institutionalized racism

(noun)

An embedded pattern of social structures and institutions—such as governments, legal systems, educational systems, courts, financial systems, etc.—that awards privileges to white people and discriminates against people of color based on their race.

Related Terms

Examples of institutionalized racism in the following topics:

  • Racial Tensions and Black Lives Matter

    • Originating in 2013 in response to police violence, the Black Lives Matter movement has raised awareness of institutionalized racism in the United States.
    • Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an activist movement originating in the African-American community that campaigns against violence and institutionalized racism toward black people in the United States.

  • Race and Opportunity

    • While virtually all African Americans in the North were free by 1840, they were subject to racial segregation and discrimination, including the institutionalized racism that characterized the majority of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  • Conclusion: The Successes and Failures of Progressivism

    • Plessy thus allowed segregation, which became standard throughout the southern United States, and represented the institutionalization of the Jim Crow period.
    • Furthermore, racism often pervaded most progressive reform efforts, as evidenced by the suffrage movement.

  • The "Color Line"

    • Born in western Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a tolerant community and experienced little racism as a child.
    • Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment.
    • The private sector was not the only source of racism; under President Wilson, the plight of African-Americans in government jobs suffered.
    • Du Bois also wrote an editorial supporting the African-American Great Migration, the movement of blacks from the southern U.S. to the Northeast, Midwest, and West, because he felt it would help blacks escape southern racism, find economic opportunities, and assimilate into American society.
    • Du Bois and the NAACP in combatting racism and the segregation of the "color line" in the early 20th century.

  • Toward Immigration Restriction

    • The early 20th Century in the United States saw widespread racism targeting immigrants and the emergence of a “nativist” movement demanding favored status for established citizens over new immigrants.
    • After the Immigration Act of 1924 significantly reduced the intake of non-Nordic ethnicities, the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South displaced anti-white immigrant racism with anti-black racism.

  • The "Nadir of Race Relations" and the Great Migration

    • Racism was so pervasive and, in many cases, so violent, that many African Americans realized they could not influence racists to change their views.
    • Racism was so prevalent that even American presidents embraced segregationist attitudes and polices in the government and the military, while black Americans turned toward civil rights and Afrocentric movements led by W.E.B.
    • African Americans commonly experienced racism in the context of territorialism, often from ethnic Irish people defending their power bases.

  • African Americans in WWII

    • Despite racism and segregation in the U.S. military, over two and a half million African American men registered in the military draft, with more than 1 million serving in the armed forces during World War II.
    • African-American soldiers served with distinction in World War II, despite racism and segregation

  • Moving West

    • Indian resistance, sectionalism and racism forced some pauses in the process of westward settlement.

  • White Society in the South

    • Second, free small farmers in the South often embraced hysterical racism, making them unlikely agents of internal democratic reforms in the South.
    • White racism in the South was sustained by official systems of repression such as the "slave codes" and elaborate codes of speech, behavior, and social practices illustrating the subordination of blacks to whites.

  • Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy in the Gilded Age

    • The "nadir of American race relations" is a term that refers to the period in United States history from the end of Reconstruction through the early 20th century, when racism in the country is deemed to have been worse than in any other period after the American Civil War.
    • They also faced racism from Northerners with whom they were competing for jobs and housing.