Defining “Isms” in Diverse Communities: How Americans View Discrimination
By Aimee Kim
Every holiday, everyone gathers with friends and families. These special days are bound to bring tasty foods, heart-warming memories being formed, and occasionally, the uncomfortable shift towards politics after pie. These holiday dinner debates are often represented online as satirical. However, amid ideological warfare and rising political tensions, hatred appears to be gaining a stronger foothold in America. In recent years, social media has shifted from cultivating meaningful connections to a place where conversations often become muddled and escalate out of control. A 2021 study conducted by Pew Research Center found that over 40% of U.S. adults have faced harassment online, with the number of physical threats rising. Yet recording instances of racism, classism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination is a complicated process because each American perceives discrimination differently. Dr. Lauren Valentino seeks to unpack these discrepancies.
Dr. Lauren Valentino
The Confusion Behind Discrimination
I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Valentino, who is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UNC, this past March on discrimination in America. This issue was one of the reasons Dr. Valentino pursued her study on “Cultural Heterogeneity in Americans’ Definitions of Racism, Sexism, and Classism.” She began her research in 2020 and recently had her findings published in the American Journal of Sociology. Alongside her coauthor, graduate student Evangeline Warren of Ohio State University, Valentino sought to define these terms from the point of view of the average person (also known as “layperson”).
The American Journal of Sociology
She noticed that previous studies focusing on these “isms” failed to account for a variety of unique perceptions of discrimination, nor did they make the results digestible for the average person, often the subjects in these analyses. She began to question whether discrimination must be intentional to be considered as such. Is it a two-way street? Do people consider white people to also be victims of racism? Essentially, what is discrimination to the average American?
This disconnect between researchers, and the public is directly reflected by constant miscommunication between fellow citizens. Valentino observed that people seemed to invoke different definitions of discrimination, preventing healthy sociopolitical conversations. For instance, a 35-year-old white male might have extremely different perceptions of what is considered discrimination as opposed to a 75-year-old Black woman, leading to disagreements and misunderstanding. But how do we quantify degrees of discrimination and account for different factors contributing to its prevalence?
Gathering Unique Perspectives and Data Through Scenarios
Valentino’s study aimed to resolve these issues by taking an unconventional mixed-methods approach. First, she conducted around 40 interviews asking participants to distinguish what they considered to be instances of racism, classism, and sexism to identify patterns. Many offered modern examples, such as billionaires going into space being indicative of classism and the #MeToo movement (Figure 3) evoking sexism. These “instances of discrimination” were then used as vignettes, or brief hypothetical scenarios, and compiled in a survey. In a nation-wide sampling effort, people were asked to rate these vignettes from 1 to 100 based on the level of discrimination and explain their choices. By combining the strengths of the interview method with a survey experiment, Valentino was able to bypass “researcher wording bias,” where the phrasing of the question influences the response, by instead relying on the casual language of the public’s vignettes.
The 2018 #MeToo global movement exposed those who sexually assaulted or harassed women
Criteria Defining Discrimination Greatly Vary
The results were somewhat surprising. Valentino and Warren were able to affirm their initial hypothesis, showing that different people have different definitions of discrimination. They found political ideology, race, and gender to affect these definitions. Furthermore, Valentino did not find that education or race alone impact one’s definition of discrimination, once the other factors like political ideology, gender, age, and income are taken into account to explain this variation.
Valentino was able to further breakdown and categorize certain criteria subjects had in defining discrimination. People made appraisals of racism, classism, and sexism based on intentionality, the outcome of the explicit or implicit discrimination, and whether there were resulting power or resource disparities. Although race, political ideology, and gender impacted these judgments, they didn’t necessarily hold a concrete influence across all subjects. Contrary to many sociologists’ prior beliefs, Valentino found that the evaluations people make are more indicative of a stable, potentially learned perceptional frame.
Discrimination Research is Important for Empathetic and Healthy Communities
She was also able to conclude that people don’t necessarily define these terms in a self-serving way: “Women don’t necessarily define sexism differently than men. Black people don’t always define racism differently than white people.” The study disputes the stereotype that some groups are overly eager to claim "victimhood" by labeling an excessive number of situations as examples of racism, sexism, or classism, a message that is perpetrated through American culture. This work may have incredible implications on how we approach discrimination in our country. Valentino’s findings and distinct methodology could frame anti-discrimination policies in education, shift future sociological studies on discrimination, and even be used in determining health outcomes, which discrimination has been proven to affect.
Valentino and Warren’s finding that cultural heterogeneity impacts Americans’ definition of discrimination serves as an important step towards sociologists understanding the public, as well as Americans understanding each other. In Dr. Valentino’s own words, “Sociology in general... is a powerful tool for helping us get outside of our own experience. What I think is exciting about this project is that it gives us an opportunity to understand each other better and have difficult conversations about topics like discrimination that many people don't even know where to start. We can have more productive conversations and work toward a more fair and just society.”
References:
Vogels, E.A, The State of Online Harassment. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/01/13/the-state-of-online-harassment/ (accessed March 14th, 2025)
Interview with Lauren Valentino, PhD. 3/7/25
Valentino, L., Warren, E., AJS. 2025, 130, 846–892
Major, Brenda and others ‘Stigma and Its Implications for Health: Introduction and Overview', in Brenda Major, John F. Dovidio, and Bruce G. Link (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Stigma, Discrimination, and Health, Oxford Library of Psychology (2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 6 Dec. 2017) pp. 3–28