What is institutional racism

Racial awareness training has been seen as the answer, backed up with attempts to recruit more black officers. Condon has now decided that to accept institutional racism in the Met is to accuse all his officers of being racists. That is not what is meant by the term. Institutional racism is shown in the clear patterns of differential policing meted out on a systematic basis against black people.

The whole criminal justice system then compounds those racist patterns. Black events, black areas, black meeting places are targeted for special policing. Black people are four to five times more likely to be stopped and searched. In the last ten years, 35 black people have died in police custody in suspicious circumstances.

And, when black people complain of abrogation of their rights, the whole criminal justice system — from the Police Complaints Authority and the Crown Prosecution Service to the judiciary — compounds the racism by closing ranks. No one gets found guilty of racism, no one gets suspended or punished and charges are never brought following a violent death in custody.

When individuals and groups point out systemic injustices and inequities, the dominant culture is made accountable. Question if your university course on Australian literature omits Aboriginal authors.

Understanding systemic racism is important. To identify these systemic privileges enables us to embrace the point of view of people whose cultures are silenced or minimised. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth.

Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Presently, there are 2. By most measures, this number is remarkable. It means that the U. China comes in second, imprisoning 1. The U. This rate dwarfs the incarceration rates of the countries that the U. Indeed, the rate at which the U. While these numbers, in and of themselves, might be disconcerting, they become even more disturbing when we consider the racial geography of the U.

The extremely high rates of black incarceration mean that, in many communities, it is not unreasonable for black people—particularly black men—to expect to go to jail at some point in their lives.

Even if the large number of black people presently imprisoned simply reflected the extremely debatable fact that a large number of black people commit crime, we should have a problem with mass incarceration.

Imagine a country in which two-thirds of the young men can anticipate being arrested before they reach age Imagine a country in which there are more young men in prison than in college … Such a country sounds like a police state. When we criticize those kinds of regimes, we think that the problem lies not with the citizens of the state, but rather with the government or law. Mass incarceration means that this country approaches its problems through the criminal-justice system.

When faced with a social ill, our nation responds by building more prisons and jails. In this way, institutional racism may be particularly damaging for minority groups and further restrict their access to services and participation in society. Institutional racism. Overview Institutional racism Unconscious bias White privilege.