is racism expressed in the form of formal and informal policies and practices. It involves rules, practices, and economic and political structures that systematically disadvantage, subjugate, and ensure power over racially underrepresented groups. Institutional racism happens when these practices consistently lead to racial differences, with Blacks receiving lower status (White & Cones, 1999). Such policies and practices may intentionally or unintentionally produce racial inequalities (Reed, 2009). Racially discriminatory policies and practices in the U.S. are often normative and accepted as ordinary (Reed, 2009). According to Carmichael and Hamilton (1967), Black people are systematically deprived of power in the racialized colonial contexts; thus, “institutional racism is another name for colonialism” (p. 5). Lawrence (1994) claims that African Americans remain the principal targets of institutional racism because of their relatively large population size compared to other racially oppressed groups, and because they have been oppressed longer than any other group in the U.S. context (with the exception of Native Americans). Institutional racism is difficult to identify because unequal outcomes are often justified by racial differences in qualification, abilities, merit, or motivation (White & Cones, 1999). Without understanding institutional racism, Black people may direct energy at fixing other Black people, not realizing the role that institutional racism plays in creating the poverty, unemployment, and poor healthcare that plague this community on a daily basis.
Examining Different Levels of Systems
Institutional racism effects the delivery of critical services to Black people. It shapes how psychologists see Black patients, how teachers see Black students, how politicians see Black citizens, etc. However, recognizing institutional racism requires analyzing multiple levels of social systems. For example, one cannot assess the presence or absence of racism in the criminal justice system by looking only at judges’ rulings in criminal cases. Mauer (1994) explains, as an example, the need to examine multiple levels of the criminal justice system:
The seeming contradiction may depend on which part of the system is being examined. As described previously, much of the disparity in the justice system may lie in the early stages, at the level of arrest and prosecution. Thus, a Black drug offender and a White drug offender may be treated equally at sentencing, but the Black drug offender may be more likely to be arrested and prosecuted in the first place. Thus, we cannot conclude that the system is fair just because sentencing outcomes appear to be. (p. 89)
According to Alexander (2010), the criminal justice system produces racist results at two stages: (1) the discretion that law enforcement officials have regarding their decisions about who to stop, search, arrest, and charge, which allows them to operate based on their conscious and/or unconscious racist beliefs; and (2) by creating barriers against individuals who want to make claims of racial discrimination.
Institutions and individuals often try to avoid addressing institutional racism by reducing clear institutional patterns and cultures of racism to individual random acts. For example, a systemic problem like police brutality is often viewed as the isolated acts of individual bad cops (Reed, 2009). Controversial police killings of unarmed Black males are commonplace (Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, OH, and Eric Garner on Staten Island, NY). Police accountability for taking Black lives is remarkably low, exhibiting clear patterns of targeted abuse, bias, and neglect (Morial, 2015). When these cases occur, officers are often acting on formal and informal institutional policies that condone their aggressive behaviors. Individual and institutional racism are interrelated; therefore, officers’ individual racist acts are only extensions of institutional racism, and law-enforcement perpetrators are rarely convicted.
This has strong implications for possible solutions. Solutions cannot be geared toward punishing racist individuals. Instead, they must involve punishing institutions and changing institutional ←33 | 34→practices and cultures through policies and laws. The portrayal of police brutality as individual random acts is a way of misdirecting attention away from addressing problems at a structural level. Not only does a racist society require the racist writing and teaching of history to support and reinforce its ideology, it also needs a willing mass media to disseminate its values and beliefs (Rome, 2004). Given their wide distribution, racist ideas and images in the media can result in a collective Black experience of racism-related stress and negative self-perceptions (Freeman, 1994; Wong & Schwing, 2014).
Institutional racism occurs when employers systematically deny jobs and promotions to Black workers and when Black people are denied loans or given higher interest rates than Whites who pose the same credit risks. As Alexander (2010) explains, part of instructional racism are the barriers erected that prevent victims from legally challenging the way institutions behave. “Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that racial disparities are the product of intentional racial discrimination, i.e. the work of a bigot” (p. 103). Alexander (2010) explains that it is nearly impossible to prove racial bias in policing because race is rarely the only reason a police officer can site for a traffic stop, i.e., the arrested individual appeared “too calm” or “too nervous” etc. Another example of a barrier lies in the fact that Black youth charged with similar offenses and with similar criminal histories are significantly more likely than their White peers to be sentenced as adults (Poe-Yamagata & Jones, 2007).
Racial profiling is “the use of race as an indicator in a profile of criminal suspects” (Rome, 2004, p. 116). The stereotype of the Black male as criminal leads to Black male motorists being stopped solely or in part because they are both Black and male. A Gallup poll on racial profiling indicated that 72% of Black males between the ages of 18 and 34 reported experiencing being stopped by police because of their race, compared to 40% of Black females in the same age range (Newport, 1999). Weatherspoon (2014) adds that this happens to Black males regardless of their economic success (sports figures, actors, news reporters, and lawyers).
Cultural Racism
Neither individual nor institutional racism capture the way that the values and ideologies of worldview are implicated in racism (Jones, 1991c). U.S. society’s cultural assumptions and social structure are Anglo-American in origin and thus place Black people at a fundamental disadvantage (Jones, 1991c). Kambon (2006) explains that definitions are important because cultures shape the meaning that different people attach to their day-to-day experiences, and then influence how they perceive and respond to events. The shared meanings, beliefs, and values that different ethnic groups represent are what Kambon (2006) refers to as definitional systems. Because power and privilege in society are not distributed evenly, some racial/ethnic groups have more influence than others. For example, White or Euro Americans have been able to institutionalize their definitional systems (beliefs, values, and ways of life) such that they have become habitual, customary, and taken for granted (Kambon, 2006). These systems can create in Black men a loyalty to Whiteness beyond logic. The definitional system governing the cultural space in the U.S. is dominated by Euro-American beliefs and values. The imposition of this Euro-American way of life on people of African descent represents a kind of psycho-cultural warfare (Kambon, 2006). Not only is European cultural reality imposed on non-European people, African people’s socioeconomic security, in large part, depends on their acceptance of European cultural reality, which often includes punishment for embracing their own cultural reality (Kambon, 2006).
Cultural racism is a form of social control that involves the imposition of meaning on others in the form of beliefs, values, priorities, and general ways of life. According to Jones (1991a), it is the most intractable, and perhaps the most critical expression of racism. It involves subjugating, denying opportunity, or harming people based on assumption about their culture. Examples include notions such as classical music is more sophisticated than the blues or hip-hop, that speaking Ebonics or being religious ←34 | 35→or spiritual are indicators of lack of intelligence, that traditionally Black hairstyles are unprofessional, or that collectivist values represent weakness while individualism represents a strength.
Aversive Racism
Aversive racism refers to subtle, unconscious,
