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February is Black History Month, and this year it comes on the heels of two developments that underscore the problems posed by structural and systemic racism: the death of Tyre Nichols, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ latest salvo in his war against what he calls “wokeness.”
Nichols was brutally and unjustifiably beaten to death after a traffic stop by Memphis police officers—Black officers who, arguably, might have internalized long-standing, structurally racist aspects of American policing. As for DeSantis, he is proposing a ban on state universities’ teaching topics related to diversity, equity and inclusion that seek to address America’s racial inequalities. Banning DEI might score points in the culture wars, but it won’t erase the facts or the legacy of America’s history.
The first English settlement in the New World was established in 1607 at Jamestown. The first African slaves were brought to Jamestown in 1619—one year before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.
Multi-generational African chattel slavery existed in the colonies and then in the United States from 1619 until 1865. After a brief, post-Civil War experiment in racial equality in the South known as Reconstruction, a new form of legal, institutionalized white supremacy known as Jim Crow was implemented and was federally endorsed in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
Formal, legal racism did not come to an end until the 1960s. From 1964 to 1968, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia overturning “anti-miscegenation” laws that banned interracial marriage, and the Fair Housing Act made Black Americans legally equal for the first time in 350 years. Put differently, Black Americans have enjoyed formal legal equality throughout the U.S. for only about 50 years.
Racism might no longer be lawful, but its deep legacy (and continued practice) infects our social, cultural, economic and legal institutions to this day. In 1972, scholar James Jones offered a definition of institutional racism that is still used by academics: “Those established laws, customs and practices which systematically reflect and produce racial inequalities in American society … whether or not the individuals maintaining those practices have racist intentions.”
For most Americans, their single largest asset is their home. Redlining policies beginning in the 1930s restricted federally backed home-loan availability to people based on race in most American cities, including Indianapolis. Redlining, restrictive covenants and other discriminatory, race-based housing polices loaded the dice for decades to come.
Such policies and practices, which are continued today in the form of predatory lending, have produced tremendous divergences in intergenerational wealth. According to the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, “the typical White family has eight times the wealth of the typical Black family and five times the wealth of the typical Hispanic family.”
Decades-long systemic racism in lending and housing has impact on the location of economic underdevelopment and high-crime areas in America’s cities. A recent study of Philadelphia showed that areas with the highest rates of gun violence were those that had been redlined going back to the 1930s.
The physical mobility of African Americans has been constrained in law and in everyday practice since the time of slavery: from slave patrols (America’s original organized police forces), to “sundown towns,” to today’s racial profiling. Driving while Black, shopping while Black, even walking or jogging while Black produces humiliations, if not life-threatening encounters, around the country every day.
Institutional and systemic racism is real. Acknowledging this unfortunate reality should not be dismissed, ridiculed or banned as “wokeness.”•
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Atlas, a political scientist, is a senior lecturer at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Indiana University. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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Well said.