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In the United States, there's a political battle raging over the concept of systemic racism. One side claims racism is the domain of individuals and isolated incidents - if it still exists at all - while the other side argues racism is woven into the fabric of the country's systems. Who's right? One can find evidence of systemic racism by taking a close look at areas of society like education, employment, housing, healthcare, the criminal justice system, and immigration policy. On the surface, a single stat may have more than one explanation but taken all together, the data paints a clear picture: someone's race affects things like their education, how much money they earn, where they can live, and the kind of medical care they receive. Here are six examples of systemic racism in the United States:

Education

In many ways, access to education lays the foundation for the rest of a person's life. A lack of good schooling limits a person's employment opportunities and income potential, which has a ripple effect on every area of their life and their children's lives. School discipline is a big source of racial disparities. According to 2013-2014 data from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, Black K-12 students are almost 4 times more likely than white students to get one or more out-of-school suspensions. Black girls in particular are much more likely to be suspended compared to white girls, but it isn't because they're committing worse offenses. According to a report from the National Women's Law Center, Black girls are 5.5 times more likely than white girls to be suspended. Native American girls are 3.3 times more likely to face suspension.

Systemic racism affects education quality, as well. School districts with the most Black, Native, and Latino students get significantly less revenue than districts with fewer students of color. For districts with 5,000 students, that can mean losing $13.5 million. Less funding means fewer computers, fewer teachers, outdated textbooks, and run-down buildings. Even in schools with resources like gifted-education programs, racial disparities are a problem. In one study, after adjusting for factors like standardized test scores, researchers found Black students were 54% less likely to be referred to gifted-education programs. Lower-quality education and fewer resources affect where - and if - a student attends college, how many loans they need, if they graduate, and more.

Employment and wealth

Systemic racism's effect on employment is well-documented. It begins with the hiring process. Black Americans with "white-sounding" names receive 50% more callbacks for their job applications. Even having a college degree doesn't necessarily help one's chances. Between 2010-2012, one study showed that while only 6% of all engineering graduates were unemployed, 10% of Black college graduates with engineering degrees were unemployed. Despite these numbers, is getting a degree still worth it for everyone? Studies show that while white college-educated households enjoy higher lifetime earnings and better economic achievements, this doesn't apply to Black college-educated households. The reason is tied to the fact that white college graduates are much more likely to get (and give) financial support for education and/or home ownership from their parents, while Black college graduates are more likely to be the ones supporting their parents.

What about income? Workplaces are still discriminating against people of color, especially women. While white women earn about 79 cents for every white man's dollar, Black women earn 63 cents while Hispanic/Latina women earn 58 cents. Black men earn about 71 cents per dollar. According to a Citi report, the Black pay gap alone equals about $2.7 trillion. All that lost income leads to higher rates of poverty within non-white communities. According to census data from 2019, Black and Hispanic Americans were over-represented in poverty compared to their representation in the overall population. The data represented an improvement from years past, but the COVID-19 pandemic most likely undid that progress.

Homeownership

Systemic racism in housing has a long history. The National Housing Act of 1934 formalized redlining, which effectively provided housing to white families and left out people of color. Instead of getting to live in the newly-established suburbs, Black Americans and other people of color were segregated into urban housing projects. The government was not subtle. According to the Federal Housing Administration's reasoning, if Black Americans bought suburban homes, the property values would go down. This would put the loans of white Americans at risk. There was no evidence of this and in fact, as Richard Rothstein explains, property values actually went up when Black Americans moved in because they were willing to pay more for housing than white Americans. The FHA's justification was racism pure and simple.

Redlining has lasting consequences to this day. Black homebuyers are more likely to be denied a real estate agent appointment, while housing lenders are more likely to recommend subprime loans to Black homebuyers even if they qualify for prime loans. According to real-estate brokerage firm Redfin, just 44% of Black householders own their homes as opposed to 73.7% of white householders. Compared to white neighborhoods, similar homes located in Black-majority neighborhoods are worth 23% less.

Healthcare

The healthcare system has abused non-white people (especially Black Americans) for centuries. It's so prevalent it has its own term: "medical racism." Hiding behind the veneer of science and medicine, doctors and researchers in the 1800s promoted ideas like phrenology (which is the belief that the shape of a person's skull relates to their moral character) and that Black people were naturally submissive and therefore meant to be enslaved. From 1932-1972, the US government recruited Black men with syphilis, saying they would treat them, but instead left the disease untreated to study its progress. The Tuskegee study is one of the most infamous examples of healthcare abuse.

Systemic racism in healthcare is still prevalent. It can show up in odd ways, such as the belief that Black patients feel less pain. Studies show that Black people are significantly less likely to receive pain medication and when they do get it, they get it at lower doses. When Batten professor and social psychologist Sophie Trawalter went to learn why, she found the belief isn't always linked to negative feelings about race, but rather a belief that race is biological. This shows that even someone with good intentions can end up perpetuating systemic racism. How can the healthcare industry deal with its issues? A more diverse medical field can help. Only around 5% of doctors are Black. White doctors represent 56% of the field, while Asian doctors are 17% and Hispanic doctors are around 6%. These stats matter because research shows more ethnic diversity in the medical field leads to better outcomes and increased trust.

