GRSJ224/Structural Racism

Definition

Structural racism is a manifestation of racism that can be recognized as the normalization and legitimization of social, cultural, and institutional dynamics which routinely advantage white people at the expense of racially oppressed peoples. “Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead, it has been a feature of the social, economic, and political systems in which we all exist” .The foundation of structural racism is a racial hierarchy which affirms the privileges associated with “whiteness,” and therefore affirms disadvantages associated with “color”. * Structural racism often takes a covert form that escapes the reach of specific policies or practices intending to combat discrimination. The nature of structural racism is such that even if "interpersonal" racism, in other words, directly visible forms of racial discrimination, were to be eradicated, structural racism would still exist and contribute to racial inequity .Targeted studies have found consistent evidence of structural racism adversely affecting racially oppressed groups in hiring, educational opportunity, and access to quality healthcare in North America.

Hiring

A Canadian study found that “minority” job applicants were more than twice as likely to receive a callback from a potential employer if their resumes did not identify or emphasize their ethnicity. The efficacy of the practice termed “resume whitening,” clearly illustrates the prevalence of racial discrimination in hiring today in spite of the introduction of equal opportunity policies. The disparity between responses to unaltered resumes and the same resumes after being “whitened” “was no smaller for pro-diversity employers than employers who didn’t mention diversity at all”.

Educational Opportunities

Over 6500 faculty members from 259 American universities were emailed requests from fictional students expressing interest in a professor’s work and seeking mentorship. The emails differed only in the name of the sender. The names chosen were selected for their ability to reliably be perceived as belong to either white, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese individuals. The study found that “professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities”[1]. Within the discipline of business, 87 percent of white males received a response while only 62 percent of females and minorities combined received a response to the identical emails.

Healthcare

A Wellesley Institute study titled "First Peoples, Second Class Treatment" discusses the health disparities disproportionately affecting Canadian Indigenous peoples. Inuit peoples, to provide one numerical example, suffer from a suicide rate 11 times the national average, and among Inuit men, this jumps to 40 times the national average. Inuit peoples also have the highest rates of colorectal and lung cancer in the country and a rate of Tuberculosis 185 times the national average .The study reviews the negative consequences of Canada's Indian Act of 1876, which "cemented a restrictive state-imposed definition of Indian identity, creating significant divides between those with and without status, and serving to encourage and support assimilationist policies and to reduce the number of status Indians to whom the government would hold responsibilities to, including responsibilities with regard to health care services" .

A more focused paper by Sannie Y. Tang and Annette J. Browne examines the intersection between egalitarian principles in healthcare and the pervasive feeling among many Indigenous peoples that are "treated differently" by healthcare providers . The paper argues that "the ideological context in which wider social perceptions about Aboriginality are constructed" (perceptions of low socio-economic status, proclivity to substance abuse, and dependence on social services) "is the same context in which Aboriginal people negotiate the social world and access to health care". Healthcare encounters are as a result, often racialized, in spite of an ideological position in healthcare that purports to treat every individual equally. Tang and Browne explain that "the rhetoric of treating everyone the same" may perpetuate inequity by dismissing/masking structural inequities.This ideology of egalitarianism in healthcare is individualist, meaning it "places the responsibility for making ‘bad life choices’ on an individual "while "those historical and socio-economic processes that constrain equal access to resources and to a healthy life are relegated to the background". This has serious consequences for access to health care. Developing alcoholism, to provide one example, is problematically assumed to be a kind of genetic fault afflicting Aboriginal peoples. This presumption is one which is fueled by national discourse and campaigns that imply that alcoholism or Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder are exclusively "Aboriginal issues." "In health care contexts, these discourses become a lens through which patients’ individual circumstances are interpreted". Indigenous patients speak about being denied health care when their medical issues are dismissed as a product of alcoholism. Tang and Browne seek to emphasize "how the process of racial profiling ‘structures’ inequity including inequitable access to health care, by exerting powerful ideological effects on ‘both sides of the encounter'...including how health care providers may expect some patients to behave, and how those patients subject to profiling in society may expect to be treated and thus what decision they will make in regards to when, where, or whether to seek health care".