 167–178. PubMed.com, doi:10.1037/a0019091.

Anderson, Elijah. "This Is What It Feels Like to Be Black in White Spaces." The Guardian, 9 June 2018, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/09/everyday-racism-america-black-white-spaces. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019.

Apuzzo, Matt. "Ferguson Police Routinely Violate Rights of Blacks, Justice Dept. Finds." 3 Mar. 2015, New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/justice-department-finds-pattern-of-police-bias-and-excessive-force-in-ferguson.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2016.

Avery, Lola-Rose. "Why Systemic Racism Is Not Just An American Problem." World Economic Forum, 6 June 2020, www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/why-systemic-racism-is-not-just-an-american-problem. Accessed 10 June 2020.

Baker, Peter, et al. "Trump Employs an Old Tactic: Using Race for Gain." The New York Times, 20 July 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/us/politics/trump-race-record.html. Accessed 10 June 2020.

Baker, Peter, and Maggie Haberman. "Trump Rebuffs Protests Over Systemic Racism and Calls Police 'Great People.'" The New York Times, 8 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/politics/defund-police-trump.html. Accessed 10 June 2020.

Burke, Meghan. Colorblind Racism. Polity, 2018.

Campbell, Bradley, and Jason Manning. "Microaggression and Moral Cultures." Comparative Sociology, vol. 13 no. 6, pp. 692–726, Research Gate, doi:10.1163/15691330-12341332.

Cawthorne, Alexandra. "Weathering the Storm: Black Men in the Recession." Center for American Progress, 15 Apr. 2009, www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2009/04/15/5906/weathering-the-storm-black-men-in-the-recession/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2016.

Cheng, Ping, et al. "Racial Discrepancy in Mortgage Interest Rates." Journal of Real Estate Finance Economics, vol. 51, no. 1, July 2015, pp. 101–20.

Chin, William Y. "The Age of Covert Racism in the Era of the Roberts Court during the Waning of Affirmative Action." Rutgers Race & the Law Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2015, pp.1–38.

Coates, Rodney D. Covert Racism: Theories, Institutions, and Experiences. Haymarket Books, 2012.

Green, Erica L. "As Trump Attacks Diversity, a Racist Undercurrent Surfaces." The New York Times, 3 Feb. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us/politics/trump-diversity-racism.html. Accessed 20 Feb. 2025.

López, Ian Haney. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford UP, 2015.

Morillo, Alexis. "Covert Acts of Racism Have Been Happening in Grocery Stores and Restaurants Forever." Women's Health, 7 June 2020, www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a32784935/covert-racism-grocery-stores-restaurants/. Accessed 10 June 2020.

Sainato, Michael. "'It Comes from Racism': Immigrant Workers on Trump's Deportation Push." The Guardian, 17 Feb. 2025, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/17/immigrant-workers-trump-deportation. Accessed 20 Feb. 2025.

Sue, Derald Wing, et al. "Racial Microaggressions against Black Americans: Implications for Counseling." Journal of Counseling & Development, vol. 86, Summer 2008, pp. 330–38.

Full Article

Covert racism, or racial bias, refers to a form of racial discrimination practiced within society that is subtle as opposed to obvious. Covert racism can be either unintentionally or intentionally constructed and is systematically maintained through societal acceptance. Covert racism is often disguised, and is not always apparent to either the actors or the targets. Covert racism can range from microaggressions (small repeated, common transgressions) to larger socioeconomic biases practiced in business, education, employment, housing, journalism, the media, and law enforcement.

Some analysts have argued that race has decreased in importance in contemporary America. Other social scientists have maintained that a new racial structure has developed in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in which discrimination based on assumed racial biases through passive methods and coded racial appeals has been accepted and unquestioned by society at large, thereby constructing debilitating barriers that oppress certain racial groups.

Background

With a history of slavery and immigration that predate the formation of the country, the United States has always faced issues of racism. Even in contemporary times, overt racism has been espoused by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and other White nationalist movements.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed legal explicit discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin within the United States. It officially ended the unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and by facilities that served the public. The act nullified Jim Crow laws, or racist, segregationist laws previously adhered to in the American South. Subsequently, in most places, expressions of overt racism—such as use of racial slurs or support for White supremacy—also became considered socially unacceptable.

