Systemic Racism

A Theory of Oppression

Joe Feagin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134729074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Feagin develops a theory of systemic racism to interpret the highly racialized character and development of this society. Exploring the distinctive social worlds that have been created by racial oppression over nearly four centuries and what this has meant for the people of the United States, focusing his analysis on white-on-black oppression.

Drawing on the commentaries of black and white Americans in three historical eras; the slavery era, the legal segregation era, and then those of white Americans. Feagin examines how major institutions have been thoroughly pervaded by racial stereotypes, ideas, images, emotions, and practices. He theorizes that this system of racial oppression was not an accident of history, but was created intentionally by white Americans. While significant changes have occurred in this racist system over the centuries, key and fundamentally elements have been reproduced over nearly four centuries, and US institutions today imbed the racialized hierarchy created in the 17th century.

Today, as in the past, racial oppression is not just a surface-level feature of society, but rather it pervades, permeates, and interconnects all major social groups, networks, and institutions across society.

1

SYSTEMIC RACISM

INTRODUCTION

Some time after English writer Henry Fairlie immigrated to the United States in the 1960s, he visited Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation in Virginia and took the standard tour. When the white guide asked for questions, Fairlie asked, “Where did he keep his slaves?” Fairlie reports that the other white tourists looked at him in disturbed silence, while the guide “swallowed hard” and said firmly that the slave quarters were “not included in the official tour.”¹ Today, racial segregation in various areas and institutions, and the well-entrenched, systemic racism such segregation reveals, are still not in the “official tour” of this society.

In the late 1700s, Thomas Jefferson and the other white founders of the new United States advocated strongly an “all men are created equal” perspective. Yet their broadly stated phrasing of equality was hypocritical, for they intentionally and openly excluded African Americans, indigenous peoples, and women from the scope of this ideal. The new nation of the United States was explicitly designed to create wealth, privileges, and status for European Americans, people who had long stolen by various means, including much violence, the lands of indigenous peoples and the labor of Africans.

From the first decades of colonial America, European Americans have made oppression of non-Europeans basic to the new society. For the first 90 percent of this country’s history (about 350 years) slavery or legal segregation was generally in place. Only for the last 10 percent or so of our entire history have we been free of slavery and legal segregation. Thus, racial oppression makes the United States very distinctive, for it is the only major Western country that was explicitly founded on racial oppression. Today, as in the past, this oppression is not a minor addition to U.S. society’s structure, but rather is systemic across all major institutions. Oppression of non-European groups is part of the deep social structure. Beginning with the genocidal killing off of Native Americans and the theft of their lands, and the extensive enslavement of Africans as laborers on those stolen lands, European colonists and their descendants created a new society by means of active predation, exploitation, and oppression.

In this book, I develop a theory of systemic racism to interpret the ra-cialized character, structure, and development of this society. Generally, I ask, What are the distinctive social worlds that have been created by racial oppression over several centuries? And what has this foundation of racial oppression meant for the people of the United States?

A CRITICAL EXAMPLE: RACISM AS FOUNDATIONAL AND SYSTEMIC

Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Europeans and European Americans who controlled the development of the country that later became the United States positioned the oppression of Africans and African Americans at the center of the new society. Over the long history of the country, this oppression has included the exploitative and other oppressive practices of whites, the unjustly gained socioeconomic resources and assets of whites, and the long-term maintenance of major socioeconomic inequalities across what came to be defined as a rigid color line. Today, as in the past, systemic racism encompasses a broad range of white-racist dimensions: the racist ideology, attitudes, emotions, habits, actions, and institutions of whites in this society. Thus, systemic racism is far more than a matter of racial prejudice and individual bigotry. It is a material, social, and ideological reality that is well-imbedded in major U.S. institutions.

Historically, and in the present, the routine operation of the economy has greatly favored many millions of white Americans. Before the late 1960s, the many wealth-generating resources provided by state and federal governments to U.S. citizens were overwhelmingly or exclusively for whites. Indeed, prior to the end of slavery in 1865, African Americans were not regarded by most whites, including the Supreme Court, as citizens, and thus very few had any access to wealth-generating resources such as the public lands provided by state and federal governments to many white citizens.

After the Civil War, African Americans freed from slavery were for the most part barred from new government-provided resources, such as good land for homesteading, by the rapidly expanding and violent Klan-type organizations and by whites implementing racial segregation. Strikingly, in the peak decades of the official segregation era, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. government provided huge amounts of wealth-generating resources to many white families and businesses. The federal government distributed hundreds of millions of acres of land, billions of dollars in mineral and oil rights, major airline routes, major radio and television frequencies, and many other government-controlled resources almost exclusively to white Americans, while black and other non-European Americans were mostly excluded by racial violence or the racial apartheid system of the era.

