Sure you could. “Institutional” or “systemic” discrimination, oppression, etc., doesn’t always mean a rigid system of official double standards as per Jim Crow laws. It can also be present in systems that are nominally egalitarian but in practice allow a lot of latitude for old biases to keep operating. Just because you as an individual black man haven’t personally had problems with institutional racism doesn’t mean that institutional racism doesn’t exist.
Ok I read your post again and I see you are saying institutional racism is the default so this must have been that. This is where I disagree, in this case. It was clearly personal and a police corruption issue. Really I find it hard to find any of these cases to be the result of institutional racism and more of police overreach.
And that was in response to El_Kabong describing institutional racism in a railroad he worked for in the 1970s. When you have a workplace culture that is resistant to racial integration and deliberately unwelcome to minority employees, not to mention gleeful about a crypto-white-nationalist executive further disadvantaging black people, that’s systemic or institutional racism in action.
Just because there aren’t actual laws in place anymore literally saying that the railroads can’t employ black people, or tax policy needs to disfavor black taxpayers more than white ones, doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a systemic or institutional culture of racism affecting us.
Wait, what? No, I’m definitely not declaring that every abuse of power is necessarily based in racism. I’m just saying that racism doesn’t have to be officially codified in law in order to be very persistently influential in society. As your own workplace experience seems to indicate.
I don’t trust in God. Yet my money, printed and coined on my behalf by my government using my tax dollars, says “In God We Trust”.
I think Confederate military officers were all traitors by definition, and just about all of them were racists to boot. Yet there are public statues and monuments glorifying them all over where I live, and laws forbidding localities that want to take them down from doing so. There are streets and schools and other public facilities named after them, which were paid for by my tax dollars. For that matter, I was stationed for years on a U.S. Army post named after one of them.
My city, county, state, and federal government pay for political statements constantly with which I disagree, using my tax money. They also undertake actual policies with which I disagree. That’s frustrating, but it’s not illegal.
And, by the way, I was not personally consulted about any of that. I do get to vote for or against the office holders who made all of those decisions on a regular basis, though.
Oh, and if I feel very strongly that my government is doing something wrong, I can go out and protest…
I’ve been seeing and hearing the phrase “Black lives matter” a lot lately. In every case, I have seen no indication that it is in reference to some “group.” Rather, people are affirming that Black. Lives. Matter.
The terms “institutional racism” and “systemic racism” have been used in the sense I’m describing for more than fifty years. You’re just now getting around to noticing that they’re not synonymous with “legally mandated and enforced de jure racial discrimination”?
That’s the same sort of institutional racism that, by your own account, is keeping your workplace almost as resistant to racial integration now as it was in the 1970s, and is enabling the workplace culture that constantly tells you you’re not welcome there even though you’ve worked there for 20 years.
No, you’re not being legally prohibited from working there. But legal prohibition is by no means the only form that institutional racism can take.
Well then they need to put the *next to it because it clear black lives don’t really matter unless. They are not affirming what you say. This whole thing should have been a movement against police or toward police reform if you will.
So its not welcoming so what. What does that have to do with anything? We are all adults we don’t have to be friends we are not in high school here. You can legally work there, in fact the companies go out of the way to make sure of it. Even banning the rebel flag on company property.
The terms “institutional racism” and “systemic racism” have been used in the sense I’m describing for more than fifty years. You’re just now getting around to noticing that they’re not synonymous with “legally mandated and enforced de jure racial discrimination”?