Black History ToolKit
Understanding Systemic and Institutional Racism
Listen on
Episode notes
The Sewell Report made the claim that there is “no evidence of institutional racism” and that, although the UK is not a “post-racial society”, it sets a good example for other white-majority countries when it comes to diversity.
The term “institutional racism” was Kwame Ture's coinage. It appeared first in “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America,” a book Tuare wrote with Charles Hamilton in 1967. A reader runs into the phrase right away, in the second paragraph of the very first chapter. The writers distinguish individual acts of racism—which can “be recorded by television cameras” or otherwise “observed in the process of commission”—from institutional racism: “less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts.” (The italics were Tuare’s and Hamilton’s.)
But institutional racism exists, “it permeates the society,” Tuare and Hamilton wrote. And its effects were certainly palpable—in the higher death rates of Black babies, for instance, or in how Black families couldn’t break free of their tenements. Like gravity, institutional racism couldn’t be seen, but it could be felt by the minorities who became its victims.
Support me to keep producing material via Patreon www.patreon.com/user?u=39306141
or buy me a cup of coffee at www.Ko-fi.com/bhtoolkit
more material will also be posted on www.abubakrmadden.me