Structural Racism and Its Contribution to Racial Inequality (Social Sciences Essay)

Charlotte Liu
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Essay 1
Structural Racism and Its Contribution to Racial Inequality
Introduction
Racism is not evident in the static or singular form. As politically and historically determined domination structures, it marginalizes, excludes, and certain inferior groups based on intended cultural, physical, and symbolic differences. It operates as a bigger racialization structure where ethnic or racial collectivities get constituted and provided status, meaning, and value in a certain order of a race. Modern societies, especially in America, are dominated by racial thinking; this represents racial states and formations where categorization and ideas of race are primary in their regulation and organization.
Although an invocation of ethnicity or race is not a racist manifestation, although it does reflect on racial thinking, such invocations are essential in providing a way through which racial inequalities are enshrined and enacted. Racism is present not only where race is invoked but also where race reproduces systems of domination based on essentialist racial categories. Racism is an ideology that links physical differences to social and cultural differences, thus allowing societies to be grounded in a scale of hierarchy allowing subordination of the inferior. The essay will therefore look address the following aspects understanding the concept of structural racism in American and how it leads to racial inequality and how institutional racism contributes to racial disparities in America. Further, the essays will seek to establish how interpersonal racism contributes racial inequality in America.
Since the colonial period in America, private and public institutions have continued to reinforce one another, maintaining the race's hierarchies that allowed the white in America across every generation to consolidate more and earn more than the non-whites and maintain dominance in the political sector. This structural racism has played a significant role in shaping, for instance, the distribution of determinants of social health and the health profile of America, including increased health inequality in America.
Discriminatory incarceration, for instance, is an excellent reference to structural racism in America. The United States justice system includes court systems, correctional agencies, police departments, probation departments, and sentencing boards that have established practices and policies. However, the policies criminalize people of color through, for example, stop and frisk in places like Chicago and incarcerate black women, children, and men disproportionately. With such discriminatory alignment, the blacks or the non-white remain disadvantaged in economic progress leading to racial inequality in the country (Bailey 1460).
Residential segregation also reflects upon the reinforcement of institutional and structural racism, where most Americans have continued to live in neighborhoods that are racialized and segregated economically by the system. The high concentration of dilapidated housing in the various neighborhoods where blacks live includes a substandard social environment, toxins and pollutants, and the limited chance of quality education and healthcare. These adverse effe...