CHAPTER 11
THE ARCHITECTURE OF INEQUALITY:
RACE AND ETHNICITY

Sociologists at Work

Diana Pearce
Institutional Racism and Real Estate

Sociologist Diana Pearce was interested in how a structural phenomenon like residential segregation is maintained.1 In the late 1970s, she randomly selected about a hundred real estate agents in the greater Detroit area to be in her study.

Each agent was visited at different times by a white couple and a black couple who were looking to purchase a house. The couples were similar in terms of education level, occupation, income, family size, and the type of house they wanted. The agents were unaware that the couples were trained and paid accomplices of the researcher.

Pearce found that the chances of actually being shown a house on the first visit to the real estate agent were one in four for the black couples and three in four for the white couples. Even when the black couples were shown homes, they were shown fewer than the white couples.

The efforts of the black homeseekers to see homes were not met with strong, blatant refusal. Instead they were met with reasonable-sounding excuses like "I don't have the key" or "I need to make an appointment ahead of time." Finally, when black couples were shown homes, they were subtly "steered" into poorer neighborhoods.

This lack of overt insult and mistreatment masks the discriminatory treatment to which the black homeseekers were subjected.

Pearce found that such practices were not isolated instances of personal racism; in fact, they occurred in a variety of different communities across the entire metropolitan area. There seemed to be a high level of consensus in the Detroit real estate industry at the time about what the racial composition of neighborhoods ought to be.

Certainly, racism can be manifested at the personal level. But the fact that the actions of the real estate agents in Pearce's study were "typical" of most agents characterizes their practices as institutional racism.

1 Pearce, D. 1979. "Gatekeepers and homeseekers: Institutional patterns in racial steering." Social Problems, 26, 325-342.