How can institutions be “racist?” What additional challenges are posed when bias is produced and reproduced by everyday institutional practices? This chapter traces the historical evolution of institutional discrimination from Reconstruction to the present, highlighting explicit legal and implicit policy-level discrimination in the Jim Crow era, the New Deal, and historical immigration policy. It also provides more in-depth analysis of the role of race in the present-day housing market, in the criminal justice system, and in election administration.

What does solvent mean? JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, 2010 A little more than five years after the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (Sarbanes–Oxley),1 many of the nation’s largest financial institutions failed or were pushed to the brink of failure. An unprecedented decline in housing prices reduced the value of securities backed by housing loans owned by many banks. The resulting insolvency of some of the most significant Wall Street giants prompted the worst financial turmoil since the Great Depression. The crisis raised serious questions about the efficiency of markets as hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization suddenly disappeared. The losses suffered by investors were more severe and long lasting than those that came out of the market crisis that helped give rise to Sarbanes–Oxley.