Spatial dimensions discrimination

SIGNIFICANCE: The consideration and pursuit of racial, ethnic, and gender equality have led to investigations of the spatial aspects of discrimination: the negotiation of public and private spaces, access to institutional resources and privileges, and intergroup relations and conflict.

Since classical antiquity, the distinction between public and private space has served as an entry point into issues of social and political analysis, legal and economic debate, and the ordering of everyday life. Different versions of this distinction have attained new or renewed prominence in a wide variety of disciplines ranging from neoclassical economics to legal studies and feminist scholarship. However, the distinction between “public space” and “private space” is not rigid, both because the two terms lack definitional clarity and because there is significant overlap between the two categories.

Public and Private: Basic Orientations

Research on spatial discrimination has been confusing, in part, because the dimensions of spatial discrimination have not been clearly defined. For social scientists, the public/private distinction is generally used to delineate different kinds of social action occurring in various physical and social spaces. For example, for the eighteenth-century philosopher and social theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “public space” referred to the practice of citizenship—a metaphorical political realm characterized by discussion, deliberation, and debate. However, for modern scholars such as Jane Jacobs or Erving Goffman, public space was not only conceptual but also physical, characterized by face-to-face interaction and sociability. According to these scholars, “public space” can refer either to a city’s built environment (spaces that have form, location, and structure) or to interactional and experiential space (rules, conduct, and conventions displayed within spaces between strangers). In practice, the distinction between public and private space is often used to demarcate boundaries between the private world of family and the public world of sociability or between the public sector of state administration and the private sector of the marketplace. Historically, however, public/private distinctions have been used for social stratification purposes: to assign men and women to different spheres of social life on the basis of “natural characteristics” and to confine women to positions of economic inferiority with respect to men. Thus, differences between public/private distinctions not only point to different assumptions about how the social world operates but also are motivated by different problems, generate different issues, and raise very different concerns.

Dimensions of Discrimination

In the social sciences, “discrimination” refers to actions or practices carried out by members of dominant groups or their representatives that have a differential and negative impact on members of subordinate groups. For discrimination to occur, there must be a discriminator, an act having differential and harmful effects, and a victim. Regarding these three dimensions, similarities between spatial and traditional discrimination become evident and even intertwine and overlap. However, although both spatial and traditional approaches recognize variations in the number of discriminators, an important difference between these two perspectives is that the traditional approach tends to view discrimination as more individualistic, sporadic, and episodic than the spatial approach, which—while recognizing microlevel discriminatory activity—emphasizes the social patterning of discriminatory actions on the institutional level, especially their presence in large-scale bureaucratic organizations.

Defining Spatial Discrimination

Spatial discrimination refers to the size, complexity, and organizational environment of groups or individuals carrying out discriminatory activity in public or private settings. The size can vary from individual action to very large numbers of individuals engaged in routine practices in a large organization, such as the finance division of a large corporation that regularly denies loans to minority individuals. Individual and small group actions may not be embedded in large organizations; however, discriminatory practices may still occur in normative contacts between acquaintances and strangers (such as a derogatory remark that reveals a prejudicial viewpoint against a loan applicant). From this perspective, spatial discrimination is not only the imposition of barriers at a given point in time but also entails a process of constantly defending any group privileges (such as access to housing in desirable areas) gained at the expense of another group. Thus, spatial discrimination can be viewed as a behavioral process aimed at maintaining the privileges of the dominant group.

Spatial aspects of discrimination may include a concept called redlining, which is a spatial discriminatory practice impacting residents of a specific race or ethnicity living in central cities. This practice puts services—insurance, loans, mortgages, and other financial necessities—out of their reach. Redlining is an illegal practice, but it still occurs, most often with mortgage lending practices in minority communities. However, student, business, car, and personal loans may also be a source of discriminatory lending.

Impact on Public Policy

Social scientists are not the only researchers who have contributed to broadening the concept of spatial discrimination. Legal research in which “the object of litigation is the vindication of constitutional statutory policies” has also contributed to blurred lines between public and private distinctions. For example, a doctrine known as parens patriae sometimes allows the government to enforce private rights, and private individuals may sometimes enforce public rights in what is referred to as a qui tam action. The concerns driving legal scholarship have led to sharp reformulations of how spatial discrimination and the public/private distinction are defined.

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