Institutional Racism In America

Institutional racism is alive and thriving in modern-day America. There is nothing extreme in this statement. African-Americans have been exploited through segregation and slavery for centuries. And today they are still disproportionately threatened, incarcerated, and killed by police in the streets. To understand the sheer size and intricacy of systemic oppression in it`s entirety is nearly impossible and inevitable fruitless. However, one thing is quite clear; America needs to reckon with its fraught racial history. The birth of the black lives matter movement has galvanized the millennial generation with a new-found sense of urgency that rivals the brutal desperation of the civil-rights movement. This indicates that black youth will force

It permeates Americas entire infrastructure, including: education, jobs and the prison industrial complex. Pursuing this further we can take a look at American wealth distribution and it`s effect on education. Between 1934 and 1962, the government backed 120 billion dollars of home loans. But they refused to back home loans to African-Americans. This practice, called redlining, essentially forced African-Americas into poor urban centres also known as the «gettho». This segregated America to this day and made it impossible to invest in the future of African-American neighbourhoods. Property taxes fund schools, which means that families who live in nice neighbourhoods - ones they could afford because of government backed home loans - get a better education. Better education means more opportunities, more resources and better jobs. The lack of educational opportunities meant that many African-Americans were relegated to low-wage manual work widening the wealth disparity that already existed. Part of being white is the privilege to reject a political consciousness. But it is crucial for white America to confront their privilege. That means searching and questioning your own view of black morality, like the often echoed idea of black

Shortly after the civil-rights movement prisons became privatised, for profit business. The prison population increased drastically from 200 000 to 2,4 million. According to the author of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander, there are more African-Americans today under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. Black men are now imprisoned at six times the rate of white men. However it is highly unlikely that black men suddenly became six times more dangerous. What really changed was the laws and sentencing. Sweeping laws were written that specifically targeted poor black communities. For instance the sentence for possession of crack were 100% harsher than the sentence for cocaine But it wasn`t just harsher sentencing: communities of colour are also more policed more harshly. Policies like; Stop and Frisk, and Show me your papers target the disenfranchised people of colour under the law. As a consequence they are far more likely to get arrested for the same crime white people commit. They are twice as likely to get pulled over. Take the late Walter Scott that was pulled over for a broken taillight only to be shot three times in the