Surveillance and the criminal justice system

Like many examples, discrimination begins early in the criminal justice system with police surveillance. In 2020, a study using a dataset with 100 million traffic stops across the US found that Black drivers are 20% more likely to get stopped than white drivers relative to their residential population. Once pulled over, Black drivers are then 1.5-2 times more likely to be searched than white drivers, despite the fact they're less likely to be carrying guns, drugs, or other illegal contraband. Are we sure race is the factor? That same study found that as the sun sets and it gets harder to tell the race of a driver, there's a 5-10% drop in the number of Black drivers stopped. Other forms of police surveillance, like wiretaps, aerial surveillance, and facial recognition, also target people based on their race.

Once a person is in the criminal justice system, their race impacts what happens next. Black youth are more than 4 times more likely to be detained or committed to juvenile facilities compared to their white peers. According to a 2017 report, Black men got 19.1% longer sentences for the same federal crime than white men between 2012-2016. This accounted for factors like criminal history, age, citizenship, and education. The long-term effects of systemic racism? Despite making up just 13% of the US population, Black people make up 38% of the population in jails and prisons. In certain states (like Michigan, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina), more than 50% of the prison population is Black.

Immigration policy

Race and immigration policies in the United States have always been closely aligned. It's all about who the US considers worthy of citizenship. When the country was first deciding who could be a citizen in 1790, only "free white persons" with good character and who had lived in the US for two years were eligible. Eligibility expanded, but the US remained deeply invested in the type of person who entered the country. Millions of mostly white immigrants entered the country illegally from the early 1900s through the 1960s, but were generally welcomed and lawfully employed. Non-white immigrants did not enjoy the same privileges. As more people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America began arriving, policies got stricter. Chinese immigrants were a favorite target early on. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was the first comprehensive federal immigration legislation. It banned all immigration of Chinese laborers for a decade with few exceptions.

As the 20th century rolled in, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which set up a quota system to limit immigration. To keep "undesirable" immigrants out (like immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia), the law was based on census data from 1890, when most immigrants were white Protestants from Western and Northern Europe. Policies like this shaped the population of the United States and helped stoke anti-immigrant and racist sentiments. Today, Mexican immigrants are a frequent target, but studies show Arab and Asian immigrants also experience higher rates of racial discrimination than white immigrants. This impacts access to education, healthcare, housing, civic participation, equitable employment, and more.
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5 Examples of Systemic Racism in the USA

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In the United States, there's a political battle raging over the concept of systemic racism. One side claims racism is the domain of individuals and isolated incidents - if it still exists at all - while the other side argues racism is woven into the fabric of the country's systems. Who's right?

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Podcast (Critical Race Theory and Systemic Racism)

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Podcast (Critical Race Theory and Systemic Racism)

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Critical Race Theory and Systemic Racism - with Voddie Baucham - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 24

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ATLANTA (AP) - The National Urban League released its annual report on the State of Black America on Tuesday, and its findings are grim. This year's Equality Index shows Black people still get only 73.9 percent of the American pie white people enjoy.

While Black people have made economic and health gains, they've slipped farther behind white people in education, social justice and civic engagement since this index was launched in 2005. A compendium of average outcomes by race in many aspects of life, it shows just how hard it is for people of color to overcome systemic racism, the civil rights organization says.
READ MORE: Student loan debt has a lasting effect on Black borrowers, despite the latest freeze in payments
"These numbers change so little and so slowly. What it tells me is that this institutional disparity based on race seems to be built into American society," National Urban League President Marc Morial said in an interview.

The index shows not only that median household income for Black people, at $43,862, is 37 precent less than that of white people, at $69,823. Black people also are less likely to benefit from home ownership, the engine of generational wealth in America. Census data shows Black couples are more than twice as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage or a home improvement loan, which leads to just 59 percent of the median home equity white households have, and just 13 percent of their wealth.

"In that area of wealth, we've seen almost no change, none, since the civil rights days," Morial said. "The wealth disparity has gotten wider."

Among dozens of health measures, one stands out: Life expectancy has declined slightly for African Americans, so a Black child born today can expect to live to 74.7, four years less than a white baby. And lifelong inequities loom: Black women are 59 percent more likely to die as a result of bearing a child, and 31 percent more likely to die of breast cancer. Black men are 52 percent more likely to die of prostate cancer.

Overdoses afflict the races about equally, while white people are 55 percent more likely to drink themselves to death through cirrhosis or chronic liver disease. Among people 15-24, white people are more than twice as likely to commit suicide, while Black men are nine times more likely to die by homicide.

Educational gaps abound: Black and white preschoolers are roughly equally prepared, but the classrooms they enter are starkly different. Schools with more minority students are more likely to have inexperienced, less trained and even uncertified teachers. Fewer of these students are enrolled in the STEM classes that can lead to higher-paying jobs. Black students are less likely to graduate college.

The index uses U.S. Justice Department statistics to chart social justice differences, noting that Black people have been more than twice as likely as white people to experience threats or uses of force during police encounters, and three times more likely to be jailed if arrested. In 2020, they were 93 percent more likely to be victims of hate crime.

Measuring civic engagement, the index cites 2020 Census data showing that white people are about 5 percent more likely to be registered and to actually vote than Black people.

Morial chose to release the report in Atlanta, where a concentration of historically Black colleges have long represented high achievement among African Americans, in part because its survey shows a declining faith among young people that voting can make a difference. The Urban League is responding by launching a "Reclaim Your Vote" campaign.

