A reading assigned to students in a Texas A&M sociology course this fall called for creating a new Cabinet agency to eliminate racial discrimination and for mandating lower property taxes in black neighborhoods. The same chapter accuses Republicans, and even Major League Baseball umpires, of racial bias.
Texas Scorecard previously reported about the syllabus and course materials used in Sociology 217: Introduction to Race and Ethnicity, taught by Dr. Liangfei Ye, which instruct students to look at the world through a racialized lens. Additional course materials used in the Fall 2025 semester explored concepts such as “microaggressions,” “Asian hate,” and “algorithmic bias.”
A reading assignment for students this fall, recently obtained by Texas Scorecard, was “The Race Discrimination Question” by Barbara Reskin, published in 2012.
Reskin proposes resolving alleged racial disparities across multiple domains (housing, education, employment, health, and criminal justice), which she claims are “reciprocally related and comprise an integrated system” with feedback loops.
Several of her claims made in this section are disputed by authors such as economist Dr. Thomas Sowell, a distinction Reskin fails to note.
Reskin believes dismantling race discrimination systems requires “a well-organized, sustained intervention by a central authority that enjoys legitimacy and commands resources.”
To that end, she wrote that the tool that would “most likely” provide the “coordination needed for effective intervention” would be for the federal government to create “a single, cabinet-level agency that houses all federal programs charged with proactively monitoring and eliminating race discrimination within all spheres.”
Although he is not mentioned in Reskin’s essay, disgraced author Ibram X. Kendi previously proposed a similar “department of anti-racism” at the federal level.
The course syllabus recommends a separate Kendi essay—which does not discuss the creation of a new Cabinet department—as supplemental reading for the day this reading was assigned.
To counter “residential segregation,” Reskin proposes that officials “encourage residential integration through tax incentives such as substantially lower property taxes in predominantly black neighborhoods.” She argues the American government, from the federal to local levels, has done this to “shape the behavior of employers and other public and private actors.”
A flavor of this approach has surfaced in the 2025 New York City mayoral election. Socialist Zohram Mamdani has proposed levying higher taxes on “richer” and “whiter” neighborhoods.
Reskin’s calls for greater federal intervention to follow the failure of previous efforts at federal intervention. Reskin pointed to an analysis that blames this result on Republican attempts “to win over Southern Democrats by playing on their racial fears of black violence.”
As opposed to analyzing this from a cultural level, Reskin’s essay explores the emergence of “racial disparities” from a “systems level.” From this perspective, Reskin argues that “the emergent product of pervasive race-based disparities – some but not all of which are caused by discrimination – is über discrimination” [Italics in original]. She claimed that “widespread, interdependent, race-linked disparities … constitute a system whose emergent property is uber (or meta) discrimination.”
She clarified the term disparity as “any difference in an outcome,” and discrimination as “unwarranted differential treatment of persons based on group membership.”
This “über discrimination,” she wrote, “shapes our culture, cognitions, and institutions” and operates at a meta level beyond any individual subsystem, and previous government actions were not enough.
She used Major League Baseball umpires as an example, claiming they are “more likely to call strikes when they and the pitcher are the same race,” albeit unconsciously.
From this presupposition, Reskin called for the creation of a “default hypothesis… that discrimination is implicated in all observed disparities, a hypothesis that we must accept unless we can demonstrate that it is false.”
The Texas A&M sociology department is chaired by Dr. Jennifer Glanville. In mid-September, Glanville listed her pronouns in her official university biography. These have since been removed.
Texas A&M University is part of the Texas A&M System, which is overseen by a Board of Regents that is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Texas Senate.
After revelations of a Texas A&M instructor throwing a student out of class for objecting to promoting transgenderism to minors—which subsequently led to the termination of then-president Mark Welsh—the Texas A&M University System’s Board of Regents stated Chancellor Glenn Hegar will “audit every course and ensure full compliance with all applicable laws.”
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