Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

When most people think about racism, they think about the concept of individual prejudice – in other words, negative thoughts or stereotypes about a particular racial group. However, racism can also be embedded in the institutions and structures of social life. This type of racism can be called structural or institutional racism (hereafter, institutional racism) and it is significant in creating and maintaining the disparate outcomes that characterize the landscape of racial inequality. The term institutional racism was first used by Carmichael and Hamilton in 1967 with the intent of differentiating individual racist acts from what we can describe as policies or practices that are built into the structures of various social institutions and which continue to operate even without the active support and maintenance of individuals. Institutional racism has probably been with us for as long as human societies have been formally or legally divided into races. There are two main types of institutional racism. The first, which can be called “direct,” occurs when policies are consciously designed to have discriminatory effects. These policies can be maintained through the legal system (such as in the case of apartheid in South Africa or Jim Crow in the US) or through conscious institutional practice (such as redlining in residential real estate or underfunding urban public schools). The ... log in or subscribe to read full text