Writing in the Prison Mirror, Charles Bates, a middle-aged black counselor, relates his experience of being repeatedly harassed at a public library by a white police officer who assumed Bates was a criminal simply because of his race. Bates contends that the officer did not take into account his professional appearance and his physical differences from the description of the criminal suspect he was searching for. Instead, Bates asserts, the officer saw “a stereotype of his own making.”

Many civil rights advocates argue that the discriminatory attitudes that can result in incidents like the above are all too common in American society. Such discrimination, they claim, is sometimes overt and noticeable, as is the case with racially motivated name-calling and epithets. However, they maintain that many less-obvious forms of discrimination result from practices that are sanctioned by society’s...