Development of Structural Racism

Structural Racism: Critical Review Essay
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Structural Racism: Critical Review Essay
Structural racism is a critical concept that impacts development in society. Before addressing structural racism, it is significant to identify key elements, including race, racism, and racialization. The identified elements establish the background of structural racism. The race is the division of human groups by considering different traits of people (Brown et al., 2019). The traits are majorly linked to the ancestry. However, racism is a term that defines racial diarchies and their systematic effects. Racists ascribe inherent traits to a group, thus creating a significant difference in the systems and structures. Besides, it is based on prejudice and stereotypes and constitutes a structure of feeling. Racialization is the process of producing racism and takes different angles on biological race notions. Racialization is majorly based on social conventions, privileges, and power. Therefore, with adequate knowledge of race, racism, and racialization, it is easy to understand what structural racism entails. Structural racism is the totality of ways whereby a society fosters and reinforces racial discrimination in housing systems, healthcare, education, media, earnings, and employment (Brown et al., 2019). All the stated patterns reinforce resource distribution, discriminatory values, and beliefs. Structural racism is a concept that has been heavily mentioned to shape development and practice. The paper critically reviews structural racism.
How Structural Racism Works
Structural racism emerged in the public domain in 1999 and is heavily connected to institutional racism. It can be summarized as behaviors, attitudes, and processes amounting to discrimination by unwitting racist stereotypes, thoughtlessness, ignorance, and prejudice. Structural racism is majorly associated with social and political disadvantages leading to critical problems such as poor education and high poverty rates. Subjective, individual, and personal racism relies on the social systems' structures. Besides, the structures can function without component or subject-object relations, making them difficult to detect (Schuurman, 2000). For instance, harming an individual may not necessarily be based on the structure. However, violence can be linked to different structures by promoting unequal power distribution. Therefore the distribution of the racist effects relies on a well-established structure. Structural racism works at the macro-level of different structures, globally and nationally.
Structural racism exists in different political, educational, and economic systems. It has been linked to different areas, including escalation of health problems and extreme segregation. It is enforced using different institution systems such as recruitment policies leading to the exclusion of different groups (White, 2006). Therefore, the exclusion leads to social prominence and power differences. Structural racism is critical and has led to underrepresentation in different fields with evident factors such as increased pay gap and education inequalities. Structural racism is mainly alig...