I too finished @MehrsaBaradaran 's The Color of Money recently. (Also: first heard her on @jeremyscahill' s Intercepted). Extremely good book. Highly recommend. 4 me especially good for understanding institutional racism.
institutional racism seems to be a term that a lot of people say but it's taken me few books worth of reading to start to appreciate the real idea. I talk to people who have vague impression that "X is institutionally racist" means "collection of people who work in X are racist"
where X is police force or the judicial system or banking
but one of the big realizations to have is that this needn't be the case, i.e. in order for an institution to uphold and propagate racism, it needn't be the case that the individuals who run the institution or work in the business are themselves explicitly racist in any way
the mechanisms by which the racism is being effected can be actually woven into the policies, procedures and norms in such a way that it no longer requires n*-hating lynchers to actually keep up the racism.
because the history of racism against blacks is so raw and so recent in the US, you can often clearly trace the current institutional racism back to explicit, overt racism.
But when I say "you can often...", the point I really mean is more like "some academics have been able to..." i.e.. the point I'm making is the average person doesn't really have the tools to do this, but if you wan to understand it well it's not so hard to find the right books.
and when you see it explained well, it is really clear. Often it did not need to be hidden at the time, people were just like "how can we continue to discriminate against blacks (which we all agree needs to happen) but do it legally?"
They take fruits of last year's racism (eg blacks live in the ghetto...these zip codes are the black zip codes) and use them to sow the seeds of the next generation of institutional racism (ie there's nothing 'racist' about using zip code to evaluate your mortgage application).
or let's require a literacy test for voting... OK fine..... let's at least agree that there is an admin fee of $100 to get your ID card ...OK fine... but you can only apply at certain special offices which happen to be located where do you think?
There are myriad ways in which these things work . White racists have been clever about it, of course they have... the reigns of the most powerful country depend partly on the efficacy of this system.
I also recommend Michelle Alexander's (now quite famous book) The New Jim Crow.
Also recommend The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin which is just *wow*.
Also recommend The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin which is just *wow*.
