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From Institutional Racism to Institutional Anti-Racism
When the cartoonist Scott Adams made a statement that was deemed racist, he was not only denounced thoroughly in the media, but nearly every major newspaper, hundreds of minor ones, his book publisher, and his syndicate canceled his projects. It’s impossible to argue that his treatment is an example of institutional racism. It’s easy to say it’s an example of institutional anti-racism.
“Institutional racism” is a fine description of segregated societies like Jim Crow America where every institution was closed to black people — even in entertainment, there were places where black performers were excluded entirely and others where they could only perform to all-white audiences. Yet ironically, the term was coined after legal segregation had ended in the United States and all of the nation’s institutions were opening to black people, and it’s used to describe the United States today.
Its history explains why its users use it counter-intuitively.
“Institutional racism” was coined in 1967 in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton. Both men did well in the institutions of academia. Hamilton became the W. S. Sayre Professor Emeritus of Government and Political Science at Columbia University. Carmichael graduated from one of New York’s best public schools, the…
