Understanding Systemic Racialization
Focus on Systemic Racialization
While much public discourse has focused on the most outrageous examples of individual racist actions, it’s equally important to understand the far more insidious ways racism is hiding in plain sight within our institutions and processes—and how they continue to perpetrate and magnify its devastating effects. According to The Annie E. Casey Foundation, Systemic Racialization is “the well-institutionalized pattern of discrimination that cuts across major political, economic and social organizations in a society.” The status quo simply cannot stand here, so we’ve gathered a multimedia list of resources that have helped us to expand our understanding—and carefully consider our actions.
Explained: The Racial Wealth Gap
From the beginning, we have marveled at Vox’s ability to morph meaty topics into concise, twenty-ish minute episodes—without losing the substance. This episode on the racial wealth gap is by no means exhaustive, but you will walk away with an understanding of how decades old decisions are still widening this gap today.
All In: The Fight for Democracy
It’s safe to say that many of us feel that we have learned all there is to learn about the intricacies of voting in the last year, but this documentary helps us pan out and better understand the multi-year, multi-state and multi-pronged effort to suppress votes—especially those of Black Americans and other marginalized communities. The takeaway? What you might have understood as a local or episodic issue is in actuality a system-wide effort, in every sense.
A Colony in a Nation
TV commentator Chris Hayes turns his intellect and writing skills to this examination of the American criminal justice system. The premise: Our country has fractured into a colony and a nation. In the nation, the law is revered. In the colony, the law is applied by fear, a love of order and a disregard for civil rights. Hayes opens the book in Ferguson, Missouri and the police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, and uses the story to illuminate so many failings in our policing and legal priorities. A citizen’s must-read.
Reply All: The Test Kitchen
Though we are just two chapters into this special series in the Reply All podcast, we were riveted by the story of Bon Appetit’s implosion as the US began a racial reckoning in 2020. What’s important is not that Bon Appetit is not a particularly extreme example of a racist workplace (a fact that host Sruthi Pinnamaneni points out). It helps to see simply and clearly how disparate decisions, some big and some small, created a place that lacked diversity, inclusion—and ultimately led to the downfall of a star editor.
UPDATE: In the "we can not make this sh*t up" category, as we signed on to the third episode of this podcast, we were greeted with a statement by the head of Gimlet Media letting listeners know that both the host and another executive had left the company post their own toxic work culture reckoning. You can read more here. We still recommend the first two episodes, but are disappointed for the many Bon Appetit staffers that shared their stories.
Unnatural Causes
As COVID has made all too clear, socio-economic and racial inequities in our health care systems are all too real—with real consequences for actual people. We applaud efforts such as The COVID Racial Data Tracker for illuminating the uneven impact of the pandemic on Black, Indigenous, Latinx and other people of color. But the issue is far more widespread than our current crisis, and this PBS series attempts to shed some light on the root causes of these inequities.
