There's context missing here. I'm not going to even pretend to know about New Zealand culture or it's history in relation to racism.
But in the US, institutional racism is very much a thing. It does not mean "only white people can be racist". It means, in simple terms, that the historical treatment of people of color - particularly black people - in the US has led to a structural imbalance when it comes to white people in power in comparison to black people in power (wealth, careers, politics, even media). Same with men in comparison to women.
Again, that does not mean black people can't be racist or women can't be sexist. They're two different things.
Can you give examples of modern institutional racism? I definitely agree it has existed in America in the past, and I also agree that some of the products of insitutional racism in the past have affected certain aspects of modern life (wealth distribution, availability of education, etc), but can you give me examples of laws/rules/directives that exist today that explicitly favour one race over another? Remembering that insitutionalised racism is not one person in power acting with racist motives, but instead a defined protocol (usually clearly stated and written down) which favours one race over another. I have had a very hard time finding any examples of this in modern America, but your search might prove more fruitful than my own.
If you send two identical resumes but one has a black name and one has a white name the black sounding resume has a significantly lower chance of getting a callback...
Blacks are disproportionately shot by police... even adjusting for poverty, blacks are still over represented amongst people who are shot by cops without being a threat.
There are a lot of conveniently Republican states that have for some strange reason used gerrymandering and voter suppression in areas with large African american populations...
Mississippi (or maybe some other southern state) made some laws back in the day that made sentencing on youth harsher for the purpose of locking up black teenagers... these laws are still in effect.
Blacks are disproportionately poor. You might say this has nothing to do with racism but the fact of the matter is if you look at why blacks are poor it's a result of racism, and since poor americans face insurmountable medical bills, more crime, and shit schools its not exactly like blacks have an easy time climbing out of this poverty... so in many ways, even if no white people are going around explicitly supporting black poverty, it's an extension of racist policy and keeps blacks down. Also, the income disparity between blacks and whites leads to de facto segregation (I Live in the suburbs and I can count the number of black people I know one my hands. There is a city that's like 30 percent black thirty minutes away. I can tell you from personal experience that my lack of contact with blacks means I have some pretty strong subconscious biases which on a large scale contribute to things like aforementioned call back discrimination)
Blacks also tend to talk African American Vernacular which is certainly english but has it's own quirks... other than being considered stupid for talking their own dialect this leads to lots of legal problems for blacks since court stenographers are generally only trained to copy down standard english. They've done a study on stenographers in a city with lots of blacks and found their accuracy dropped significantly when they had to transcribe someone speaking in Vernacular...
The war on drugs was started by Nixon to disrupt black communities (one of his aides has explicitly stated this). We still have harsh sentencing for drug possession, and lo and behold blacks are over represented in prisons. Like with poverty you might say this doesn't count since it's an effect of past racism and no whites are explicitly targeting blacks for racist reasons anymore, but its still a continuance of a racist policy that keeps blacks down
In general if you only look for explicit racism you wont find much. Racists are smart and they know how to dog whistle while still getting what they want done.
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u/Clarice_Ferguson Dec 11 '19
There's context missing here. I'm not going to even pretend to know about New Zealand culture or it's history in relation to racism.
But in the US, institutional racism is very much a thing. It does not mean "only white people can be racist". It means, in simple terms, that the historical treatment of people of color - particularly black people - in the US has led to a structural imbalance when it comes to white people in power in comparison to black people in power (wealth, careers, politics, even media). Same with men in comparison to women.
Again, that does not mean black people can't be racist or women can't be sexist. They're two different things.