What is Institutional Racism? When a practice or policy results in discrimination against specific racial groups, it is called institutional racism. Discrimination refers to unequal or unfair treatment. It is conscious discrimination when biased individuals create policies and practices intended to achieve racist outcomes. It can also be independent of whether or not the person administering the practice or policy has any racial bias. An individual can be relatively free of bias, have no intent to harm, and even be supportive of the access and success of everyone while taking racially biased action directed by the institution. Institutional racism can also be the byproduct of policies and practices with other intentions or nonracist purposes.
Institutional Racism & Criminal Justice
Although the same laws apply theoretically to everyone, how they are applied results in differential incarceration rates across racial groups. Many judicial processes exude institutional racism against people of color. One explicit example is that Whites are far less likely to be convicted of crimes against people of color than the opposite. Recent statistics show higher frequencies of traffic stops, on-the-street stopping and frisking, prosecution for nonviolent crimes, incarceration, and longer sentences. Even when the statistics are adjusted for education and income, disparate treatment is evident. While less than one third of the American population is made up of African Americans and Latinos, more than two thirds of the prison population is composed of those two groups. The differences above are too large to be accounted for by inherent criminality.
Preferred Citation: Hayles, R. (2015). Institutional Racism. In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence. SAGE Publications, Inc. Thousand Oaks. pp. 716-720.