"Georgia is ground zero for voter suppression. The legislature's actions after Jan. 6 have been sweeping in their aggressiveness to suppress the vote," Morial said. "We've got to remain resolute, to push back against this. We cannot give in. We cannot give up."

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Annual report shows systemic racism continues to bring down Black people's quality of life

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Urban League President Marc Morial says the index shows how hard it is to overcome systemic racism that's made life harder in many ways for people of color.

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Did you know that even though America's infant mortality rate has gone way down in the last 50 years, Black babies are still almost 2.5 times more likely to die before reaching their 1st birthday?

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Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

Abstract

Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation, with disproportionate costs to Black Americans' opportunities, networks, education, wealth, health, and legal treatment. These institutional and societal systems build-in individual bias and racialized interactions, resulting in systemic racism. Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans' inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human. Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals' systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior. Interracial interactions likewise convey disrespect and distrust. These systematic individual and interpersonal patterns continue partly due to non-Black people's inexperience with Black Americans and reliance on societal caricatures. Despite systemic challenges, Black Americans are more diverse now than ever, due to resilience (many succeeding against the odds), immigration (producing varied backgrounds), and intermarriage (increasing the multiracial proportion of the population). Intergroup contact can foreground Black diversity, resisting systemic racism, but White advantages persist in all economic, political, and social domains. Cognitive science has an opportunity: to include in its study of the mind the distortions of reality about individual humans and their social groups.

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Introduction

Significance

American racial biases persist over time and permeate (a) institutional structures, (b) societal structures, (c) individual mental structures, (d) everyday interaction patterns. Systemic racism operates with or without intention and with or without awareness. But because these responses are based on socially defined racial categories, they are racialized, and because they are negative, they reveal the roots of racism. At the level of most behavior, they are also controllable, even if many non-Black people rarely notice these relentless patterns. Systemic racism is a unified arrangement of racial differentiation and discrimination across generations. Understanding these formidable challenges is necessary to understand and then dismantle them. Cognitive science can illuminate the fine-grained levels of inbuilt racial bias because it has the methods and the theories to do so. Moreover, studying racial bias is interesting; it will improve the science; and it is the obvious path to ensuring a mutually respectful, peaceful society that flourishes economically, politically, and socially.

At the Editor's invitation, this article presents the social and behavioral science of systemic racism to a cognitive science audience. The tutorial defines systemic racism, describes its origins in US history, shows how the resulting racialized societal structures have become built-in cognitive structures that propagate in social interactions, resisting change. But these very societal-cognitive-social features can also be agents for change.

Definition

Systemic racism is said to occur when racially unequal opportunities and outcomes are inbuilt or intrinsic to the operation of a society's structures. Simply put, systemic racism refers to the processes and outcomes of racial inequality and inequity in life opportunities and treatment. Systemic racism permeates a society's (a) institutional structures (practices, policies, climate), (b) social structures (state/federal programs, laws, culture), (c) individual mental structures (e.g., learning, memory, attitudes, beliefs, values), and (d) everyday interaction patterns (norms, scripts, habits). Systemic racism not only operates at multiple levels, it can emerge with or without animus or intention to harm and with or without awareness of its existence. Its power derives from its being integrated into a unified system of racial differentiation and discrimination that creates, governs, and adjudicates opportunities and outcomes across generations. Racism represents the biases of the powerful (Jones, 1971), as the biases of the powerless have little consequence (Fiske, 1993).1

Preview

We highlight the "inbuilt" aspect of systemic racism to be its signature feature and the touchstone necessary to understand the nature of systemic racism and its resistance to awareness and change. We begin with the concept's more traditional domains: institutional and societal systems. Then, given the current venue, we expand the levels of analysis to include individual mental systems that have built in those systems of inequalities. We close with the interaction of those minds in social behavior, which can either maintain or change racial systems.

Institutions and Society. As the first section explains, the term systemic racism has traditionally referred to systems that uphold racism via institutional power (Feagin, 2006), with stark examples of what is also called institutional racism (Jones, 1972) visible in inequities in housing and lending, as well as more broadly in access to finance, education, healthcare, and justice. This section focuses on the institutional level in depth, as it provides the strongest evidence of systemic racism. At an even more macro s ocietal level, however, the inbuilt aspect of systemic racism is evident in race-based demarcations created by large-scale state and federal programs, which offer levers either to increase or decrease systemic racism. To remain within the scope of the paper, we consider the structures of institutional and societal racism in a single section.

Individuals and Interactions. In tandem with the previous section, this section focuses on individual bias and interactional racism, together bringing into view the inbuilt nature of systemic racism. To expand on this inclusive view of systemic racism, we end by reviewing what we know about the individual human being, alone and interacting with others. Individuals are agentic entities, the primary actors within all systems of life and living. Their attitudes (preferences, prejudices), beliefs (stereotypes), and behaviors (discrimination) are inbuilt or intrinsically enmeshed into the foundation of the mental systems that feed systemic racism. At the individual level, "inbuilt" refers to the common psychological processes that represent race in the minds of individuals. This evidence reveals systemic race bias.

Note that, here, we use slightly different terms: Systemic Racism refers to much of the sociological, demographic, and historic material as well as anything in the psychological section that is explicit and conscious racism. Systemic Race Bias is about implicit cognition-people who may not be aware of the harm they may cause. Implicit race bias does not mean a person is a racist. In this view, keeping racism and bias separate as terms seems advisable. Others view even unexamined racism as systemic racism in its individual manifestation. Each section elaborates on the meaning of racism in that context.

