How Structural Racism Works

[Music] every aspect of life jobs employment wealth discrimination and education criminal justice media housing health mental health insurance agencies loans banking every aspect of life that we can think about has significant forms of elements of structural racism or shall we say evidence of racial disparity that's operating there's been a pretty explicit ideological war over the past 40 years between the story of structural racism and the emergent and now dominant story of colorblindness so let's start with just some basic definitions structural racism in the u.s is the normalization and legitimization of an array of dynamics historical cultural institutional and interpersonal that routinely advantage whites while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color color blindness or i'm calling it colorblind ideology makes the argument that only the absence of accounting for race will bring racial equality and that we must reject all racial categorizations record keeping make no distinctions based on race in order to reach a color-blind context for a fair equal society so it fundamentally relies on the idea that race is not operating now and that we must keep it that way by being colorblind now i could spend a whole 45 minutes on how we got this color blindness exactly you know what what the what the easy mechanisms were the kind of manipulation of king's very famous phrase content of character not color of skin he didn't say anything about being blind um you know i mean i know he's rolling over in his grave um about that phrase like i should have changed it who could know um um but but colorblindness um is is uh extremely resistant to illuminating any categories of race and any and therefore any measurements which makes of course the whole structural racism argument completely antithetical to colorblind ideology but it also assumes in addition to that race does it doesn't matter now it also means that we have to assume racial hierarchies are not already operating that society is fundamentally fair if it's left alone to its own devices it also rejects policies that are designed and this is very important because colorblind ideology has been at the heart of the the ending of any kinds of programs designed to redress a legacy of structural discrimination so you can't solve the problem by saying any anything that looks like affirmative action in any sphere becomes extremely uh problematic in the context of colorblind ideology and the supreme court's been you know very significant in ending transforming forcing dramatic curtailments of a variety of efforts to try to remedy even past discrimination i'm not even talking about new fangled present day versions of it just the past so i put it in this way and this is how sort of everyday people can back themselves into the logic of color blindness people would say to themselves well since most people believe in racial equality which includes myself and since the laws have been changed to outlaw discrimination and since i don't see color well we'll give you that one so i can't be a racist and since no special benefits are accrued to me based on whiteness question mark racism isn't causing these inequalities so you end up with a kind of if then if then if if all these things are true then i don't know what y'all problems are about right because this i've passed my own litmus test so what remains left here at the end of this kind of self-check what remains left is actually the heart of colorblind ideology in the way it gets deployed and that's the behavior because colorblind ideology imagines that there are no structures impeding us so we have a kind of individual capacity and this must be about the behavior of those who are being discriminated against they must either bring it upon themselves or be uninterested and they have imputed cultural limitations that get understood as motivating their experiences with structural racism given both the the the argument that's made by uh colorblindness uh but also the argument that um that relies on culture that there's a huge racial disparity in what people think about when racial equality will be achieved so this one is lawrence bobo a sociologist who was then at harvard does a study that shows that 61 of whites think we've already achieved equality racially speaking and it's on the horizon for another 20. so 80 of white people think we're pretty much scot-free we're all we're almost home i don't know what they're doing okay [Music] they live they live in multi-racial communities okay okay 17 of black people think we've achieved equality 36 think it's on the horizon and the other half are not so sure about when it's going to happen but this is a very big gap this is an insignificant gap in if nothing else perception we don't know what education is about but if the 61 of whites think we have already achieved it in a 20 another 20 think it's around the corner how in god's name do we convince those 80 percent of respondents that racism is an impediment you see so this perception drives a rejection of the consciousness you need to fight structural racism now you know some people say this out of pollyanna hopefulness you know it's just right around the corner and oh it's going to be fine but there is a willful kind of resistance so the focus on behavior the belief that equality has already or will soon take place work together to facilitate the rejection of policies that many think would in fact work to counter structural racism but there have been some important journalistic trajectories recently in particular what's happened with police brutality and you know state murder has brought more