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Originally Posted by ottopilot
For something to be institutionalized, there has to be a standard and an authority (established policies and laws). Can you provide an example of institutionalized racism? If you could, it would be illegal, against the law, and prosecutable. Is there prejudice? Probably, but if you can prove it, they will be prosecuted. There is no "institutionalized" racism. If there was, the laws are there to handle it. What you speak of is more likely done subtly by individuals outside the rule of law ... but it's not institutionalized.
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otto....I disagree with your interpretation of institutionalized racism.
IMO, institutionalized racism are discriminatory policies and practices that
are enabled to exist by or within the law.
A good example is redlining, whch at the very least is a discriminatory policy of banks and lending institutions that disproportionately affect minority communities and neighborhoods.
The government addressed it in the 70s with the Community Reinvestment Act that set strict requirements for lending institutions to provide housing loans, small business loans and other investments in the communities in which they are located.
Bush relaxed these standards several years ago....
see:
U.S. Set to Alter Rules for Banks Lending to Poor
....resulting in less investment (of money citizens deposit in their savings account in their neighborhood bank) in their own communities. Discriminatory or racist....small difference in my mind. The result was that these communities were not being served.
Other examples that, at the very least, raise the question of institutional discrimination:
The issue of penalities for distribution of crack vs power coke provided for great disparity in sentencing with a disproportionate adverse affect on minorities.....at least until a Supreme Court ruling last year.
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Would FEMA have acted more quickly and followed through more thoroughly if the worst impact of Katrina had been in the Garden District of New Orleans rather than the 9th Ward?
Would it have taken as long to get trailers to wealthier white residents. Would they have kept the fact hidden for two years from wealthy white residents that the trailers posed health risks?
CDC Confirms Health Risks to Occupants of Trailers
Federal health officials have confirmed that high levels of formaldehyde gas pose health risks to hurricane victims housed in 38,000 government trailers on the Gulf Coast, and will recommend that occupants be moved before temperatures rise this spring and summer, Bush administration officials disclosed yesterday.
...The findings cap nearly two years of internal government deliberation over the housing of hurricane Katrina and Rita survivors in the trailers, and come 23 months after FEMA first received reports of health problems and test results showing formaldehyde levels at 75 times the U.S.-recommended workplace safety threshold.
Who knows...but I dont think its unreasonable to understand why the citizens of the 9th ward might think so. And yes, I know that there are white citizens in these trailers and many white victims of Katrina...but the vast majority are black and lower income (not a Republican constituency)
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SAT and other standardized tests....Are these standardized tests culturally biased? Some say yes:
Jay Rosner, executive director of the Princeton Review Foundation, conducted an SAT bias analysis in 2003. He examined answers from 100,000 test takers along with their race, ethnicity and gender.
Rosner's findings, outlined in “On White Preferences,” showed that “every single question carefully preselected to appear on the test favors whites over blacks.”
Rosner said that whites answered 99 percent of the questions correctly at a higher rate than did blacks and Latinos.
“The test developers at ETS don’t intend to produce these results,” Rosner said. “They are choosing questions using a methodology that produces very consistent and predictable results.”
...“There has been a long history of bias in the development of standardized testing,” said Stafford Hood, professor of psychology in education at Arizona State University. “We are better in terms of paying attention to the possibilities of bias in testing than we were before, but has it been fixed yet? Of course not.
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/....aspx?id=35935
....others say no. I dont know. But if they are used too heavily as admission standards, the result could be discriminatory or perceived as racist.
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Conclusion....
And finally.....voter caging...an issue that Ustwo dismisses with a laugh and a shrug but really doesnt want to discuss...is institutional racism.
When I presented some of these earlier, pan's response was that since they impact whites as well, they are not racist.
I would suggest that if the vast majority of those negatively mpacted (by intent or by circumstance) are of one race...it is not a stretch to characterize these policies and practices as examples of institutional racism.