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Background on Systemic Racism and Other Forms of Oppression
Module 3: Ways to Teach Systemic Oppression and Privilege*
From Ways to Incorporate DEI into Your Courses By David Luke, Chief Diversity Officer, University of Michigan, Flint
Background on Systemic Racism and Other Forms of Oppression
We experienced a dramatic increase in public discussion around systemic racism and witnessed a number of global protests against racism and inequality during the summer of 2020. Importantly, for many white people in the U.S. who were awakened to, and outraged by, systemic racism, this was their first significant engagement with the idea.
Let's not water this down at all.
Sociologist Joe R. Feagin is largely credited with coining the term “systemic racism,” having developed it into his book Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression. He introduces the concept in his book Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations, in which the first chapter discusses the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where 55 white men in the top 2% of wealth, 40% of whom owned slaves, began developing the U.S. founding documents and deliberately excluded 20% of the population who were either enslaved or were part of the indigenous population. Significantly, women were also excluded from this convention.
That is systemic racism (and sexism). The United States was built on it.
In “Racist America,” Feagin explains, “Systemic racism involves both the deep structures and the surface structures of racial oppression. It includes the complex array of antiblack practices, the unjustly gained political-economic power of whites, the continuing economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines, and the emotion-laden racist framing created by whites to maintain and rationalize their privilege and power. Systemic racism thus encompasses the white-racist attitudes, ideologies, images, actions, and institutions of this society. This racism is a material, social, and ideological reality and is indeed systemic, which means that the racist reality is manifested in all major institutions . . . each major part of U.S. society—the economy, politics, education, religion, the family—reflects the fundamental realities of systemic racism (Feagin 2014:xiv).”
The U.S., and many of its institutions, was fundamentally built on a system of racism and exploitation. Genocide and slavery were two critical components to the building of this country. As such, efforts to fight systemic racism challenge many of our core institutions, their practices, and implicit ideologies. Because racism was built-in, eliminating systemic racism will take some deconstruction so we may rebuild a more equitable future. It's bigger work than many realize, which is why it's important to understand the terms we use.
In fact, Feagin suggests the need for a new constitutional convention, based on the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and related documents as a starting point. Because the U.S. is a country built on, with, and through systemic racism, he argues for a new foundation entirely. This is the type of transformative change people are advocating when they talk about fighting systemic racism, but I'm not sure everyone using the term realizes it.
Take higher education as an example. Many institutions are identified as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Most of the others are referred to as just simply colleges or universities, or sometimes by researchers as “predominantly white institutions.” The truth, however, is that these institutions would be more accurately labelled as “Historically White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs),” as their student bodies were made to be predominantly white with a level of intentionality similar to HBCUs, although not reflected in their names. These institutions were built for white, upper-middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, neurotypical, able-bodied men; people who hold numerous dominant social identities. Thus, we see these institutions tacitly acknowledging this reality by creating, usually in response to student activism, cultural centers, LGBTQ+ centers, women’s centers, etc. These centers exist to help the institutions better serve the populations they weren’t initially designed for, because systemic oppression has been built into these institutions in many ways.
*Published 07/22. © 2022 Sage Publishing. All rights reserved. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners.