8.2.3: Systemic Racism

Systemic and structural racism cause disparities in access to goods, services, and opportunities using laws, policies, practices, or attitudes. Systemic racism is often hidden, and practices or social values are accepted as the norm without questioning whether racism had any influence on their creation. Below are two examples of how systemic and structural racism continue to impact racially minoritized communities and cause health inequities.

Systemic racism has influenced neighborhoods through redlining: a practice of segregating Black Americans into urban neighborhoods and denying them residential loans. Black neighborhoods were considered financial “risks” by banks and lenders. Newly-built housing tracts often came with contracts requiring that anyone who purchased one of the new houses could not sell it later on to folks from other races or ethnicities - thus keeping suburban communities segregated. Even when the Fair Housing Act of 1968 opened up FHA loans for Black Americans legally, the practice of discrimination continued on within financial institutions. At the same time, home prices continued to increase in the suburbs, which continued to keep loans out of reach for many (Rose, 2023). A majority of those communities that were redlined almost a century ago are still low income, minoritized neighborhoods. Since home ownership is one of the primary mechanisms of building wealth for the middle class, this had a generational effect on racial wealth disparities (Reich, 2019).

Structural racism also influences access to education and economic advancement via funding for public schools. Public schools are funded primarily by state taxes and local property taxes, with much smaller portions from federal funds or community fundraising. This means that if home values are lower in a particular neighborhood, their school district gets less money compared to a school district with higher home values. In those states that have approved them, voucher programs also redirect tax dollars from public schools into private, charter schools - cutting into public school budgets even further. Schools in lower income neighborhoods tend to have more trouble attracting and maintaining teachers, and they may spend more of their limited resources on safety measures and behavioral interventions rather than enhancing learning programs (Reich, 2023). In school, young Black men are more likely to receive harsher punishments, and schools are more likely to call the police when disciplining them - thus increasing the risk of incarceration and eroding trust (P. A. Braveman et al., 2022). In these ways and many others, both current and historic policies continue to create structures and systems that provide fewer opportunities for wealth and impact long-term health outcomes in racially minoritized neighborhoods.