Everyday racism harms health more than occasional major racist confrontations do
Evidence
The main characteristics of everyday racism can be summarized as follows: Everyday racism is a process in which (1) socialized racist notions are integrated in meanings that make practices immediately definable and manageable, (2) practices with racist implications become in themselves familiar and repetitive, and (3) underlying racial and ethnic relations are actualized and reinforced through these routine or familiar practices in everyday situations. Everyday racism is experienced directly and vicariously. Because it permeates everyday life, it has a more damaging effect on health than incidental major confrontations with racism. Everyday racism involves cumulative practices, often covert and hard to pinpoint. Specific incidents acquire meaning in terms of the three major processes through which racism operates in everyday life: the marginalization of racial and ethnic groups, the problematization of (attributed) group characteristics and culture, and the repression of (potential) counter action. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1484
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: A precise working definition of ‘everyday racism’ broken into three constitutive processes.
- XREF: Connects to Philomena Essed’s concept of everyday racism and to microaggression theory in critical race studies.
Related
- Everyday racism operates through mundane, difficult-to-pinpoint microinjustices that damage health. (similarity 0.89)
- Everyday racism operates through familiar routine practices that actualize underlying racial relations (similarity 0.87)
- Mundane routine racism causes chronic psychological and physical harm (similarity 0.86)
- Everyday racism reduces to three interlocking strands of marginalization, problematization, and repression (similarity 0.85)
- Everyday racism is a multidimensional accumulation, not a singular act (similarity 0.85)
- Racism reproduces through three intertwined everyday micro-processes (similarity 0.84)
- Everyday racism is a process of resource negotiation sustaining unequal power, not only outcomes (similarity 0.83)
- Everyday racism links small recurring injustices to macrostructural racial hierarchies (similarity 0.82)
- Everyday racism does greater damage at higher levels of status and authority. (similarity 0.81)
- Everyday racism is a continuous, often unconscious exercise of power that presupposes white privilege (similarity 0.81)
- Individual acts against everyday racism contest larger racial inequalities (similarity 0.81)
- Everyday racism adapts to each society’s institutionalized structures. (similarity 0.80)
- Racism persists as unconscious normalized privileging of whiteness (similarity 0.80)
- Racism harms health even when not personally directed, because it targets shared group characteristics. (similarity 0.78)
- Everyday microaggressions cumulatively make targets more vulnerable to lethal violence (similarity 0.78)