Institutionalized Racism - Additional Thoughts

In this post I just want to talk about the term Institutionalized Racism itself.  If you take a look at the denotative definition in the dictionary and also its connotative definition in general and colloquial use, and its use in literature and academia, it speaks to a deliberate, explicit and formalized system.  To say racism is institutionalized as a means to describe our implicit social networks operating beneath our awareness is to grossly misuse the term.  Moreover, it incorrectly presents a view that posits this aspect of our nature as totally dominant and its response to simply skin color as its only problem.

I can understand its use for its shock value, but shock causes backlash, and that hinders progress.  Moreover, such a use is political in nature, which is to impose one person’s (or group’s) way of looking at it on another.  No man or women on the planet is above fallibility, and when I see the work of experts in the field – even those admired with astonishing credentials and thick CVs who wield it for this use, it is no wonder why little progress gets made.

Who am I, a little guy with a laughable CV in comparison, to say they are wrong?

Instead of talking at people as if they were stupid creatures that need experts to look down on them and beat their ideas into them, we need to be inclusive of them as fellow human beings – brothers and sisters in the short life we have. 

This includes not using terms that are loaded for shock value under an activism mindset.  It is also to not be satisfied by just over emphasizing just the skin color aspects of our implicit nature and not including all relevant findings regarding what predicts behavior. 

We do have an implicit and automatic response to skin color that has some subconscious social racial spin (evidenced by blacks’ preference for whites found in the Implicit Association Test – IAT – and in experiments in neuroscience).  This is a primal nervous system response that invokes learned social spin it is connected to spatially, immediately nearby in the brain.  This spin is trained subconsciously throughout our lives.  Even in the absence of being raised without such spin, the stereotypes are everywhere. 

However, automatic attitudes are just the automatic defaults that prevail when the conscious mind doesn’t take over.  Even some of the lowest spin can be reprogrammed.  I know because I am a living example, evidenced by the change in my scores on two Implicit Association Tests seven years apart after being enthralled in empirical science throughout that time period.  There is extant experimental research currently in progress that is looking at how to reprogram our implicit attitudes.

On top of this automatic and default layer, we have more robust and slower-processing layers that process those signals, that, though also including subconscious social processing, examines behavior, dress and appearance, and other characteristics other than skin color.  At this level we also have what I’ll call the anti-racism component, which is just an implementation part of the psyche that generally checks our primal responses against social norms – it is the major command-and-control center that overrides the more primal and automatic responses to say a person of another skin color.

The command-and-control aspect of ourselves is where we really need to have understanding.  On top of implicit (automatic/general/default) attitudes are the specific attitudes – which are more accessible by the conscious mind, and the ones that typically govern our interpersonal relations with people in our lives.  Most of us (white or not) have black people in our private and professional lives, and these people are the exceptions to the default implicit side of us.  This is the part we tend to share in self-report surveys that may conflict with our primal selves – for instance, our score on the Implicit Association Test.

There is another aspect of human nature in this equation. Generally speaking, by nature, the more we are not consciously aware of aspects of the context (such as another person’s race) the more likely our more automatic protective attitudes will have way, which includes negative stereotypes of blacks.  This is demonstrated in various aspects of scientific research even unrelated to race.  We do need to realize this difference and speak to it in a simple enough way – in an objective, apolitical and non-activist way, so that we maximize our audience participation.

On the flip side, racism (including internalized racism) often takes over once racial stereotypes are salient - though we are not usually consciously processing this feature of the context.  Therefore, once we have awareness we need to work to keep the feature in our awareness and practice consciously reprogramming our responses.

Now I hope you understand why using the term Institutionalized Racism to describe this aspect of human nature, is not only a misuse of the term, but also an incomplete treatment.  And all programs, policies and implementations of this will not only make much less progress, but likely wastes resources and can even be counterproductive.  Moreover, knowingly generating the attitude in the public from wielding the term that it represents sole causation of the plights of millions of blacks,  is a civil rights anathema.

So enthralling society in beatings for our racist past and forcing the postulation that racism is institutionalized because our implicit “birds-of-a-feather” nature, while ignoring the rest of the equation – not to mention the other side – the internalized racism, and all other extant sources of the African-American socioeconomic disparity, is to spin our wheels.  In the meantime, millions of people continue to suffer, and a large portion of society's human resources go to waste!

So when can we get started on a comprehensive, honest, and all-inclusive treatment of the problem?