Week 10 Discussion — The Person or the Procedure? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Hook

A census form changes its race boxes and a category triples. A hiring rule that no one meant as unfair keeps a team looking the same year after year. A server who holds a stereotype treats every table the same, while another who holds none follows an unequal order. This week gave you the tools to read all of it: race as a category people built, prejudice versus discrimination, individual versus institutional racism, and the census's own labels.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Pick a real rule or routine you know from a workplace, a school, a club, a team, or an online platform, such as a hiring practice, an application step, a dress code, a referral system, or a form. Take a position: could that procedure produce unequal results by group even if no one applying it holds a prejudice, or does any unequal result there come mainly from individual attitudes, or some mix you can defend? Use the difference between prejudice and discrimination and between individual and institutional racism, say what evidence would show a group pattern, and say which of Merton's four types fits the people who apply the rule.

Option B: The share of the U.S. population reporting Two or More Races rose from 2.9% in the 2010 Census to 10.2% in the 2020 Census, a rise of 7.3 percentage points, and the Census Bureau attributes the change partly to improved question design and coding. Take a position: if a local newsroom could write one headline about this change, should it say mainly that the population changed, mainly that the measurement changed, or a mix you can defend, and why? Use the census's own labels, say what the figure measures and what it cannot show, and say what the change suggests about race as a socially constructed category.

There is no single right answer. A rule can be fair in intent and uneven in effect, or uneven because of the people applying it, and a census change can reflect both people and questions, so either option can be argued well in more than one direction. Pick one you actually care about, and tell us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, name the rule or routine and who applies it; for Option B, write the headline you would choose.
• State your position in one clear sentence and give your reason.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (race, ethnicity, self-identified, minority group, dominant group, prejudice, stereotype, discrimination, Merton's typology, individual racism, institutional racism, pluralism, assimilation, segregation, contact hypothesis, alone, alone or in combination, Hispanic origin, Two or More Races) correctly.
• Name one thing that complicates your position: for Option A, what evidence could show the opposite; for Option B, what the headline you did not choose would capture that yours misses.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: ask whether a poster is mixing up prejudice and discrimination, name the evidence that would test a claimed group pattern, or point out what a change in the census question would add to a headline. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option A, using a referral bonus at a store where I worked. Nobody I worked with seemed prejudiced, so I would not call it individual racism. But the rule only reaches the friends of current staff, so if the staff came mostly from one group, the rule could keep hiring inside that group. I would want hires by group over several years before calling it institutional racism, and I would call the managers who follow the rule possible unprejudiced discriminators rather than prejudiced ones.

Notice how it keeps the person apart from the procedure, names the evidence it would need, and takes a position without pretending the other side has nothing to say. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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