What Is Structural Racism? Examples and Solutions

When many people think of racism, they often imagine blatant acts like hate crimes or racial slurs. However, racism today is frequently more subtle, disguised, and covert, making it challenging to identify and acknowledge. This is where the concept of structural racism comes in.

What is Structural Racism?

Structural racism refers to the totality of ways societies foster racial discrimination through mutually reinforcing systems like housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care, and criminal justice. It’s a system of hierarchy and inequity that routinely advantages White people while causing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color. This system is deeply embedded in our history, culture, politics, economics, and social fabric.

• Structural racism underlies and perpetuates other forms of racism, including individual (prejudice, xenophobia) and institutional racism (discriminatory policies within organizations).
• It operates without requiring the actions or intent of individuals and can even exist without an individual’s awareness.
• It functions through “racialized rules”—norms, principles, and regulations that govern behavior across institutions, reinforcing racial hierarchies and allowing racism to adapt and persist.

Examples of Structural Racism

Structural racism manifests in many aspects of society:

• Residential Segregation: This involves the physical separation of races, enforced by historical and ongoing zoning laws and mortgage policies from local governments and banks that disenfranchise marginalized communities. This leads to disparities in access to quality public education, healthy food, and other health-promoting factors.
• Education: Schools’ dependence on local property taxes can perpetuate inequalities. Critiques of education reveal how racism is institutionalized through existing practices and syllabi.
• Employment and Wealth: Unfair lending practices and other barriers to homeownership limit wealth accumulation for people of color. Policies like the 1935 Social Security Act, which excluded agricultural and domestic workers (predominantly Black men and women), show how structural racism has intergenerational effects.
• Criminal Justice: Biased policing and sentencing of men and boys of color, as well as immigration and border enforcement policies, are examples of structural racism.
• Healthcare: Racialized adjustments in actuarial projections, for example, can devalue the lives of non-White Americans. Institutional practices can lead to differential quality and access to care.
• Environmental Injustice: The strategic placement of bus garages and toxic waste sites in communities of color.
• Cultural and Environmental Attacks: These can include offensive symbols, mascots, or monuments that create hostile and invalidating societal climates. Even data aggregation policies can mask critical disparities by failing to adequately disaggregate racial and ethnic groups, rendering underrepresented populations invisible in policy and resource allocation.

Impacts of Structural Racism

The cumulative and chronic impacts of structural racism are profound, extending to physical and mental health outcomes across generations. It is considered a fundamental cause of health inequities. This constant exposure can lead to “racial battle fatigue,” taxing the resources of target groups and causing behavioral exhaustion, psychological affliction, and physiological distress.

Solutions and Approaches to Dismantling Structural Racism

Addressing structural racism requires a shift from focusing solely on individual acts to dismantling the pervasive systems, laws, policies, and practices that perpetuate inequality. It’s an ambitious social project aimed at achieving broad social change.

Here are key strategies:

• Naming Racism: Explicitly identify racism and acknowledge its foundational role in society. This means recognizing how racism structures opportunities and assigns value based on race, rather than viewing it as merely an individual character flaw.
• Asking “How is Racism Operating Here?”: Vigilantly question the “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “how,” and “why” of decision-making in structures, policies, practices, norms, and values to identify specific mechanisms of racism and levers for intervention.
• Organizing and Strategizing to Act:
  • Policy Change: Advocate for policies that promote fairness, justice, and equal opportunities in key areas like economic security, housing, education, and criminal justice.
  • Empowerment: Involve service users in decisions that concern them, validate their experiences, and mobilize their strengths and resources.
  • Education and Training: Incorporate anti-racism education into professional training programs to help individuals overcome fears of discussing race, explore their own racial identities, and understand how microaggressions operate.
  • Fostering Reflexivity: Encourage critical self-knowledge and self-examination to understand one’s place in the dominant system and challenge it. This includes White individuals acknowledging their privilege and taking responsibility for racism.
  • Interdisciplinary and Collective Action: Engage with scholars from diverse fields (sociology, history, law, economics) and collaborate with affected communities to develop comprehensive measures and solutions.
  • Challenging “Color-blind” Ideologies: Recognize that dismissing racial identity ignores the unique experiences of people of color and can be an excuse to deny personal prejudices.
  • Support and Advocacy: Seek external support from authorities or others when confronting microaggressions, as these efforts can be emotionally draining and risk pushback.

While challenging, active and collective engagement in addressing structural racism is essential for building a more inclusive and equitable society.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash