Institutional and Systemic Racism - The Racial State Week 8
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Racism is perpetuated in institutions. Often it is difficult to discern racism because it is not overt, and may not be immediately obvious in individual behaviour. Nevertheless, outcomes for school students, patients, employees and those who have dealing with the police and the judiciary are often affected by cultures of racism within institutions. ‘Racial neoliberalism’ establishes standards according to which racialised people are judged against white middle class people who have not experienced the same challenges. Efforts to oppose institutional racism have often focused on ‘equity and diversity’ measures but have not tackles the underlying systemic racism that may determine outcomes. This week sets up the framework for the discussion of specific systems in the following weeks.
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Institutional and Systemic Racism - The Racial State Week 8
- 1. Institutional & Systemic Racism The Racial State Week 8 A/Prof Alana Lentin
- 2. Overview • Creating a culture of racism • Defining institutional and systemic racism • Black Power: Origins of the term • Ruling on institutional racism: the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry • Australian institutional racism: Theft of children and NT Intervention • Case studies: Health, Housing, Education
- 3. Creating a culture of racism
- 4. Definitions Systemic racism is a ‘material, social and ideological reality that is well embedded in major US institutions.’ Feagin (2006: 2)
- 5. –Sara Ahmed (2012) On Being Included. p. 44. ‘Eliminating the racist individual would preserve the racism of the institution in part by creating an illusion that we are eliminating racism. Institutions can “keep their racism” by eliminating those they identify as racists.’
- 6. –Ture and Hamilton (1976), Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America “Racism is both overt and covert… [Institutional racism] is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts… [it] originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus received far less public condemnation.”
- 7. Racism is: ‘the predication of decisions and policies on considerations of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group and maintaining control over that group.” –Ture and Hamilton (1976), Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America
- 9. Ruling on Institutional Racism The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry
- 11. –Sir William Macpherson, Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry, 1999 ‘The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."
- 12. Ambalavaner Sivanandan ‘Don’t Break My Legs’ (1982)
- 13. Institutional racism in Australia The Stolen Generations The Northern Territory Intervention
- 15. –The ‘Bringing Them Home Report’, 1997 ‘When a child was forcibly removed that child’s entire community lost, often permanently, its chance to perpetuate itself in that child. The Inquiry has concluded that this was a primary objective of forcible removals and is the reason they amount to genocide.’ ‘I didn’t know any Aboriginal people at all – none at all. I was placed in a white family and I was just – I was white. I never knew, I never accepted myself to being a black person until – I don’t know – I don’t know if you ever really do accept yourself as being ... How can you be proud of being Aboriginal after all the humiliation and the anger and the hatred you have? It’s unbelievable how much you can hold inside.’
- 16. The Apology ‘There is a deeply seated impulse in Australian society to separate problems of Aboriginal life and death in the present from the European attitudes to Aboriginal life and death in the past.’ Tony Barta (2008: 209)
- 17. 10 times more likely to be in care than their non-Indigenous peers. Although they rep Larissa Behrendt
- 19. The Northern Territory Emergency Response
- 21. Suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act
- 22. 'It has not changed behaviour but has had negative effects of disrespect and disempowerment’ Former Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs (2017)
- 23. Land Land: ‘The government is using child sexual abuse as the Trojan horse to resume total control of our land.’ Pat Turner
- 24. Case Studies Health, Education, Housing
- 25. Medical experimentation ‘The Tuskegee Study’ (1932-74)
- 26. Racialised medicine Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention (2011)
- 28. Housing Discrimination Rae Dufty-Jones & Dallas Rogers (2015) Housing in 21st- Century Australia: People, Practices and Policies.
- 29. Schools The Australian National University 2017 Speak Out Against Racism survey.
- 30. Higher Education
- 31. Summary • Systemic racism is embedded in societal instituons starting with the state • Institutional racism counters the ‘bad apples’ thesis - racism is not only individual • Institutional racism has been defined as ‘unwitting’ but it goes beyond ‘unconscious bias’ • Racism is institutionalised in Australia across a wide range of cases - FACS, housing, health and education.