attention to what the conditions might be around it but there's a there's a there's a mainstream public narrative that is driven by color blindness but that approaches this kind of information with three particular strategies and there are others but these are three one is that these are structural anomalies right this you know just just a weird one off something happened and went wrong that the criminal justice system works just sometimes it doesn't work you know just so just these few times over here and oh well that one was just a procedural thing and this one the guy had mental problems and he lunged at him and this other guy he's 6'4 and this you know so there's sort of like a perpetuation of anomalies and the other one is the one bad apple oh there's a rogue cup there's this one rogue cop right who's 17 times you know nobody pays any attention to and he's just so rogue nobody notices but he's just one bad apple right but the the you know doesn't spoil the whole tree of course because the system works that's a one is a structural and only the other one's a sort of personalized one and then the third one is just the demonization of either the victim of a community so just recently i was going through some i don't even know what kind of website but um freddie gray's family and others have asked them the media to stop referring to him as the son of an uneducated heroin addict it's like well wait just exactly what is the value of that information here it's like well if he was an educated non-heroin addict then the police would not have done to him what they did is that is that what we're really saying so like there's this constant sort of demonization and marginalization and and and reduction of the humanity of victims as a means by which to normalize status quo and render the visibility of structural racism foggy at best so even if we buy structural racism which i'm gonna just take for granted for the sake of argument that you do if we do that we still have these three these three uh impediments we have that the discrimination itself continues in new forms and practices so actually it's a constant project it does it's not the same thing it was even 10 years ago um you know someone wrote a really interesting piece about the end of redlining right with with subprime lending being the exact inverse of redlining right redlining is we're not going to get which we're going to talk about in a minute we're not going to give you any loans subprimed lending we're going to give you a whole lot of really bad loans you know is this sort of like it never ends like it's like what's the newfangled way we could create bad outcomes and take a lot of money banks are very creative with this so they're new forms and practices so you can't tackle something very easily when it's always shifting right you have to figure out what are the core things that seem to be continuous the second thing is the way in which colorblind ideology and the stories hide um what's going on and blames uh personal behavior and the third is the special favors narrative because anything that smacks of special favors people resist and they just have a knee-jerk kind of rejection doesn't matter what the data is so my argument is that research alone is not going to interrupt this interconnected set of perceptions if it were it probably would have done it by now because the research is staggering so the house structural racism works project is is an attempt to figure out how do we tell this story in a way that builds the kind of emotional momentum that colorblind ideology built you know how do we actually make people feel connected to it in some way so the first part was to sort of decide okay how do we tackle where it's happening and how do we condense it in such a way that might make it sort of graspable because again it really is everywhere so i just made a what i guess you'd call a kind of educated slash executive personal choice decision that these five areas are incredibly significant not only consequential but dynamic and interactive but as they're listed here you see them and as they are in this image they are operating in their own spheres right there's a real sense that the media and criminal justice and housing wealth and education have their own circumstances and they're operating independently this is often how we talk about this we talk about them as single sphere we look for housing discrimination and we look for a legacy of it but we don't think about how it connects to all these other factors so part of the vision of the project is to put these gears in relationship to one another to one explain that the system is designed to reproduce these disparities right so it's not a one-off it's not a bad apple it's a history of intentional constant reproduction through different mechanisms and that they're interactive and interconnected along multiple pegs that that you could start this in any number of places and connect them in different ways and that they reinforce each other it's not a single sphere set of problems if we end mass incarceration tomorrow we'll still have a tremendous level of problems in many other spheres that are interactive with mass incarceration but interdependent interactive and compounding so this is thinking of it this way and figuring out how to tell the story this way seems to be uh one of the one of the goals so far so okay so let's say we take the housing gear now this gear could have like 10 more pegs with policies but just imagine this gear here to describe some of the main policies that have happened over time in to create really black communities slash you know constrained ghettoized black communities often the