Let us briefly consider systemic racism as it operated in just one historical period of the US. economy. Under the federal Homestead Act—passed in the 1860s and in effect until the 1930s—the US. government provided about 246 million acres of land (much of it taken from Native Americans by force or chicanery) at low or no cost for about 1.5 million farm homesteads. Because of the extensive racial exclusion and violence directed at African Americans, including those recently freed from slavery, those who gained access to these wealth-generating resources were almost entirely white. The homesteads of about 160–320 acres provided land resources on which many white families, including new European immigrant families, built up substantial wealth in the initial generation and subsequent generations. These white-controlled programs of land provision have had major long-term consequences. Drawing on demographic projections, one researcher’s careful data analysis suggests that perhaps 46 million white Americans are the current descendants of the fortunate homestead families and are substantial inheritors and beneficiaries of this wealth-generating government program.² In addition, many millions more of white Americans are the current descendants of those whites who received millions of acres of public lands allocated by the government or private companies for farms before the 1860s.

Even though they may not now be aware of it, many white families today are comfortable or affluent because of these past and vast federal giveaways. The enhanced incomes and wealth garnered by white Americans in one generation have generally been transmitted by them to later generations. This type of inheritance has enabled later generations of whites to provide much better educational, housing, and other socioeconomic opportunities for their children than the later generations of black Americans whose ancestors did not receive access to such wealth-generating resources because of massive racial discrimination and segregation. The other side of this centuries-long unjust enrichment for white Americans is the centuries-long unjust impoverishment for African Americans; this unjust impoverishment has often, with the help of continuing white discrimination, been passed along from one generation of African Americans to the next.

MAINSTREAM APPROACHES TO ‘RACE’

One remarkable thing about this intergenerational transmission of unjust enrichment and unjust impoverishment over centuries is that virtually no mainstream scholars and other mainstream analysts of “race” in the United States have given serious attention to its reality and operation. The unjust, deeply institutionalized, ongoing intergenerational reproduction of whites’ wealth, power, and privilege is never the center of in-depth mainstream analyses and is rarely seriously discussed. Today, mainstream analysts of the racial-ethnic history and contemporary reality of this society usually adopt some variation of an “understanding race and ethnicity” approach that ignores or downplays the centrality and injustice of white wealth, power, and privilege and instead accents the buzzing complexity of U.S. racial-ethnic groups and their socioeconomic demographics, geography, recent history, attitudes, or patterns of sociocultural adaptation and assimilation.³ This is generally true for most scholars assessing immigration patterns, for they analyze the adaptation and assimilation of various racial-ethnic immigrant groups with no sustained discussion of the implications for these groups’ socioeconomic situations of whites’ unjustly gained, centuries-old dominant racial status, power, and privilege in the host society.⁴

Most mainstream analysts approach the histories and experiences of each U.S. racial-ethnic group as more or less distinctive and/or as taking place within a U.S. society whose major institutions are now reasonably democratic and generally open to all groups in terms of socioeconomic opportunities—and thus no longer (if ever) systemically racist. This mainstream approach tends to view persisting racial-ethnic tensions and conflicts today as being matters of prejudice and stereotyping or of individual and small-group discrimination mainly directed against Americans of color. Racial-ethnic inequality is periodically discussed, but it is typically presented as something that is not fundamental, but rather an unfortunate socioeconomic condition tacked onto an otherwise healthy society.⁵

In most mainstream analyses of “race and ethnic relations,” whites as a group often seem to be just one of many contending racial-ethnic groups. Whites are typically included in demographic comparisons of racial-ethnic groups’ socioeconomic status and are often noted as the more advantaged group, especially in comparisons with black Americans and Latinos, yet rarely are whites seen as currently the central propagators and agents in a persisting system of racial discrimination and other racial oppression. Data on group differences in regard to such variables as income, occupation, health, and residence are frequently presented, but these differences are rarely if ever conceptualized in terms of a deep-lying system of racial oppression.⁶

Even many social analysts who recognize the still difficult conditions faced by certain racial groups, such as contemporary discrimination against African Americans, do not assess how deep, foundational, and systemic this racial oppression has been historically and remains today.⁷ While there may be some discussion of subordinate groups and allusions to institutional discrimination, these ideas are typically not built into a thoroughgoing perspective on racism in U.S. society. Many mainstream analysts give significant attention to divisions and conflicts among racial-ethnic groups, but their acceptance of the existing society as more or less sound in its sociopolitical foundation leads to well-intentioned analyses of these divisions that accent the need for a societal “vision” that will promote the “values of racial and inter-group harmony.”⁸ Yet such a perspective does not take into account the well-institutionalized power and wealth hierarchy favoring whites, nor the centuries-old social reproduction processes of unjust enrichment and impoverishment that lie just beneath the surface of the recognized disharmonies.