Editor's Notes
- This year two documentary films were made about the issues surrounding the case of former star NFL player player, Aboriginal man Adam Goodes. Goodes ended his career in 2015 after sustaining booing from fans for the last three years of his career. The booing was ramped up after Goodes heard a thirteen year old girl calling him an ape and had words with her. This was followed by Collingwood coach Eddie McGuire likening Goodes to King Kong on radio. Many sports commentators felt Goodes’ had reacted unfairly to the young girl’s slur although he himself commented that she was not to blame, but a victim of her education and upbringing. Both the widespread nature of the racism experienced by Adam Goodes and the public’s opposition to his public pride in being Aboriginal, and the denial that what he experienced was racism are crucial to understand the dynamics of racism today. The predominant view of racism, as we discussed in Week 1, is that it is the ignorant behaviour of individuals. However, what the Adam Goodes case shows is that the culture of bullying that led to Adam Goodes being booed is made possible by a system of racism in Australia that does not begin with one sportsperson, but with the colonisation of Australia, which required Aboriginal people to be seen as less human, and their culture negated. But this does not remain at the level of personal attitudes; rather the inferior status of Aboriginal people, and later of other racialised minorities, is written into the institutions of everyday life - both in law and in convention. Aboriginal people today are still seen as inferior and treated unequally because of the Australian state’s history of legislating for them in ways that directly harm them, even if this is under the guise of being ‘for their own good’. The dominant bias of the media against Adam Goodes during the period from 2013-2015 was due to the fact that the media reflects the dominant class in Australia rather than being really representative of multicultural society. So, to understand racism we need to understand the way in which it becomes enshrined in law, policy and convention and how this in turn has an impact on how ordinary people understand what racism is. For example, the commonly expressed view that Aboriginal people are ‘work shy’ and rely too heavily on welfare, is possible because the conditions established historically by a state that placed Aboriginal people under the state’s ‘protection’, having destroyed their connections to land, and the forms of work that they had been traditionally engaged in.
- Systemic racism: Joe Feagin: writes about US case, but very similar issues in Australia which, like the US, is a settler colonial state. Racial oppression is deeply ingrained in US history and can be found in group relations, institutions, organisations and power structures. Racial oppression entails grouping people according to hierarchy and giving those lower down the pecking order less access to power and resources. Systemic racism produces institutions that reproduce this hierarchy, e.g. creating socio-economic disparity between groups. So, for example, the argument that immigrants take jobs away from citizens (underpinned White Australia Act) is based on a racialised idea of the labour market, whereby only whites are deserving of good, well-paid jobs. Institutional racism: Sara Ahmed: ‘All forms of power, inequality and domination are systemic rather than individual’ and so is racism. The argument for institutional racism tries to counter the ‘bad apple thesis’ - i.e. that a few bad apples ‘spoil’ an institution. A focus on systemic/institutionalised racism shows that the ‘bad apples’ are produced by the society and the institution, not the other way round.
- When we only focus on the racism of individuals we fail to ask how did they become racist. Because we leave the focus off institutions, we allow racism to be reproduced. As Sara Ahmed puts it, just getting rid of individual racists within institutors does nothing to solve racism: ‘eliminating the racist individual would preserve the racism of the institution in part by creating an illusion that we are eliminating racism. Institutions can “keep their racism” by eliminating those they identify as racists’ According to the late A. Sivanandan, institutionalised racism is best described as state racism, as it emanates from the state and its institutions.
- The term institutional racism originated with Kwame True and Stokely Carmichael, activists in the Black Panther movement in the US, in their book Black Power.
- Ture and Hamilton defined racism as a system of deliberate policies and decisions with the aim of keeping particular racialised groups down. They were particularly focused on the situation faced by Black people in the US many of whom are descendants of enslaved people.
- Kwame Ture, who changed his name from Stokely Carmichael based his theory on his own experience as the son of Trinidadian migrants in New York. In this clip he interviews his mother about her experiences of poor housing and economic hardship as a Black migrant to the US.
- Stephen Lawrence was an 18 year old Black teen from London who was murdered by five white men in 1993. In 1999 an inquiry into the handling of the murder investigation by the Metropolitan Police force was handed down by Lord Macpherson. It was known as the Macpherson inquiry and it found that the Met Police had been institutionally racist. [show video for background]
- Two of the five men accused of murdering Stephen Lawrence were finally convicted in 2012. However, as this photo from the Daily Mail newspaper shows, there was widespread knowledge that the five were guilty. The evidence was overwhelming and the police has actively covered up the fact. Facts were also revealed in the 2000s that the police had been involved in drugs deals carried out by the father of one of the accused. Therefore, it was important that the Macpherson inquiry report found that it was not a ‘fe bad apples’ that were responsible for the bungled inquiry, but that an entire culture within the Met Police made it possible for the investigation to be thwarted from the outset.
