Organizational Directives and the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in U.S. Public Accommodations

Public accommodations have been key sites of racial inequality in the United States for well over a century. Relative to employment and housing, however, systematic analyses of discrimination in public accommodations remain scarce in the sociological literature. Especially important may be whether and/or how organizational norms and directives underpin contemporary occurrences of racialized differential treatment in public accommodations. Based on an analysis of 319 closed case investigations gathered from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to civil rights commissions across 18 U.S. cities and states (2015–2020), findings reveal that African Americans and, in particular, African American men are frequent targets in formal complaints of racial discrimination in public accommodations. Building on theoretical expositions regarding the organizational foundations of inequality, case materials suggest that organizations’ ideal patron norms, policies, and directives play a foundational role in producing these racial disparities. Several purportedly “colorblind” institutionalized tools (e.g., admission tickets, restroom access, tote/bookbag rules, and dress codes) were also found to be central to these processes. As such, I argue that organizations of public accommodation contribute to the (re)creation of racial hierarchies as they normalize, direct, weaponize, and legitimize gatekeepers’ profiling and discretion—discretion which is often imbued with explicit or implicit stereotypes of the iconic ghetto/Negro—in these incidents.