policies that have done that along with many other things so these are just a handful there are many others but when you take them together they have pretty much gutted the ongoing stability of predominantly black or all or mainly african-american and latino communities so they've devalued these communities and the property owners in them and their property created incredibly high hurdles for ownership of homes and businesses and in a in an indirect way transferred risks that would otherwise be dis disparate across society that by creating pockets of privileges and resources and buffer zones troubles and problems are disaccumulated from one area and hyper accumulated in communities of color but so let's take here let's look at redlining for a moment because it's such a big one redlining and the homeowners alone corporation and the fha operated from 33 to 1977 until it was outlawed to redline american city neighborhoods with use a color-coded system for determining which neighborhoods were suitable and which residents were suitable for loans so they took cities you can find these maps all over google they're still in existence i mean you can see the old maps um and if it was green and you you were put in green you got a rating of an a and that the basis for the rating was entirely racial it was about on being an all-white neighborhood and lacking a single foreigner or negro if you got a red marking now there were there were grades in between so the more you became of color would say dangerous mixed race communities with latinos asian americans and blacks but the worst possible rating where for which there was no lending were neighborhoods where any black people lived and where they were therefore given the lowest rating and ruled completely ineligible for home and business loans it didn't matter how many and it didn't matter what their social class was not that it should but it's just a point to be made and these were partnerships between government and private businesses designed to stabilize and expand home ownership um for um some communities but not these others and there were literally this had nothing to do with credit had nothing to do with jobs and it had everything to do fundamentally with a state and government and private uh enterprise transfer of value and privilege to the category of whiteness lipsticks george lipsets calls this a possessive investment in whiteness that the nation makes an investment in whiteness and then of course people are going to want to hold on to it because it has value and they're going to want to protect it because it is being rewarded fair housing act of 1968 is happy news except in the version i'm going to tell you right now which is that it was fought for and it was lobbied for and it was an amazing a piece of legislation along with many other civil rights acts of uh of you know anti-discrimination law and this banned discrimination in all the places this is just a few intimidation and coercion because there was constant threats to black people if they moved into white neighborhoods there was racial steering we're like oh we don't have any homes over here but we have them over here blockbusting in which neighborhoods were intentionally broken up so that profits could be gleaned and so white flight could be accelerated and slum lords could exact higher prices for worse maintained properties and redlining so it was passed by johnson with an aim of you know creating this is in some sense um an anti-discrimination law that's trying to level the housing playing field but the the person who had to deal with it was richard nixon because it happened at the end of johnson's term and nixon was not all so excited about this he called it forced integration and consistently uh interrogated his staff fired people who tried to implement it so between 1974 and 1983 not a single dollar was withheld from any city or town that may have been practicing housing discrimination so if you if you again we don't have time here today to go into the depths of how it works but i guarantee you somebody did and not one single dollar here's a law what happens nothing right so this is again while colorblind ideology is so dangerous because it relies on the use of a law and not the actual application and and implementation of it so what we're talking about here is a set of practices and policies and behaviors on the ground that have created a structurally speaking incredibly fragile and economically deprived and highly burdened neighborhoods neighborhoods that are carrying the risks and accumulated disadvantages that are produced in other parts of society in very compacted spaces in fact the entire logic of the notion of a ghetto which was not a black phenomenon originally but when you say the word today pretty much that's what people think is actually a construction right it is an intentional construction but the power and legacy of housing discrimination is is much more uh powerful when you think about it in relationship to the spheres that are around it so very briefly you know i want to just help you think about how these gears might interact so the most obvious one for those of you who already studied this material is that the primary way we fund education and public schools in the united states is through what taxes what determines property taxes the value of your house so now if you've had a hundred years of no home ownership because you have been denied loans or high-risk loans that mean you have high levels of foreclosures that you actually qualified not to have but were given anyway economic discrimination in other spheres you're not going to have a tax base to generate the kind of resources