- However, if we look at Macpherson’s definition of institutional racism, we notice that, despite ruling that there was institutional racism at play, institutional racism is not defined as systemic and wilful, but as the result of ‘unwitting, ignorant or thoughtless’ behaviour. Macpherson also does not deal with the history of race as a mechanism of power underpinning the British state - a major colonial power to which millions of formerly colonised British subjects migrated and were subject to appalling racism as second class citizens. Furthermore, according to Jenny Bourne (2001), the report’s focus on unwitting prejudice has made it difficult for public bodies, local authorities or voluntary sector groups to have ‘a fundamental rethinking of how racism came to be embedded in their organisations, they have, at best, reduced the concept to mean indirect or unintentional discrimination.’ This has not led to any lasting change according to Bourne. Too much emphasis then has been placed on ‘unconscious bias’ and not enough on how racism is reproduced through institutions despite attempts to rectify the situation since the Macpherson ruling.
- The further problem is that the only solution to institutional racism proposed by Macpherson was to increase the diversity of the police force by hiring more ethnic minority officers and to train the policy to be more culturally sensitive and aware of racism. However, these two approaches have one been criticised by antiracism campaigners. With regards to diversifying the police force, critics have asked how would it be possible for an institutionally racist body to be transformed merely by including non-white people within it. how can it be good for individual Black and minority ethnic people to have to work within an institutionally racist organisation. With regards racism awareness and culturally sensitivity training, critics such as A. Sivanandan have asked how shaming individuals about their racism does anything to get rid of a culture of racism. [watch video]
- According to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, The Stolen Generations are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who, when they were children, were taken away from their families and communities as the result of past government policies. Children were removed by governments, churches and welfare bodies to be brought up in institutions, fostered out or adopted by white families. The removal of Aboriginal children took place from the early days of British colonisation in Australia. As we saw in Week 6 when we discussed the policy of ‘protection’ towards Aboriginal people, taking Aboriginal children away from their families was see as for their own good. The so-called ‘Aborigines Protection Board’ was created as a result of the Aborigines Protection Act that was passed by British Parliament in 1886. Among the Board’s functions was ‘the care, custody and education of Aboriginal children’. The stolen generations refers to a period up until 1970.
- The Bringing Them Home Report was completed in 1997 following a two-year Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. This report included 54 recommendations. According to the Healing Foundation, two decades after the publishing of the report, the majority of the Bringing Them Home recommendations have not yet been implemented. For many Stolen Generations members, this has created additional trauma and distress.
- In 2007, Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister delivered an apology to the stolen generations in the parliament. Sara Ahmed argues that the Apology, rather than actually redressing past injustices in order to never repeat them, is more for White Australians than it is for Aboriginal people. She says: ‘when apology covers over shame in order to reach pride, shame can eclipse the very histories whose recognition might transform the social fabric of shame in Australian society.’ And Tony Barta argues that white Australians want to skip over the uncomfortable parts of their history and to smooth things over.
- Despite the Apology and the institution of a National Sorry day, children are being removed from their families at unprecedented rates today, much higher even than during the ‘stolen generations’. According to Grandmothers Against Removals, a campaigning group against the separation of Aboriginal kids from their families, ‘Aboriginal children are placed in out-of-home care at a rate ten times that of non-Aboriginal children, with a placement rate of 52.5 children for every 1000 compared to 5.5 for every 1000. Tonight, there will be more than 14,000 Aboriginal children sleeping away from their families.’ According to Prof Larissa Behrendt: ‘more Indigenous children are being removed today than at any other time in Australian history – they are 10 times more likely to be in care than their non-Indigenous peers. Although they represent only 5.5 per cent of their age population, they make up 35 per cent of children in out-of-home care. As one of the founders of GMAR Hazel Collins says, often when Family and Community Services remove a child from their family, it is for ‘unspecified reasons’. FACS speaks about ‘significant concerns’ but does not outline what they are. When her grandson was removed because of her daughter’s drug addiction, she applied to care for him but she was refused and deemed “unsuitable” with no explanation.
- The practice of child removal is based on a Eurocentric view of the nuclear family that refuses to accept the role played by the extended family. In her film, After the Apology Professor Larissa Behrendt documents the current theft of children and the movement against it.
- The Northern territory emergency response, other wise known as the NT Intervention is another key moment in institutional racism in Australia. The background: In 1997, a report, Little Children Are Sacred, was commissioned by the Howard government. Its remit was to look into allegations of child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory. The report found that Aboriginal communities were blighted by child sex abuse, pornography, and underage exposure to sex and prostitution. Alcohol was a big factor in fuelling this behaviour. The government responded with a 7-point programme which included, Restrictions on welfare so parents spend their money on food and other necessities and not alcohol. Family welfare payments would be linked to children's school attendance. A six month ban on the sale of alcohol in most of the concerned Indigenous communities. A ban on the sale and possession of hardcore pornography, which was seen as “rife in Aboriginal communities”. Medical checks for sexual abuse for Indigenous children younger than 16. A permit system restricting non-Aboriginal access to Indigenous land would be scrapped. Howard said made the permit system made it easier for abuse to go undiscovered. Proposing legislation to enable the government to acquire five year leases for over 64 Indigenous communities in return for compensation. Extra police provided by the federal and state governments will investigate sexual abuse in the communities.
