Systemic racism in America
- Luís Fernandes
- Apr 28, 2021
- 5 min read
Institutional racism, also known as systemic racism, is a form of racism that is embedded within a soceity or an organization. It can lead to such issues as discrimination in criminal justice, employement, housing, health care, political power, education, among other issues.
There are different components of systemic racism that we can look at when we're talking about the ways in which a society disproportionately affects a certain group of people.
The easiest type of racism to explain is explicit racism. Explicit racism would be like the Jim Crow laws or slavery explicit racism is on the books it is observable it is inarguable.
Then you have implicit racism, implicit racism exists when there are racist outcomes without any institution or person being explicitly racist. For example racial bias against resumes that have black sound names. Studies show that resumes with white-sounding names got twice as many callbacks as identical resumes with black-sounding names taking for account all of the possible variables.
Implicit bias is one of the many reasons why the black unemployment rate is twice the rate of white unemployment even among college graduates with the xsame background.
Another form of implict racism is the clear racial biases in the criminal justice system. This bias can take form in many examples:
-while white and black Americans admit to using and selling illicit drugs at similar rates, black Americans are VASTLY more likely to go to prison for a drug offense
-extensive multivariate regression analysis indicates black male offenders receive 19.1% longer federal sentences than similarly-situated white male offenders (white male offenders with similar past offenses, socioeconomic background, etc.)
-a study of first-time felons in Georgia found black men received sentences of on average 270 days longer than similarly-situated white males, black boys as young as 10 are more likely to be considered criminal or untrustworthy, and more likely to face police violence.
These two cases are just two examples of how black people are disproportionately affected by implicit racism.
If you are interested in where I found all of these statics don't be afraid to go down below and click the links that I posted a few ones are even from the own united states government.
The last type of form of systemic racism I want to address is racism by outcome and it plays a HUGE role in why black Americans are underperforming in America as in today.
Here is a fact: generational poverty exists.
People do not have perfect wealth mobility in America or anywhere in the world, if you are born poor you're more likely to die poor and if you're born wealthy you're more likely to die wealthy, people generally stick to whatever economic quartile they're born and that's just a fact of economics that is not disputable.
In 2010 Black Americans made up 13% of the population but only had 2.7% of the country's wealth. Also the median net worth for a white family was $134,000, but the median net worth for a Black family was just $11,000
Historically speaking owning a home or property, living in a dual-parent household, and getting a college education is the easiest way for an American family to build wealth.
However, in the 30´ through the 70´ when black families wanted to buy a house or go to college the banks denied them loans through a practice that is called redlining.
Redlining is a discriminatory practice that puts services (financial and otherwise) out of reach for residents of certain areas based on race or ethnicity. It can be seen in the systematic denial of mortgages, insurance, loans, and other financial services based on location (and that area’s default history) rather than on an individual’s qualifications and creditworthiness.
The term “redlining” was coined by sociologist John McKnight in the 1960s and derives from how the federal government and lenders would literally draw a red line on a map around the neighborhoods they would not invest in based on demographics alone. Black inner-city neighborhoods were most likely to be redlined.
Investigations found that lenders would make loans to lower-income Whites but not to middle- or upper-income African Americans.
Indeed, in the 1930s the federal government began redlining real estate, marking “risky” neighborhoods for federal mortgage loans on the basis of race.
The result of this redlining in real estate could still be felt decades later. In 1996 homes in redlined neighborhoods were worth less than half that of the homes in what the government had deemed as “best” for mortgage lending, and that disparity has only grown greater in the last two decades.
Examples of redlining can be found in a variety of financial services, including not only mortgages but also student loans, credit cards, and insurance.
Although the Community Reinvestment Act was passed in 1977 to help prevent redlining, critics say discrimination continues to occur. For example, redlining has been used to describe discriminatory practices by retailers, both brick-and-mortar and online. Reverse redlining is the practice of targeting neighborhoods (mostly non-White) for higher prices or lending on unfair terms such as predatory lending of subprime mortgages.
So now let's imagine a world with no explicit or implicit racism where people are completely race-neutral. There is absolutely no racism in people's decision-making,
However, redlining and and racism by outcome still happened. What would the outcome of that be?
Well the outcome even in a complete racism neutral world would be long-standing black poverty mathematically guaranteed and as we move forward and into the future that pattern is going to be maintained because in America and in the world wealthy people tend to stay wealthy and poor people tend to stay poor and that is the disparity which has been replicated generation after generation. In fact it probably gets worse because when you're poor you get worse schooling you get worse outcomes you get worse neighborhoods you get higher rates of criminality you get fewer dual-parent households.
However the idea that there can still be racist outcomes even if nobody in the system is acting with a racial bias is very confusing to most people so a lot of people say that systemic racism isnt a thing.
So what can we do do solve it?
Explicit racism you can outlaw at least in the legal sense and you can discourage socially and culturally implicit racism and can compensate it with means-tested programs that are meant to help people who are the victims of implicit racism.
Racism by outcome is the easiest thing of all to address because we do not need to prove intent on any level that black families are struggling disproportionately. We need to aks ourselfs:
What can we do in those neighborhoods? how can we invest in good programs that could lift whole black neighbors out of poverty? in what schools we should invest? what policies can we develop?
We see inequality happening disproportionately and we address it. It's that simple at least it's supposed to be that simple.
file:///C:/Users/anari/Downloads/wp2017-12-pdf.pdf
I's like to read about the possible answers you have to the questions you pose in the end. =)