Interestingly, when racial discrimination issues are raised by some mainstream scholarly or media analysts, they are often discussed in ways that remove the dominant white agents of discrimination largely from view. Thus, these discussions of discrimination are put into the passive tense in order to remove white agents from the center of attention; or they are couched in an abstract language, so that it is some vaguely specified “institution” that may occasionally discriminate against black Americans or other Americans of color.⁹

RACIAL FORMATION THEORY

Currently, a major alternative framework to this traditional race and ethnic relations approach is the racial formation theory pioneered by the creative sociological theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant. This perspective has advanced our thinking about racial and ethnic matters because it accents the important ideological and political processes that have imbedded racial-category thinking in U.S. laws and other institutions. This framework accents ideas and ideology, that is, “how concepts of race are created and changed, how they become the focus of political conflict, and how they come to permeate US. society.”¹⁰

From this perspective, the concept “racial formation” refers to historical and governmental processes by which various racial categories have been socially created and destroyed.¹¹ The category of “race” symbolizes social conflicts by referring to human physical characteristics, yet it is not fixed, but rather variable over time. Omi and Winant recognize the importance of racial inequality, and for them a “racial project” is one where racial symbols are often linked to an unequal distribution of resources. Governments appear as the most important institutions in the racialization process because their actors have imbedded the “race” category into many public policies and laws.¹² This is a major contribution of racial formation theory, for much mainstream analysis gives little or no sustained attention to the role of government in creating racial-ethnic groups.

SYSTEMIC RACISM: AN ALTERNATIVE AND DEEPER APPROACH

Unlike the systemic racism perspective that I use in this book, however, the racial formation perspective does not view U.S. racial formations as being first and fundamentally about long-term relationships of racialized groups with substantially different material and political-economic interests—group interests that stem from greatly different historical experiences with economic exploitation and related oppression. The accent in racial formation theory on the racial categorization process is very important, but mainly in the context of these historical relationships of material oppression. In the U.S. case, these racial-group interests have generally arisen out of large-scale racial oppression over a long period. In racial formation theory there is not enough consideration of the grounding of U.S. society today, as in the past, in the provision of large-scale wealth-generating resources for white Americans; nor is significant attention given there to the intergenerational transmission of these critical material and related social assets. Racial formation theory assesses well and insightfully the critical importance of racial ideology, but not so much the historical foundation and systemic character of contemporary racial oppression. Also accented in this approach is how other racial formations have developed alongside antiblack racism.¹³ Like other scholars operating from this perspective, Omi and Winant view the past of North American slavery and legal segregation as not weighing “like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” but rather as lingering on “like a hangover” that is gradually going away.¹⁴

Thus, missing in both the mainstream race-ethnic relations approach and much of the racial formation approach is a full recognition of the big picture—the reality of this whole society being founded on, and firmly grounded in, oppression targeting African Americans (and other Americans of color) now for several centuries. Given that deep underlying reality of this society, all racial-ethnic relationships and events, past and present, must be placed within that racial oppression context in order to be well understood.

White-on-black oppression is systemic and has persisted over several centuries without the broad and foundational racial transformations that many social analysts suggest should have happened. While some significant changes have certainly taken place, systemic racism today retains numerous basic features that perpetuate the racial views, proclivities, actions, and intentions of many earlier white generations, including white founders like Thomas Jefferson. Because of its power and centrali-ty in this still racially hierarchical society, white-on-black oppression has shaped considerably all other types of racial oppression that whites later developed within this still white-controlled society. To make sense out of the experiences of all non-European Americans, we must constantly accent the role of whites, especially elite whites, as the originators, enforcers, and remodelers of systemic racism in the United States. In addition, white-on-black oppression is an independent social reality that cannot be reduced to other social realities such as class stratification, though all major forms of oppression do interact and intersect with it historically. Indeed, white-on-black oppression today remains a major nightmare weighing on the brains and lives of Americans of all backgrounds.

In thinking about what a better theory of racial oppression might look like, I here suggest three features: (1) it should indicate clearly the major features—both the structures and the counterforces—of the social phenomenon being studied; (2) it should show the relationships between the important structures and forces; and (3) it should assist in...