Individual racial bias propagates through both face-to-face and virtual interactions within families, classrooms, playfields, and workplaces, both verbally and non-verbally. Individual minds create and consume racial representations in books, social media, and entertainment.2 We focus here on everyday interactions that convey disrespect and distrust of Black Americans.

Why? Role for psychological science in studying systemic racism

Individual humans are the creators and consumers of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but also the policies and practices that lie at the heart of systemic racism. Psychology as a field has historically remained silent on the topic of systemic racism, per se (e.g., Guthrie, 2004, "Even the rat was white"; for exceptions, see: Jones, 1971; DuBois, 1925). Perhaps psychologists have regarded systemic racism to be a form of institutional racism and hence in the bailiwick of social scientists who study institutions and society, not individuals. Nonetheless, we attempt here to include individual minds and face-to-face interaction as playing a role. This goal has precedents: Early scholars who straddled disciplines, such as George Herbert Mead ( 1934, p. 174), would likely find our attempt to be quite compatible with his stance that mind and society must be considered in intertwined fashion.

Today, psychologists are increasingly attempting to bridge the divide between the individual mind and society. Cultural psychology, for example, has attempted to analyze racism as the "budding product of psychological subjectivity and the structural foundation for dynamic reproduction of racist action" (Salter, Adams & Perez, 2018, p. 151). This dynamic can emerge in individual racist actions (with or without awareness) that are fitted into the structure of everyday life and perpetuate systemic racism. Interpersonal interactions bridge individual and collective representations of race. Individual minds, sharing some notions about each other's salient identities (e.g., probable race, gender, age) treat each other according to social norms, cultural habits, and cultural scripts. In the case of race, these individual mental representations and social interaction patterns rarely benefit Black participants facing Whites.

"Inbuilt": A useful metaphor guiding the essay

There are these two fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'

Wallace, 2009

The fable highlights a simple idea-that the most fundamental feature of any system may be so completely pervasive that it ceases to be perceptible or when perceptible, fails to be recognized in its true form. This paradox creates a challenge for social and behavioral scientists, who must not only generate evidence about the complexities of systemic racism, but we must also confront unthinking rejection of that evidence. Other scientists face similar challenges in documenting their own complex phenomena, such as the resistance faced by the theory of evolution or the denial of evidence about climate change.

In most cases, evidence eventually reaches a tipping point, after which it ceases to be denied and even becomes sufficiently commonplace that its previous denial itself is puzzling. An easy example is the denial of scientific evidence about the position of the earth in the solar system and its shape, with few arguments today (but not zero!) about a flat earth. However, we are far from that tipping point of knowledge and acceptance when it comes to the idea of systemic racism. This paper, then, is yet another attempt, by connecting across the individual, interactional, and institutional/societal levels, to shed light on its existence.

The obvious allegorical lesson from the fable about the fish is of course the ease of being ignorant of that which is pervasive. However, the fable also points out that not all the fish are ignorant of their surroundings. The older fish, swimming the same ocean as the young fish, seems to have figured out the truth about the substance that suffuses its environment so fully that it is imperceptible to its peers. Ignorance then, need not be the only guaranteed outcome, even when perception and awareness are hard. Hence, one section uses the term "unexamined" to describe controllable attention to or willful neglect of one's own biases (see also Fiske, 1998). Social scientists commenting on resistance to socioeconomic inequality have used the term "clueless" (Williams, 2019), which is admittedly harsh but suggests that learning some facts would permit more evidence-based understanding. Regardless, the evidence for systemic racism, at the level of institutions and society or at the level of individuals and interactions, requires re-examining the taken-for-granted, whether the water we swim or the air we breathe.

Systemic racism: the role of institutional and societal structures

Contemporary societal racism rests on Black-White segregation, historical and current. This first substantive section presents evidence that systemic racism has long pervaded US institutional and societal systems-creating a context for the minds of individuals within these systems, enabling an omnipresent neglect. First, this section shows that continued housing segregation by race obstructs Black opportunity and mobility, perpetuating racial disparities, challenging many Black Americans in ways White Americans never experience (Massey, 2020). At a societal level, Black disadvantage and White advantage come in part from residential hypersegregation (Massey & Tannen, 2015). More than any other racial group, Whites live in racially isolated neighborhoods (Rugh & Massey, 2014); and in the US neighborhood segregation translates directly into school segregation (Massey & Tannen, 2016; Owens, 2020). Both segregation and local funding undermine the quality of predominantly Black schools.

To elaborate these points, this section describes the historical context for US racism, territory likely to be less familiar to cognitive scientists. Our takeaway: Systemic racism pervades US social institutions, policies, and practices; later sections show how the societal structures make into the minds of the humans within these systems.

History: segregation and systemic racism

To explain systemic racism, we start with the historical origins of race in the US-that is, the social/political/economic mechanisms that have maintained it over time. Race is baked into the history of the US going back to colonial times (Higginbotham, 1998; Jones, 1972, 1997) and continuing through early independence when slavery was quietly written into the nation's Constitution (Waldstreicher, 2009). Although the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution ended slavery and granted due process, equal protection, and voting rights to the formerly enslaved, efforts to combat systemic racism in the US faltered when Reconstruction collapsed in the disputed election of 1876, which triggered the withdrawal of federal troops from the South (Foner, 1990).