for schools in your neighborhood so here you have an educational outcome where the institution of education is understood as the great leveler right this is going to be the great equalizer everyone works hard in schools a meritocracy system they get out the other end and everything works out um so what you see here is a very clear and easy kind of educational intersection if you think for example even if we take the notion of ghettoization and think about it as we've been talking about you know these neighborhoods here you obviously have a tremendous capacity for racialized policing right you have if you segregate people and put them under full surveillance you have a capacity to create two tiers of a ju of a system without really anybody else noticing so you notice before all of the last three years of focus on police brutality there was a trem there still is but there was a tremendous amount of skepticism oh police wouldn't do that i've never seen a policeman do that well if you live over here you saw a policeman do this all the time it's not a question right so you have a deep interaction here where for example you can have a war on drugs in this neighborhood right if this assuming this here's a black neighborhood um you can have a war on drugs in this neighborhood even though black people do not use drugs at any rate higher than whites in fact they use many of them less but nobody else ever gets the their pockets turned inside out on a constant basis stop and frisk only works in a segregated context you can't just go around stopping and frisking wall street bankers it doesn't really work out so well housing generates tremendous amount of wealth it's the most significant wealth transfer for most citizens if you have any family issues with health or with educational needs it's second mortgages it's home property this the transfers of all this wealth away from minority communities and into wealthy white communities has been tremendously significant intergenerational it's not just a one-time transfer it it's the it's the money that keeps giving we talked a bit about education but then i want to talk here a little bit about what's happened in the same last 40 years which is the kind of fixation and culturalization of black ghetto life the idea that the ghetto is a black cultural space and that it's not a structural formation and that it's not the product that's street culture and gangs and drugs and guns and sex trade and fill in the blank whatever the alternative economies you know largely in very fragile and disrupted communities get understood as a black thing right a cultural thing and if you really pay attention to what happens in this same 40-year period and it's an ever narrowing description of black life so that it's only really black when it functions as a mirror of the stereotype of the ghetto so the ghetto becomes not a form of structural racism not a form of deprivation of circumstances and oppression but a kind of cultural choice you know like i i chose the ghetto i open up the paper i want to live somewhere they say a ghetto apartment i circle it i go visit because i'm interested i think i can just do my thing in the ghetto so there are many other examples we could talk about here and there's a monumental set of of forces that are happening so of course this is daunting but at the same time there have been amazing points of entry and part of the value of this structure as opposed to others at least as i see it now is that it provides lots of points of entry that can be accumulative in value the ban the box movement i don't know how many of you know about the ban the box a few hands that's pretty good that's great um so the general principle at first was to outlaw the use of of the requirement that that anyone who was a felon or went to jail would have to check a box to say so which is just adding stigma on top of stigma like you know as if you you're it's a permanent life sentence you're always on your way to jail right you can't just have done it so if you have if you check the box you know they found of course oh lo and behold you know xcoms didn't get hired what a shock and what a surprise and then be a black ex-con oh good terrific that's going to be really helpful so they're trying to ban the box for jobs but what the movement has moved to is ban the box for housing applications because if you find housing applications now they say you know have you been a felon or been a prisoner and now there's been a movement to even not allow people who live in public housing to have relatives who are returning from prison to live in public housing so you have a sentence that is now you know destabilizing your whole family and community that you never end so the ban the box has been a really terrific movement that has moved across there have been tremendous fair lending organizations there's a county in maryland i guess it was montgomery county that a wealthy county that actually required developers to put affordable housing in their programs otherwise they wouldn't approve the plans and they've been successful for many many years although there's a lot of pressure to stop it to create at least a multi-class multi-race uh county under a tremendous pressure there's no way we're going to know all there is to know about structural racism so of course we want to keep learning and keep growing and so i'm hoping that we can use the visual and the emotional engagement to bring these ideas to the public thank you very much [Music] you

Channel: Professor Tricia Rose

Views: 47,958

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Id: X3KsVRkbnn4

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020