- This Video shows first meeting between Intervention enforcers and local people in the NT.
- During the NT Intervention, the Racial Discrimination Act had to be suspended for those in the NT affected because it would have conflicted with what the government wanted to achieve. A report by the Australian Human Rights Commission found that this was discriminatory. The report argued, ‘By suspending (excluding) the operation of Part II of the RDA, the members of the communities affected by the NTER legislation were effectively denied the protections afforded by the RDA to every other citizen to challenge legislation that they consider to be in breach of the RDA .’
- Critiques: The authors of the Little Children Are Sacred report argues that the policies put in place under the NTER differed widely from the 97 recommendations they put forward. In particular, the ‘intervention’ did not take into account that non-Aboriginal men were also involved in abusing Aboriginal children. This was not an exclusive problem with Aboriginal people. $1 billion dollars was put into the intervention, but there has been no conviction for child sex abuse. The focus was on welfare and alcohol, as if concentrating on these two aspects would make children safer while sexual abuse has deeper seated reasons (e.g. history of past trauma, etc.). The Catholic Church is rife with child sex abuse but no one blames alcoholic priests! A La Trobe University report claimed that the Maningrida Child Safety Service whose remit was to get children safely home at night which was cited in the Little Children Are Sacred report as an example of good practice did not receive any funding from the Intervention. Compounding stereotypes: O’Dowd: The NT intervention once again makes Aboriginal people in to a ‘special case’ who need special measures (e.g. as under the stolen generations. protection, etc.). The stereotype is of a classically deviant population, unable to help itself or govern itself, child-like - requiring state management of their daily affairs. They are naturalised as inherently prone to criminal behaviour. This has the effect of turning a blind eye to abuse in non-Indigenous communities and to create fear and loathing for Aboriginal men as sexual predators. The use of the basics card (originally food vouchers that could only be spent in certain shops) is dehumanising - it denies people autonomy and marks them out as deviant - everyone can observe them shopping with food vouchers and associates the with criminal acts. Stronger futures Despite criticisms the last Labor government passed the Stronger Futures legislation (2011) to continue the NT intervention for another 10 years. The legislation deepens and strengthens the original NTER, for example a person can be jailed for six months for possessing one can of beer. Although the Racial Discrimination Act was reinstated in 2010, the Australian Human Rights commission said that the legislation still violates aspects of the Act. Aboriginal communities insist that they were not consulted about Stonger Futures. For eg. as half a welfare payments are quarantined via the Centrelink basics card children are not receiving proper nutrition due to the price of food in the NT. Community groups have asked for subsidised food instead of the basics card, but this was ignored. In August 2017: Former human rights commissioner Gillian Triggs has declared the Northern Territory intervention a failure at a forum marking 10 years since the Howard government plan was implemented. 'It has not changed behaviour but has had negative effects of disrespect and disempowerment,' Ms Triggs said of the intervention. 'Domestic violence has significantly increased. 'No other country has the level of Indigenous incarceration that Australia has.' She criticised the new Centrelink Basics card which limits what users can purchase, saying it's a violation of international law.
- Part of the intervention was to allow the government to hold leases to Aboriginal land. Arrente elder Pat Turner says that the “government is using child sexual abuse as the Trojan horse to resume total control of our land.” Aboriginal communities were often forced to sign leases of 99 years which effectively meant relinquishing ownership of their native lands. This has had a flow on effect on Aboriginal struggles for land rights. In late August 2019, The Queensland government has extinguished native title over 1,385 hectares of Wangan and Jagalingou country for the proposed Adani coalmine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin - without any public announcement of the decision. As W&J Council leader Adrian Burragubba said, “We have been made trespassers on our own country,” Burragubba said. “Our ceremonial grounds, in place for a time of mourning for our lands as Adani begins its destructive processes, are now controlled by billionaire miner Adani.’
- Historically, Black and Indigenous people were historically experimented on by medical professionals. One of the most famous examples is The “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” a secret experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the progression of the deadly venereal disease among Black men. The experiment ran from 1932-1974. The men believed that they were receiving treatment but in fact the scientists studied the progression fo the illness and allowed countless men to die.
