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S H AW N B E N J A M I N
Tracing the Development of
Institutional Racism
I
nstitutional racism is one of the principal problems concerning the
inequality between blacks and whites in America. It is defined as any
policy, practice, economic structure, or political structure that places
minority groups at a disadvantage in relation to the white community. Public
school budgets and quality of teachers are a major locus of institutional
racism in the United States, because of the manner in which budgets are
generated from property taxes. Rich neighborhoods, consisting primarily of
whites, have better public school teachers and more money for education. It
may be easy to write this fact off as coincidence or as a product of the meritbased system, but social scientists have proven otherwise (Massey 2007). So
the question is: How did institutional racism develop in the United States
and what are some of the ways it persists?
Beginning in the sixteenth century, the legally sanctioned idea that
black people were inferior to white people created a social hierarchy; whites
occupied the upper echelon of society while blacks occupied the position
of slaves. Whites were afforded many privileges in education, politics and
economics, and even poor whites were granted the “psychological wage”
of whiteness, which manifested in everyday interactions that denigrated
and belittled black people (Dubois 700). By law, this continued long
past the abolition of slavery and was not fully addressed until the Civil
Rights Act in 1964, which brought the Jim Crow era to an end. Although
pen and paper created the 13th Amendment for newly freed slaves, it
did very little to change the attitudes and perceptions that whites had
towards blacks. For example, a black slave was still considered three-fifths
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of a person well into the Reconstruction Era that spanned from 1865 to
1869. The perception that blacks were racially inferior to whites was not
automatically expunged from the psyche of white Americans after the Civil
War. Hence, blacks continued to be disenfranchised in housing, voting, and
loans, to name a few. In addition, though the 15th Amendment explicitly
prohibited disenfranchisement on the basis of race or prior enslavement,
white Americans, especially in the Southern states, implicitly prevented
blacks from participating in the public sphere. For example, the poll tax,
which was first instituted in Georgia in 1871, was designed in such a way
to hinder blacks from participating in voting. This tax required all citizens
to pay off all back taxes before being permitted to vote. Many blacks could
not afford to pay this tax, since most were sharecroppers who rarely dealt
with cash. As a result, the voting turnout for blacks was significantly less
than whites by approximately half. Because of its success in Georgia, many
Southern states adopted this policy and established these legal procedures
in their constitutions. These tactics continued until 1965 when the Voting
Rights Act was passed. However, even with the Voting Rights Act, whites
found ways to circumvent the laws to restrict blacks from getting access
through violence, intimidation, voting fraud, and different interpretation of
legislation for blacks (Kousser 1974).
The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the G.I. Bill,
exemplifies this; it is one of the clearest instances in history where whites
were given tremendous opportunity, while blacks were denied access. This
government program essentially created the white middle class through
state-mandated preferential treatment of affirmative action.
After World War II, President Roosevelt was concerned about the
potential effects that 15.7 million veterans would have on the U.S. economy.
At the time, jobs were scarce and housing was not affordable for the average
serviceman. To ease the integration of veterans into society, the G.I. Bill was
created. There was opposition to this; conservatives such as Congressman
John Rankin, for example, felt that this act would create a freeloader
mentality. Despite this resistance, the G.I. Bill passed and allowed millions
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SH AW N B E NJAMI N
of white Americans to receive full government benefits, including loans
to buy homes, purchase farms, and start businesses (Massey 2007). It also
offered veterans the opportunity to go to college, which included tuition
payments and compensation for up to four years of college or vocational
training—a privilege afforded only to elite whites at the time. This had a
substantial effect in closing the income gap between rich and poor.
However, the G.I. Bill did not have the same degree of success for
blacks as it did for whites. On the one hand, many African American men
were strategically “dishonorably discharged” just before the war ended as
a means to keep them from obtaining benefits. On the other hand, only a
small fraction received benefits from the government, while the rest were
disproportionally excluded from receiving the services that would have
allowed them to start a new life. Even with laws in place to protect blacks
from racial discrimination, white government officials and business owners
systematically discriminated against blacks in practice by denying them
mortgages and college loans. The United States Department of Veterans
Affairs systematically denied black veterans equal access, and as such,
blacks were prevented from full incorporation into the growing middle
class (Desmond and Emirebayer 2010).
There was, however, a small portion of the black community that
benefitted from the G.I. Bill. Some of those individuals were afforded the
opportunity to go to college and own homes. This produced a generation
of educated blacks that would challenge inequality during the Civil Rights
Movement that spanned from 1955 to 1968 (Roach 1997). But although the
Civil Rights Movement had many successes including the Voting Rights
Act, Fair Housing Act, and Civil Rights Act—which banned discrimination
against anyone based on their race, color, religion, or national origin—
racism continued to persist. However, it became more and more implicit
as white government officials and business owners found more covert ways
to discriminate. Take, for example, the War on Drugs. In 1986, President
Reagan signed into law the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which appeared to be an
attempt to curb the distribution of illegal drugs. On the surface this law made
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sense; mandatory sentencing for anyone caught with an abusive substance.
But in practice, the law held stiffer penalties for the form of cocaine that
blacks disproportionally used (i.e. crack cocaine) under the guise that it
was a more dangerous drug. In contrast to powdered cocaine, which whites
disproportionally use, a much lower quantity of crack triggered a five-year
mandatory sentence. This twenty-five year long targeting of black drug
users was finally acknowledged in the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, but not
before contributing to the largest prison boom in an industrialized country
to date (Alexander 2010).
While this is one example of a law seeking to redress institutional
racism, such practices still persist in areas, such as, housing contracts and
bank lending policies that are created to effectively disadvantage minority
ethnic groups and blacks in particular. Similarly, racial profiling by law
enforcement officers and the misrepresentation of black people in the
media continue to create barriers to progress. Of course, the argument can
be made that the problem of inequality is a product of cultural pathology or
individual merit. However, the most effective way to understand inequality
between blacks and whites in the United States is to carefully examine the
development of institutionalized racism.
Works Referenced
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press, 2010.
Desmond, Matthew, and Mustafa Emirbayer. Racial Domination, Racial
Progress: The Sociology of Race in America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Free Press, 1965.
Kousser, J. Morgan. The Shaping of Southern Politics. New Haven: Yale,1974.
Massey, Douglas. Categorically Unequal. New York: Russell Sage, 2007.
Roach, Ronald. “From Combat to Campus: G.I. Bill Gave a Generation of
African Americans and Opportunity to Pursue the American Dream.”
Black Issues in Higher Education. August 21, 1997, 26-29.