The absence of federal troops to enforce Black civil rights enabled states in the former Confederacy to construct a new system of racial subordination known as Jim Crow (Packard, 2003). It rested on a simple principle: in any social encounter, the lowest status White person was superior to the highest status Black person. By law and custom, Black voting rights were suppressed, and Black Americans were socially segregated from Whites, relegated to menial occupations, inferior schools, dilapidated housing, and deficient facilities throughout Southern society. Any challenges to the Jim Crow system, perceived or real, were met with violence, often lethal, both within and outside the legal system (Tolnay & Beck, 1995).

From 1876 to 1900, 90% of all African Americans lived in the South and were subject to the dictates of the repressive Jim Crow system; 83% lived in poor rural areas, occupying ramshackle dwellings clustered in small settlements in or near the plantations where they worked. Although conditions were somewhat better for the 10% of African Americans who lived outside the South (68% in cities), anti-Black prejudice was widespread, racial discrimination was common and, as in the South, the prospect of racial violence was never far away (Sugrue, 2008).

Before, 1900, few African Americans lived in cities, and levels of urban racial residential segregation were modest. Black workers and servants generally lived within walking distance of their workplaces, and social contact between the races was common (Massey & Denton, 1993). At that time, the share of Blacks among city residents was small, and they were not perceived to be a threat to White hegemony, obviating the need for spatial segregation. The Great Black Migration of the twentieth century changed this status quo and transformed race relations in the US, making race truly a national rather than regional issue (Lemann, 1991). This transformation also created a new system of racial subordination based on Black residential segregation.

Between 1900 and 1970, millions of African Americans left the rural South in search of better lives in industrializing cities throughout the nation. As a result of this migration, by 1970 nearly half of all African Americans had come to live outside the South, 90% in urban areas (Farley & Allen, 1987). It was during this period of Black urbanization that the ghetto emerged as a structural feature of American urbanism, making Black residential segregation into the linchpin of a new system of racial stratification that prevailed throughout the US irrespective of region (Pettigrew, 1979).

Black out-migration from the South began slowly at first, but accelerated after 1914, when the onset of the First World War curtailed the arrival of workers from Europe. It accelerated again after 1917, when the US entered the war, boosting labor demand as conscription drew workers out of the labor force. The imposition of strict immigration restrictions in 1921 and 1924 guaranteed that Black workers and their families would continue to pour into cities during the economic boom of the 1920s (Wilkerson, 2010). The entry of ever-larger cohorts of impoverished Black laborers and sharecroppers into the nation's cities unnerved White urbanites, prompting them to organize collectively by creating "neighborhood improvement associations." These organizations pressured landlords not to rent to Black tenants and tried to convince Black home seekers that it was in their best interest to locate elsewhere, using persuasion and payoffs when possible but resorting to violence when these blandishments failed (Massey & Denton, 1993).

As the number of incoming Black migrants continued to rise despite these efforts, White city residents demanded that politicians act to "do something" about the perceived "Black invasion." Officials in smaller towns and cities responded by enacting "sundown laws" that required all Blacks to leave town by sunset (Loewen, 2018). In large cities, legislators passed municipal ordinances that confined Black residents to a specific set of already disadvantaged neighborhoods and excluded them from all others. These ordinances were the functional equivalent of South Africa's Group Areas Act, which underlay the establishment of that country's apartheid system in, 1948. These ordinances were widely copied and were spreading rapidly from city to city when, in 1917, the Supreme Court declared them to be unconstitutional (Massey & Denton, 1993). Sundown laws, however, were never challenged in court and remained in force well into the Civil Rights Era.

The end of legally mandated neighborhood segregation in cities occurred just as Black migration surged in the aftermath of America's entry into the First World War. The sudden influx of workers caused existing areas of Black settlement to fill up rapidly and eventually overflow into adjacent White areas, where the arrivals met with increasingly violent resistance. The violence peaked in the late teens as anti-Black race riots swept through the nation's cities, culminating in the Great Chicago Race Riot of 1919 (Tuttle, 1970). Even established Black neighborhoods were not safe, as evidenced by the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood was systematically attacked and razed by mobs of White vigilantes, leaving thousands homeless and dozens, perhaps hundreds, killed (Madigan, 2001).

As the real estate industry gradually assumed control of racial change in urban areas, racial violence abated and neighborhood transitions from White to Black came to be managed professionally by realtors who sought to minimize confrontation and maximize profits. As Black migration continued throughout the 1920s, recognized Black neighborhoods steadily increased in density as housing units were divided and subdivided. Basements, garages, attics, and even closets were converted into rental units. Eventually, however, no more living space could be squeezed into the confines of the existing ghetto. Realtors then conspired to move the residential color line, selecting an adjacent neighborhood for racial transition and initiating an institutionalized process known as "block busting" (Philpott, 1978).

Realtors began the process by choosing a few poor Black families just arrived from the rural South and obviously unused to city ways to be placed strategically into selected units within the targeted neighborhood. Agents then moved through the neighborhood block by block warning residents of a pending Black "invasion." Panic selling ensued, enabling realtors to purchase homes cheaply for subdivision into smaller apartments, which were then leased at inflated rents to African Americans desperate for living space. Owing to these institutionalized practices, Black segregation levels steadily climbed through the 1920s and ghetto areas gradually expanded their boundaries through the profitable management of neighborhood racial turnover by realtors (Massey & Denton, 1993).

