7.3: Racism as Structural/Institutional

Color Matters

Because of inferiorization, students of color (non-white students), indigenous students, low-income students (who may be white or non-white), women, and other marginalized groups have disproportionately experienced discrimination and oppression. For example, Winant (2002) recalls,

Pick any relevant sociological indicator—life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, access to health care, income level—and apply it in virtually any setting, global, regional, or local, and the results will be the same: the worldwide correlation of wealth and well-being with white skin and European descent, and of poverty and immiseration with dark skin and "otherness." Sure, there are exceptions: there are plenty of exploited white workers, plenty of white welfare mothers both urban and rural, plenty of poor whites throughout the world’s North; and there are a smattering of wealth-holders "of color" around the world too. But these are outliers in the planetary correlation of darkness and poverty (p. 305).

Possessive Investment in Whiteness

Part of the idea here is to recognize proportionality. While there are low-income white people, for example, the majority of white people aren’t poor and those that are typically aren’t poor due to racism. Additionally, while we understand racism as racial discrimination, many scholars in Ethnic Studies specifically emphasize the structural connection within the definition. In the 1990s, Ethnic Studies scholar George Lipsitz coined the term Possessive Investment in Whiteness, or PIW. PIW is a way to explain how white people are encouraged to “buy” into whiteness, promote it, maintain it, uplift it, and exclude access from others. Possessive Investment in Whiteness is to embrace the category of whiteness as a community that embraces white skinned hierarchy in order to obtain advantages that go deeper than everyday privilege. These advantages range from creating laws/policies/procedures that benefit white as a privileged class, that maintains generational wealth by excluding non-whites and profiting from structured discrimination. Part of the maintenance of PIW requires a normalization of whiteness (such as white as the standard of beauty), and adherence to the status quo. Because PIW is embedded in societal structures, it is also self-maintaining and replicating. One example of this is redlining which is explained further in the sidebar below (for more information about related structural racism please see the Chapter 9 on the Racial Wealth Gap).

Sidebar: Redlining

Redlining is the labeling of certain communities predominantly occupied by people of color to be red and as distinct and inferior to white communities. This creates inequitable housing opportunities and maintains wealth for white people by rejecting people of color from obtaining home loans to purchase homes in white communities and also financially devaluing homes in communities of color that make it nearly impossible to accumulate wealth. In home ownership deeds in white communities, there would be explicit directions that prohibited people of color to buy homes in white communities. Policies like this help to perpetuate the accumulation of wealth within white families that already have legacies of generational wealth compared to Blacks because of slavery and the wealth from profiting off Black bodies.

Teaching in Ethnic Studies often points to structural/institutional racism such as described in this sidebar as what creates the biggest racial inequities in our society. Whereas equality is equal, same, “fair,” having the same exact access to resources, equity recognizes that people do not occupy the same positions that grant them the same access as others so there needs to be differentiated treatment such as particular resources and services that can help give access that people were left out of initially. When naysayers argue that there shouldn’t be “hand-outs,” what they fail to acknowledge is deep history that creates such inequities in the first place. In terms of racism as racial inequity, this is vastly due to structural/institutional racism. Slavery, for example, was an economic, political, cultural, and social system which was the law. Because it was sanctioned by the government, there was no avoiding it and it seeped into every fabric of society for centuries, creating a devastating impact of how Black people are seen even today. This includes the lack of access to the levels of generational wealth that whites have, and being denied privileges associated with freedom, safety and security, which are typically afforded to whites.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): "Don't you just love the suburbs?" (CC By-NC-ND 4.0; Jan Buchholtz via Flickr)

PIW is not just something that white people can profit from. People of color can profit from Possessive Investment in Whiteness also. However, PIW predominantly and most generously enables white people to dismiss race and promote colorblindedness. It is in the best interest of whiteness to mask historical oppression as this exposes the wrongdoing that comes from whiteness as superior. Colorblind racism therefore uses the notion of colorblindedness to uphold white supremacy especially through policies and laws that normalize the absence of color which then promotes whiteness as standard instead of inclusion of others.

Because of the power of whiteness and specifically white supremacy, there have been times in U.S. history when people of color sought to be classified as white. This often occurs when there are some loose boundaries around what is defined as white. In the 1923 Supreme Court case of Bhagat Singh Thind, Thind, born in Punjab, India, attempted to claim that he was Aryan due to language and being high-caste without racial mixing and therefore eligible for U.S. citizenship. Due to the Naturalization Act of 1790, only free white persons were eligible for citizenship at that time. Prior to Thind, Takao Ozawa (1922) also tried to argue that Japanese people had the same skin color as white people and should therefore be of the “Caucasian race.” This is why Thind made the case that some Indians were Caucasian. The infamous one-drop rule was created to classify who was white. During slavery, Black enslaved women were sometimes raped by their white masters. Their children were called mulattos and there were concerns that their racial mixtures would taint white blood. Thus, the one-drop rule, known as an anti-miscegenation law, was created in the 1600s. This rule declared any person with a single drop of Black blood to be Black. Not only were mixed race children of Black enslaved women and white masters deemed Black, but this rule also ensured that a child of a Black enslaved women was also considered enslaved, reinforcing the next generation of free enslaved labor. Designating a drop of Black blood to a mixed child also applied to white women who had children with Black men. However, when a white woman gave birth to a child that was mixed with Black and white, she was also punished for it. White men were not punished for having mixed race Black and white children. California struck down anti-miscegenation laws in 1948. The last of the anti-miscegenation laws were struck down in 1967 in the Loving v. Virginia case.