Even with the dismantling of overt racist laws, however, covert racism has developed a framework in which to exist. Inequity occurs when the conditions and opportunities provided to marginalized groups are not equal to those provided to the rest of Americans. One notable area in particular is in the field of law enforcement, where covert racial profiling has led to abuse of power. With the advent of video technology, gross discrepancies in police conduct toward Black Americans have come into public view. In 1991, the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers was captured on video by bystanders and broadcast globally. This brought local and federal law enforcement practices into question. Documentation of the deaths of citizens including Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland in the 2010s continued to lead to investigations regarding racial bias, unreasonable force, and other practices against Black Americans.

The 2014 death of Michael Brown by the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, and subsequent civil unrest led President Barack Obama to create a commission to make recommendations for broad police reform. On March 4, 2015, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) released a report that concluded that police officers in Ferguson consistently violated the constitutional rights of the city's residents. The department was found to discriminate against Black Americans, rely upon racial stereotypes, and violate the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. The DOJ stated that Ferguson police practices disproportionately harmed Ferguson's Black citizens and that these practices were driven by racial biases.

The successful 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump and his subsequent time in office during his first term drew much attention to issues of race in the United States, including covert racism. Trump campaigned on a strongly anti-immigrant platform, and many observers argued that he frequently used coded or inflammatory language and other hallmarks of covert racism to rally his base of White, conservative voters. Both before and after his election, he criticized protests against racial injustice and police brutality by athletes such as football player Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement, claiming that they were unpatriotic. These and other comments earned Trump much support from overt White supremacists, and, though he eventually disavowed such supporters, many human rights advocates noted that his language emboldened and mainstreamed hate groups. For example, he implied an equivalence between White supremacists demonstrating in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and counterprotesters. In another incident, Trump was widely criticized for stating in 2019 that four Democratic congresswomen of color should "go back" to the countries they came from—a common racist trope—despite the fact that three of them were born in the US.

In 2020 protests broke out once again following the death of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The widespread and long-lasting demonstrations were seen by many as a turning point in debates over covert racism and systemic discrimination, especially in law enforcement; investigations into municipal police departments continued. Many activists characterized silence or apathy by White citizens on issues of racial injustice as a form of covert racism.

Impact

Covert racism has a significant adverse impact on American culture in many areas. Covert racism constructs barriers that, over time, debilitate and oppress marginalized racial groups and relies upon the unconscious participation of both aggressors and their targets. Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, more overt forms of racism were largely replaced with subtle, covert racist socioeconomic tactics, allowing racial inequalities to persist in areas of consumer markets, credit, employment, and housing. Upon taking office for a second term as president in 2025, Trump began issuing executive orders that, in part, targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that had been integrated into institutions across the nation by the early 2020s. Many critics argued that as more federal agencies, companies, departments, organizations, and schools subsequently began reducing or ending such initatives, which included the removal of barriers to racial social equity, in accordance with the orders or due to intimidation, this type of agenda was a form of covert racism. At the same time, the administration began employing anti-immigration policies such as deportations.

According to David Amodio, professor of psychology at New York University, brain science research using an implicit association test has suggested that implicit bias, or unconscious racism, can inform most people's thinking processes and shape their actions. A 2001 study in the Journal of Attitudes and Social Cognition found that video game participants consistently shoot armed Black men faster than they shoot armed White men, and are less likely to shoot armed White game villains at all. A 2002 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that this implicit bias existed in participants regardless of their racial background, affecting Black and White participants equally.

Microaggressions, including being ignored or treated differently, are pervasive forms of covert racism that reflect larger socioeconomic biases within society. Microaggressions are everyday verbal and nonverbal slights, remarks, questions, negative messages, or insults that rely on stereotypes and target people in marginalized groups. These brief, commonplace exchanges can be intentional or unintentional. Often the people perpetrating the microaggressions are unaware that the behavior is racist or discriminatory and would feel surprised or offended for it to be labeled as such.

Opinions on how to react to this kind of covert racism have varied. Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning argued that microaggressions are best ignored and that discourse relating to the issue leads to a "culture of victimhood." Others, including Derald Wing Sue and colleagues, argued that microaggressions subtly demean marginalized groups over time. Sue identified eight distinct areas of racial microaggression, including assumptions people from the dominant culture make about minorities. According to a 2010 study conducted by Professor Alvin Alvarez published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology, denying or ignoring racial discrimination can lead to psychological distress, including anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Sociology professor Meghan Burke argued, in her 2018 book Colorblind Racism, that treating race as if it does not matter denies the realities of racism in this way and can end up perpetuating systemic inequalities.