The exclusively private auspices of Black residential segregation ended with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. When Franklin Roosevelt came to power with his New Deal in 1933, the nation was in the midst of a catastrophic banking crisis. Millions of middle-class homeowners had lost jobs and were in danger of defaulting on their mortgages, putting both their homes and their bankers at financial risk. In response, the Roosevelt Administration created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to help middle class homeowners refinance their mortgages using long-term, federally insured, low-interest loans (Jackson, 1985). Together the federal guarantees and extended amortization periods reduced monthly mortgage payments to affordable levels, saving both the banks and the homeowners from financial losses through foreclosure.

To qualify for the federal guarantees, however, HOLC loans had to meet certain government-mandated criteria. In addition to low interest rates, minimal down payments, and long amortization periods, lenders were obliged to consider the riskiness of the neighborhoods in which properties were located. To this end, HOLC officials worked with local realtors and bankers to create a series of Residential Security Maps for use in cities throughout the nation. These maps color-coded neighborhoods according to their creditworthiness. Green indicated a safe investment, yellow indicated caution, and red indicated excessive risk and hence ineligibility for HOLC lending. Black neighborhoods were invariably coded red, along with adjacent neighborhoods perceived to be at risk of Black settlement (Rothstein, 2017).

The HOLC lending program only helped the minority of families that already owned homes, however, and in order to spread housing wealth to a wider population and create jobs in the real estate and construction industries, in 1934 the Roosevelt Administration created a much larger loan program under the Federal Housing Authority. The FHA offered long-term loans to prospective home buyers, not just owners. As before, federally guaranteed loans had to meet federally mandated criteria, which evinced a strong anti-urban bias. Specifically, they excluded from eligibility all multiunit buildings, attached dwellings, row houses, and structures containing a business. These provisions effectively restricted FHA loans to single family houses on large lots, thus channeling housing investment away from central cities toward vacant land on the urban fringes (Jackson, 1985).

Reflecting the prejudices of the realtors, bankers, and builders who helped to design the program, FHA underwriters were also required to make use of the HOLC's Residential Security Maps, formally institutionalizing the practice of redlining in real estate and banking and systematically cutting off investment in Black neighborhoods for decades to come. The FHA Underwriter's Manual explicitly stated that "if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes." In addition to requiring the use of Residential Security Maps, the manual went on to advocate the use of racial covenants to protect FHA-insured properties. When a parallel loan program was created in the Veterans Administration by the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act, it adopted the FHA's racialized practices and procedures (Katznelson, 2006).

The anti-urban biases and discriminatory practices built into federal loan programs had little effect on housing patterns during the 1930s and 1940s owing to the tiny amount of new residential construction that occurred during the Great Depression and Second World War. In the postwar period, however, FHA and VA lending drove forward a massive wave of suburban home construction that made new homes widely accessible to White but not Black households. Given high rents and home prices in central cities owing to the influx of workers during the war years, in the late 1940s and early 1950s it was cheaper to buy a brand-new house in the suburbs than to rent an apartment in the city (Massey & Denton, 1993).

The end result was a government-subsidized mass exodus of middle and working class White families from central cities to suburbs, creating a distinctly American urban configuration of Black cities surrounded by White suburbs. The homes left behind by the departing Whites seeking their piece of the American Dream in the suburbs were quickly occupied by Black in-movers coming to the city to take jobs in the still-vibrant urban manufacturing sector. Neighborhood turnover accelerated, and the nation's urban Black ghettos rapidly expanded, both demographically and geographically (Massey & Denton, 1993).

Although neighborhood transitions in the 1950s and 1960s improved Black access to housing in the short term, in the long term the neighborhoods turned into poverty traps. Because of redlining and racial discrimination built into housing and credit markets by federal policies and private practices, once a neighborhood became Black, it was cut off from investment, ensuring that its housing stock and business infrastructure would progressively deteriorate. It also left the Black middle class without a means to finance the purchase of homes, and predatory lenders stepped into the resulting void.

Drawing on their own capital, these lenders purchased homes and then offered to "sell" them to middle class Black families by means of Loan Installment Contracts (Satter, 2009). LICs were essentially rent-to-own schemes with high interest rates, bloated monthly payments, and no property rights or transfer of title until the final contract payment was made. Any missed payment could bring about immediate eviction by the property owner, no matter how long the aspiring family had been making payments under the contract.

Other predatory investors also purchased ghetto properties to become landlords, subdividing them into ever-smaller units and leasing them to poor and working class Black tenants at inflated rents (Massey & Denton, 1993). Whether city housing was being sold under an installment contract or rented on usurious terms, however, the absentee owners could not themselves get loans to offset depreciation or purchase insurance policies to protect their properties, creating a strong financial incentive for landlords to defer maintenance, minimize capital investment, and extract high rents as long as possible until the properties deteriorated to the point of becoming uninhabitable.

Because of a "one-for-one rule" embedded within the National Housing Act, for every unit of housing torn down in the name of renewal, planners had to identify another unit into which the displaced tenants could theoretically move. To satisfy this rule, local elites once again turned to the federal government, garnering additional funds authorized by the National Housing Act to construct large public housing projects for families displaced by renewal. Given that the displaced families were Black, it was politically impossible to build the housing project in a White district, so another Black neighborhood was targeted for renewal and torn down to build dense collections of high-rise projects that now had to house two neighborhood's worth of displaced families (Massey & Denton, 1993).