The Three I’s of Oppression

The three I’s of oppression describes multi-dimensional domination. Institutional oppression is oppression within organizations, societal institutions such as government, health, media, schooling, and more. According to Omi and Winant, institutional oppression is one that is largely seen through laws, policies, and protocols. In this way, institutions function largely without needing constant surveillance that guides every movement because when rules are created, people for the most part will follow them. Institutions also operate seemingly invisibly in this way by standardizing functions and symbols so that they are universally known. Institutional oppression within laws can exclude people from immigrating to the United States and it can also decide who is criminalized or otherwise different. The Immigration Act of 1924, for example, placed quotas on immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and completely denied immigrants from Asia.

Interpersonal oppression is when someone is being oppressed by another person, thus inter + personal. Violently attacking someone on the street is a form of interpersonal oppression. Attacking someone specifically due to race is interpersonal racism. Name-calling, microaggressions, verbal insults, and verbal or physical assaults, are some examples which demonstrate interactive exchange within interpersonal oppression. Microaggressions have increasingly been researched amongst people of color communities as a way to explain oppression that isn’t always considered a “macro” oppression like institutional racism but something usually more interpersonal and “less severe” like a verbal insult or slights. Filipino American psychologist Kevin Nadal is one who has lead research on microaggressions against Filipinx Americans specifically, and Asian Americans generally. With Asian Americans, one thing that some expressed was treating Asian Americans as foreigners as if many hadn’t been born here. Many say that even though they are called “micro”aggressions, they can still cause deep psychological impact especially when experienced constantly and that they can often feel larger than “micro” in impact. While seemingly disconnected, interpersonal oppression or racism can largely be in relationship to the Institutional. Because of the policies that frame how to operate with people, individuals can treat one another according to certain laws and procedures.

Internalized oppression is when a person internalizes negative messages, stereotypes, etc. that are associated with some aspect of them. For example, if they are a person of color and hate their skin color or hair texture, this could represent internalized racism that they somehow learned in their lifetime. Colonial mentality is when one believes in the inferiority of colonized peoples or the inferiority of some aspect within being a colonized or formerly colonized people. One example of this is if an English-speaking country colonized another country and colonizers teach them that English is superior, then believing that English is better than their language(s) in part shows that this colonial mentality accepts the superiority of the colonizer. Even though institutional and interpersonal oppression seem to be the most damaging and harmful of the oppressions, decolonial scholars importantly point out the extreme dangers of internalized oppression. When a person believes themselves to be inferior, this contributes to their continual subjugation and oppression as not believing they have power and agency. When people absorb ideas and beliefs of a group, they will perpetuate or challenge these ideas in regard to themselves, their family, and others. This helps to complete the cycle between the I’s.

In the 1970s, education scholar Caroline Persell named the three I’s of oppression and included societal oppression to be in a system called the “structures of dominance” that worked together to uphold oppressive ideologies in a cycle. Societal oppression are the societal values and beliefs, or ideologies, that can serve to uphold dominance for some and subordination for others. In her model of structures of dominance, institutions shape the way that people interact with one another, and therefore impacts how one sees themselves. This then translates into group values and beliefs. She specifically uses this model for education in the way that educational policy and rules impact teacher-to-student behavior and student-to-teacher behavior, and counselor-to-student behavior, etc. Then this influences the way the students see themselves, the way teachers see themselves, etc. and gets absorbed into existing and new pathways for societal beliefs. There are more ways that oppression operates within the dimensions according to Persell’s structures of dominance, but one of the most significant of her ideas within this model reflect how structures of dominance don’t just self-maintain oppression, but in particular it upholds the domination of the ruling class within education and throughout society.

Ideology and Hegemony

Ideology is a set of beliefs such as within a group. Ideologies are a part of all societies and contribute to how they define and distinguish who they are. Ideologies are often used to delineate who belongs and who does not, by sometimes attempting to require members of society and groups to practice and embrace such beliefs. In Ethnic Studies, it is recognized how sometimes ideologies spouted by elitist members in society can be harmful to the rest of the population, especially when they disregard the humanity of others, devalue their labor and cultures, and attempt to erase other cultures and way of life.

Sidebar: ideology

One example of ideology is whiteness as the standard for beauty.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): "Then and Now® Bathing Suit Barbie® - Made in China". (CC by NC-ND 4.0; Dolls N' Stuff via Flickr)

Related to ideology, hegemony is the dominance of one groups’ beliefs over others. When dominating beliefs are the standard or norm within organizations and institutions, it then establishes power for the dominant group and therefore helps to solidify dominant practices and beliefs within laws and policies that then are applied to everyone. Antonio Gramsci first introduced the concept of hegemony as cultural hegemony to explain the structured domination/subordination relationship. For example, Bates (1975) remarked how Gramsciʻs hegemony could “eliminate class struggle” by squashing it with such dominant norms and beliefs (p. 351). These laws and policies that uphold dominant beliefs as the norm often oppress marginalized populations.