- But even in more routine situations race is used by medicine to treat people differently. As sociologist Dorothy Roberts shows in relation to ‘race based medicine’, medical scientists use generalisations based on race to treat people. This is profitable for the pharmaceuticals industry that creates different drugs fro different groups in the population based on spurious assumptions that different racialised people suffer from disease differently. There is a direct conduit between these idea and government policies to surveil and punish racialised communities because they are considered a drain on resources. This can be seen in relation to increased rates of certain diseases such as diabetes among Aboriginal people where, rather than treat the underlying causes - history of intergenerational trauma, underemployment and poor access to affordable healthy food - the government punishes individuals for ‘poor life choices’.
- Racialised people routinely receive less quality of care in the medical system. One of the reasons is that assumptions about how non-white people feel pain is structured into the medical profession. A 2012 study by Sophie Trawalter, Kelly M. Hoffman, and Adam Waytz in the US found that white people assume that black people feel less pain and feel more empathy with a white person if seeing that person in pain. But black people, too, displayed less empathy towards other blacks. The study concluded that in general, people feel more empathy towards those considered more privileged. In other words, we have internalised the idea that more privileged people (whites in this instance) deserve our attention and concern. The ‘racial empathy gap’ between whites and blacks is said to stem from the belief that all black people have the same experiences. So, in terms of pain, black people are believed to experience less pain because they have been through more hardships. One repercussion of this is that black people in the US are routinely given less pain medication, and even less anaesthesia, than whites even when they need it.
- The WSU Challenging Racism project found that Aboriginal people and people from a non-English speaking background in particular face discrimination when trying to buy or rent a house in Australia. 18% of Aboriginal people sometimes, often or very often face discrimination when trying to rent or buy. Muslim people face the highest rate of discrimination at 20% Dufty-Jones and Rogers’ research found that assumptions about Aboriginal people’s capacity to pay for housing based on racialised assumptions about them as financially irresponsible played a big role in discrimination.
- In a recent study carried out by ANU researcher, Naomi Priest, one in five African students has been threatened by another student and almost half of East Asian students have been called names, according to a survey of 4600 state school pupils across Victoria and NSW. The study also found that religious intolerance was rife, with one in four students surveyed reporting they'd been bullied because of their faith. While only 2.35 per cent of the students surveyed said they were Muslim, more than half of them said they'd been bullied for their faith. Teachers can also be racist, the students told researchers: one in 10 said their teachers was racist towards them and nearly half said they had seen teachers racially discriminating against other students. When students experience racism in schools and teachers and principals do not tackle it, this cannot be disregarded as isolated incidents. Rather, institutional racism can be said to be at play because little is being done to change the culture in Australian schools. Beyond tackling racist bullying, questions such as to what extent non-Anglo pupils’ cultures and knowledges are being adequately represented and taught in schools are important to ask. It is because the Anglo experience is dominant in society as a whole and that this is reflected in both the curriculum and governance pf schools that, arguably, racist practices are allowed to persist. Recalling, A. Sivanandan, then, it is not sufficient to create awareness about racism; it is necessary to root it out and make it punishable.
- In her new book, Navigating Institutional Racism in British Universities, Katy Sian shows that the reason why Black and minority ethnic academic find it so hard to progress through the ranks of British universities is because of racism which is manifested itself through “hidden white networks” that excluded them from various opportunities. According to Winston Morgan in the Times Higher Education magazine, there are 8,300 professors of science, engineering and technology (SET) in the UK, and only 35 are black. Katy Sian found that academics felt unsupported and “blocked” in their careers. Some cited heads of departments who actively discouraged them from applying for promotions. There was a strong sense that they had to “overachieve” in comparison to their white counterparts just to be considered for promotion. In order to promote a culture of inclusiveness for students, it is important that staff at academic institutions reflect the multicultural reality of the student body. Academics cultural, religious or ethnic background will often also affect what and how they teach and how responsive they are to a wide range of students’ needs. While many universities are proud of their diverse make-up and use it as a marketing ploy - WSU being a prime example of this - there are serious questions to be asked about the progressive nature of an institution of its staff remain overwhelmingly white. However, diversifying the academic faculty is not enough as this puts too much of a burden on individual radicalised staff to tackle racism. As we saw in the case of the Macpherson report on institutional racism in the London police force, employing more people from different backgrounds will not end institutional racism in itself. Today it has become fashionable for universities to talk about decolonising or indigenising the curriculum, particularly in the US and Canada,. However, critics such as First Nations scholar, Eve Tuck, who works in Toronto, has argued that to decolonise effectively means giving back materially not just making symbolic changes. So, for first nations people this means giving back land. As many academic institutions are built in land that is stolen from Aboriginal people and other universities such as the University of Chicago in the US gained much of its wealth through involvement in slavery, addressing institutional racism must start at the top.