This pairing of urban renewal and public housing did not itself increase the level of Black residential segregation (Bickford & Massey, 1991). Segregation levels were already high in the cities where this pairing occurred; but it did dramatically increase the spatial concentration of poverty within the ghetto by replacing relatively class-diverse Black neighborhoods and business districts with tightly packed blocks of high-rise projects in which being poor was a criterion for entry, yielding neighborhood poverty rates of 90% or more (Massey & Kanaiaupuni, 1993).

By 1970, high levels of Black residential segregation were universal throughout metropolitan America (Massey & Denton, 1993).3 As of 1970, 61% of Black Americans living in US metropolitan areas lived under a regime of hypersegregation (Massey & Tannen, 2015), a circumstance unique to Americans. Although in theory, segregation should have withered away after the Civil Rights Era, it has not. In 2010, the average index of Black-White segregation remained high and a third of all Black metropolitan residents continued to live in hypersegregated areas (Massey & Tannen, 2015). This reality prevails despite the outlawing of racial discrimination in housing (the 1968 Fair Housing Act) and lending (the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act).

Why does modern segregation persist, despite Whites' reported racial attitudes improving?

Accompanying these legislative changes was a pronounced shift in White racial attitudes. In the early 1960s, more than 60% of White Americans agreed that Whites have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods. By the 1980s, however, the percentage had dropped to 13% (Schuman et al., 1998). The fact that discrimination is illegal, and White support for segregation has plummeted, begs the question of why segregation persists. The reasons are multiple.

First, although the Fair Housing Act banned discrimination in the rental and sale of housing, enforcement mechanisms in the original legislation were eliminated as part of a compromise to secure the bill's passage (Metcalf, 1988). Federal authorities were likewise granted only limited powers to enforce the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Community Reinvestment Act (Massey & Denton, 1993).

Although overt discrimination in housing and lending has clearly declined in response to legislation, covert discrimination continues. Rental and sales agents today are less likely to respond to emails from people with stereotypically Black names (Carpusor & Loges, 2006; Hanson & Hawley, 2011) or to reply to phone messages left by speakers who "sound Black" (Massey & Fischer, 2004; Massey & Lundy, 2001). A recent meta-analysis of 16 experimental housing audit studies and 19 lending analyses conducted since 1970 revealed that sharp racial differentials in the number of units recommended by realtors and inspected by clients have persisted and that racial gaps in loan denial rates and borrowing cost have barely changed in 40 years (Quillian, Lee, & Honoré, 2020).

That is, in the minds of hiring managers whose mental make-up is expected to be no different than the readers of this article, a White felon is equivalent to a Black non-felon. The same housing application, the same bank loan application, the same health data, the same behavior, lead to different outcomes depending on the race of the applicant, even though the decision-makers believe they are paying attention to the merits of the case and explicitly not to race, which most decision makers in these studies regard to be irrelevant to the decision.

What makes the problem of systemic racism so perverse is that "good people" with no explicit expression of we would call "racism" are the contributors to such decisions that produce widespread and unnoticed bias, resulting in systemic racism (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013). Racial discrimination continues because, although White support for Black segregation may have declined in principle, Whites nonetheless continue to harbor negative racial stereotypes about Black people, which limit their tolerance for integration in practice. Indeed, the willingness of Whites to enter or remain in a neighborhood declines steadily as the percentage of Black neighbors rises (Charles, 2003; Emerson, Chai & Yancey, 2001). And negative racial stereotyping of Black Americans strongly predicts White opposition to government efforts to enforce Black civil rights (Bobo, Charles, Krysan & Simmons, 2012).

In White American social cognition, as later sections elaborate, racial biases remain entrenched both explicitly (Moberg, Krysan & Christianson, 2019) and implicitly (Eberhardt, 2019). This extends to preferred neighborhoods: Residential searches are inevitably embedded within racialized expectations about neighborhoods and homes that reflect the racially segregated world that most Americans inhabit (Krysan & Crowder, 2017). The "correlated characteristics heuristic" relies on a single salient neighborhood trait-in this case racial composition-to represent an area's acceptability. In White social cognition, the mere presence of Blacks denotes lower property values, higher crime rates, and struggling schools, irrespective of what the objective neighborhood conditions are (Krysan, Couper, Farley & Forman, 2009; Quillian & Pager, 2001, 2010). Although Whites in surveys and interviews say they welcome the presence of Black neighbors, in practice Whites avoid neighborhoods containing more than a few Blacks and confine their searches to overwhelmingly White residential areas exhibiting White percentages well above those they report in describing their "ideal" neighborhood on surveys (Krysan & Crowder, 2017).

Although rarely admitted, explicit prejudice against Black Americans has hardly disappeared. Google search frequencies on the epithet "nigger" for different metropolitan areas strongly predicted an area's level of Black residential segregation (Rugh & Massey, 2014). This index of explicit racism also strongly predicts the degree to which a city's suburbs are covered by restrictive density zoning regimes (Massey and Rugh ( 2018), a key proximate cause of both racial and class segregation (Rothwell & Massey, 2009, 2010). Owing to the persistence of discrimination, Black Americans are far less able that other Americans to translate their income attainments into residential mobility, greatly compromising their ability to access more integrated and favored neighborhoods (Massey & Denton, 1985). As of 2010, the most affluent Black Americans were still more segregated from Whites than the poorest Hispanics (Intrator, Tannen & Massey, 2016).

