If you see a dead fish in a lake, you inspect the fish.  If you see five dead fish in a lake, you inspect the water.  If you see five dead fish in each of the five lakes within five square miles, you inspect the groundwater.

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All systems in America are producing inequitable outcomes based on race.  This includes life span, health, quality of schools, school discipline, foster care, bank loan rejections, home appraisals, the wealth gap, the judicial system, etc.  While sharp disparities alone don’t inform us of the specific cause, they indicate with near certainty that some form of structural racism is at work.

 

When we see racial disparities, the root cause could be some combination of inferior culture practices, inferior genetics, personal racism expressed by others, or structural racism.  For example, black Americans have a shorter average life span than white Americans.  Perhaps black people have defective genetics, poor eating habits, or higher levels of stress due to their experience of personal racism. Or maybe structural racism creates inequities that impact the health of black Americans in a variety of ways.  For example, even if we suspect that poor eating habits are a major cause, that doesn’t mean the root cause is an inferior culture.  We must search out the causes of the disparity in eating habits.  If residents of black communities don’t have the same access to fruits and vegetables as residents of white communities, this situation would classify as structural racism, regardless of whether the lack of access was intentional.  Even this simple example highlights the reality that structures are complex, and their influence on disparities not always obvious.

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Some believe that structural racism has been eradicated.  Therefore racial inequities require repairing a broken black American culture.  For example, many point to absentee black fathers as a major contributing factor to a wide variety of negative outcomes.  Have absentee fathers consistently been an important feature of black family culture in the US since Emancipation?  They have not.  For example, black marriage rates mirrored white marriage rates during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  So we must ask what caused the change in black family structure since that time if we hope to correctly understand the problem.  If structural changes in US culture since then have reduced available jobs, changed welfare laws to favor fatherless homes, changed federal and state laws to increase incarceration rates among minorities, or even encouraged white flight to the suburbs, then categorically, structural racism is causally involved.

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Why is this important?  It is important because efforts to undo cultural changes that are caused by structural racism will have limited impact unless the structural aspects themselves are also addressed.  But more important than that.  If we believe that black America is experiencing life differently than white America because they are an inferior culture and/or race, we may subconsciously develop an attitude of blaming the victim and become indifferent to the real and persistent structural racism that contributes to the disparate outcomes we see in America

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In this video, Phil Vischer explains the primary causes of the racial wealth gap, detailing the relevant impact of structural racism.

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Understanding Structural Racism – The Monopoly Game Analogy

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Let’s say we gather 1,000 students in a convention hall and break them into 250 groups of 2 white and 2 black students.  We have each group play Monopoly, but we don’t allow the black students to move their pieces until every white student has gone around the board 2 times.  In the first two times around the board the white students will build advantage over the black students.  But that doesn’t mean that it will be impossible for a black student to win.  If we find that 1 of the 250 Monopoly games is won by a black student, and we make him a poster hero of success, that doesn’t disprove that the first two times around the board weren’t effective in building up advantage for the white students.

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It is easy for people who are affluent to dismiss the impact of structural racism and assume that anyone can overcome any barriers, including structural racism, if they simply put their mind to it.  But the fact that all systems across America are producing inequitable results, based on race, suggests that structural racism is real and persistent.  We all have faced and continue to face challenges in life.  But as Christians, what is the Biblical response to knowing that some Americans face additional challenges merely because of the color of their skin?  We will delve into that question in Module 4.