Institutional racism can persist without any individual racists

Evidence

As the Kerner Report of 1968 explained, “What White Americans have never fully understood - but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it” (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968:2). This remains true today. The ghetto represents institutional racism, that is to say, a racism that is enshrined in the social fabric and that would continue to exist even if the antiblack racism of individuals would cease tomorrow. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2388

Categorization

• DEFINE: A crisp operational definition of ‘institutional racism’ as racism structurally enshrined such that it survives the disappearance of individual prejudice.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a racist system can outlive all racists is the sharpest formulation of structural racism’s independence from individual actors — sits with the reader’s recurring concern about how systems persist beyond their creators.
• XREF: Casts a different light on the pre-state trade institutions reading: just as cooperative reputational norms persist without anyone intending them, a racist spatial structure persists without current individual intent. — connects to: Racism need not presume permanent inferiority, only exclusion from privilege and protection — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 64; When overt racism is socially shed, its institutional force persists across all mapped regions — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1906; White supremacy survives individual whites’ deaths because it is institutional — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 640 (+4 more)