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Examples Of Institutional Racism

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"Look, mommy, a baby maid," a young four year old states as they see another child; the other little girl is Latina. This is an example of the racism against people of color that is institutionalized and taught in today’s society. Reverse racism, a term commonly referred to more often as the act of a minority being racist towards a white person, is not real because of institutional racism, white privilege, and the misunderstanding of the celebration of non-white culture as racism.
Institutional racism ultimately consists of racism instituted by an organization backed by the government into society. Dating back to the eighteenth century, racism has been present through not only slavery but also in the medical field, including wrongful testing …show more content…

Author of the magazine article “Understanding Unconscious Bias and Unintentional Racism,” Jean Moule elaborates on this issue; “An example is Steele and Aaronson’s (1995) work on stereotype threat, in which the performance of African American students in a testing situation was cut in half by asking them to identify their race at the start of the test” (Moule 1). Performance levels significantly dropped as children were faced with the reality that their level of intelligence would be based on their race. When presented a question that judges one due to the color of their skin, one becomes unmotivated and realizes that a system made to educate is, perhaps unintentionally, being racist. White children have not dealt with problems such as these, being deemed superior in the education system since the segregation of whites and blacks began. The presence of a racial bias is …show more content…

Provided for people of color, affirmative action ensures the security of a black individual to have the same opportunities as their white counterparts. Although the mass genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans cannot be corrected, affirmative action was made to partially “make up” for these wrongdoings. White people claim this to be discrimination but it is a necessary policy that helps people of color in their daily lives. The absence of affirmative action would lead a greater divide in the power and representation between whites and black in

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