Covert racism includes many other ways in which individuals are singled out, overlooked, ignored, or otherwise discounted based on race, including racial profiling, stereotypes, and coded racial appeals. Mortgage lending discrimination has continued to demoralize marginalized individuals, as was evidenced in 2015 when the US Supreme Court ruled that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs had proliferated segregated housing patterns by allocating too many tax credits to housing in predominantly Black inner-city areas and too few in predominantly White suburban neighborhoods. In addition to law enforcement and mortgage lending discrimination, racial bias inequities for marginalized populations has continued to exist in access to quality education, health care, employment, and media coverage. Though some researchers have pointed to various other social factors behind such disparities, many experts have suggested that the complexities of covert racism play a significant role.


Bibliography

Alvarez, Alvin N., and Linda P. Juang. "Filipino Americans and Racism: A Multiple Meditation Model of Coping." Journal of Counseling Psychology, vol. 57, no. 2, Apr. 2010, pp. 167–178. PubMed.com, doi:10.1037/a0019091.

Anderson, Elijah. "This Is What It Feels Like to Be Black in White Spaces." The Guardian, 9 June 2018, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/09/everyday-racism-america-black-white-spaces. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019.

Apuzzo, Matt. "Ferguson Police Routinely Violate Rights of Blacks, Justice Dept. Finds." 3 Mar. 2015, New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/justice-department-finds-pattern-of-police-bias-and-excessive-force-in-ferguson.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2016.

Avery, Lola-Rose. "Why Systemic Racism Is Not Just An American Problem." World Economic Forum, 6 June 2020, www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/why-systemic-racism-is-not-just-an-american-problem. Accessed 10 June 2020.

Baker, Peter, et al. "Trump Employs an Old Tactic: Using Race for Gain." The New York Times, 20 July 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/us/politics/trump-race-record.html. Accessed 10 June 2020.

Baker, Peter, and Maggie Haberman. "Trump Rebuffs Protests Over Systemic Racism and Calls Police 'Great People.'" The New York Times, 8 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/politics/defund-police-trump.html. Accessed 10 June 2020.

Burke, Meghan. Colorblind Racism. Polity, 2018.

Campbell, Bradley, and Jason Manning. "Microaggression and Moral Cultures." Comparative Sociology, vol. 13 no. 6, pp. 692–726, Research Gate, doi:10.1163/15691330-12341332.

Cawthorne, Alexandra. "Weathering the Storm: Black Men in the Recession." Center for American Progress, 15 Apr. 2009, www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2009/04/15/5906/weathering-the-storm-black-men-in-the-recession/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2016.

Cheng, Ping, et al. "Racial Discrepancy in Mortgage Interest Rates." Journal of Real Estate Finance Economics, vol. 51, no. 1, July 2015, pp. 101–20.

Chin, William Y. "The Age of Covert Racism in the Era of the Roberts Court during the Waning of Affirmative Action." Rutgers Race & the Law Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2015, pp.1–38.

Coates, Rodney D. Covert Racism: Theories, Institutions, and Experiences. Haymarket Books, 2012.

Green, Erica L. "As Trump Attacks Diversity, a Racist Undercurrent Surfaces." The New York Times, 3 Feb. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us/politics/trump-diversity-racism.html. Accessed 20 Feb. 2025.

López, Ian Haney. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford UP, 2015.

Morillo, Alexis. "Covert Acts of Racism Have Been Happening in Grocery Stores and Restaurants Forever." Women's Health, 7 June 2020, www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a32784935/covert-racism-grocery-stores-restaurants/. Accessed 10 June 2020.

Sainato, Michael. "'It Comes from Racism': Immigrant Workers on Trump's Deportation Push." The Guardian, 17 Feb. 2025, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/17/immigrant-workers-trump-deportation. Accessed 20 Feb. 2025.

Sue, Derald Wing, et al. "Racial Microaggressions against Black Americans: Implications for Counseling." Journal of Counseling & Development, vol. 86, Summer 2008, pp. 330–38.

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