In the 1980s and 1990s, the media covered crack cocaine use in a way that portrayed black, inner-city youth in a bad light, which may well have resulted in harsh and excessive penalties among a population that now is struggling to become a stable part of American life. In contrast, use of the drug ecstasy, which until recently has been associated with a more white, middle-class population, has not led to such a media frenzy. Both crack and ecstasy are illegal drugs with some negative side effects, so why might the media interest focus on crack cocaine and not on ecstasy?

Discrimination can involve the promotion of a group’s status, such as occurs with white privilege. While most white people are willing to admit that non-white people live with a set of disadvantages due to the colour of their skin, very few white people are willing to acknowledge the benefits they receive simply by being white. White privilege refers to the fact that dominant groups often accept their experience as the normative (and hence, superior) experience. Failure to recognize this “normality” as race-based is an example of a dominant group’s often unconscious racism.