structural racism

racism

fiscal conservatism

is like a birdcage in that if you focus on a single wire (or single incident out in the world) there is nothing to indicate that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere.

Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere... and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.

is like a loaded die. The person tossing it need not be a bad apple, but the result always comes back the same.

is like a moving walkway. If you are not actively walking in the opposite direction you are still benefitting from it.

is perpetuated in the domain of education in this way: one-hundred years of being denied mortgage loans (economic discrimination) through red-lining practices made owning property impossible for black communities, and resulted in schools which, funded by property taxes, were inevitably massively underfunded.

is the normalization and legitimization of an array of dynamics ' historical, cultural, institutional and interpersonal'that routinely advantage whites while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color.

structural racism in the U.S. is the normalization and legitimization of an array of dynamics ' historical, cultural, institutional and interpersonal'that routinely advantage whites while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color.

is like a black hole: we know it's there because we see its effects.

structural racism, n.All

structural racism