No other group in the history of the US has ever experienced such intense residential segregation in so many areas and over such a long period of time (Massey & Denton, 1993; Rugh & Massey, 2014). Systemic racism in federal housing policies (Katznelson, 2006), real estate (Helper, 1969), banking (Ross & Yinger, 2002), and insurance (Orren, 1974) has ensured a vicious cycle of racial turnover and neighborhood deterioration for most of the past century. As a result, many Black Americans have been compelled to live in societally isolated, economically disadvantaged, physically deteriorated neighborhoods produced and sustained by powerful external forces beyond their ability to control, the precise embodiment of systemic racism.

Because of racial residential segregation and the blocked mobility and spatial concentration of poverty it produces, neighborhoods have become the key nexus for the transmission of Black socioeconomic disadvantage over the life course and across the generations (Sharkey, 2013). Half of all Black Americans have lived in the poorest quartile of urban neighborhoods for two consecutive generations, compared with just 7% of Whites, a gap that cannot be explained by individual or family characteristics.

Whereas in the 1960s Black poverty was transmitted across generations by the inheritance of race and the discrimination and exclusion that came with it (Duncan, 1969), in the twenty-first century Black poverty is transmitted by the inheritance of place and the concentrated poverty it entails (Massey, 2013; Massey & Brodmann, 2014; Peterson & Krivo, 2010; Sampson, 2012; Sharkey, 2013). Black disadvantage with respect to income and social mobility is explained almost entirely by the poor neighborhood circumstances they experience (Chetty, Hendren, Jones & Porter, 2020; Massey & Brodmann, 2014). Racial residential segregation has become linchpin for systemic racism in the US in the twenty-first century (Massey, 2016, 2020).

Discussions of segregation typically highlight how it operates to increase the social isolation of Blacks, but in fact it does more to isolate Whites, who are by far the most spatially isolated group in the US. In 2010, the average Black metropolitan resident lived in a neighborhood that was 45% Black, but the average White metropolitan resident occupied a neighborhood that was 74% White (Massey, 2018), and in suburbs the figure rose to 80% (Massey & Tannen, 2017). As a result, the advantages of segregation to Whites and the disadvantages to Blacks are invisible to most White Americans.

Feagin ( 1999, p. 79), put this paradox into perspective by relating the experience of a British immigrant's confrontation with the realities of race in the US:

Some time after English writer Henry Fairlie emigrated to the USA in the mid-1960s, he visited Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation and took the standard tour. When the White guide asked for questions, Fairlie inquired, "Where did he keep his slaves?" Fairlie reports that the other tourists looked at him in disturbed silence, while the guide "swallowed hard" and said firmly that "the slaves' quarters are not included in the official tour." (Fairlie, 1985.) Housing segregation, and the systemic racism it reveals, are still not on the official tour."

Two decades later, the question we must answer is whether we are willing, as scientists and citizens, to put housing segregation-and all the other institutions that do so much to dictate the vicissitudes of Black life-on the official tour of the USA.

Systemic racial bias: the role of mental structures and resulting social interactions

We began with institutions and society. Now, we move to individual minds surrounded and shaped by these societal structures. Next, we then move to interacting minds, which further perpetuate societal and individual racial distinctions. Racial bias at each level supports bias at the other levels, creating a racist system.

To understand individual mental structures, we start with unconscious inference, identified by Helmholtz, and its heir, implicit bias, most relevantly as expressed by Whites associating Black racial cues with negative concepts. Socially motivated (mis)perception goes one stage earlier to bias information seeking and interpretation. More specific links among racial bias in perceiving physiognomy, linked to dehumanizing associations, and aggressive behavior close this first section on the individual.

Unconscious inference

Among the intellectuals who contributed to the emergence of experimental psychology as an independent discipline in the nineteenth century was the German polymath, Herman von Helmholtz, whose numerous contributions to science include the concept of " Unbewuste Schluss" or " unconscious inference." Helmholtz's concept was simple, but its implications are profound, even more so today with recent advances in the mind and brain sciences. Given the complexity of just the visual world, how are humans to represent it based on their individual-level, meager sensory and perceptual system, which entails the shunting of packets of data from the world outside, through the eyes and into the brain? Helmholtz offered two ideas. First, perception is not veridical, given the complexity of the world and the rudimentary nature of the minds attempting to make sense of it. Second, as implied by the word inference, what one deduces from the evidence provided by the senses is not a replica of what is out there. Rather, mental representations of the physical world are mere approximations.

Whittling the self-esteem of Homo sapiens down further, Helmholtz went on to say that perception is not controllable, but rather that it unfolds automatically. He used a commonplace example to make this point. We know that it is not the Sun that rises, but rather that the Earth revolves around it. But when we sit on our porch at sunrise, and look toward the horizon, we incontrovertibly experience ourselves as being fixed, and the Sun, however bulky, pushing itself up to meet us. To say about the Sun that "it rises" is completely inaccurate yet completely compelling. That incorrect perception is not something over which we have choice. To think otherwise is to delude ourselves.

Helmholtz's two ideas contained in the phrase "unconscious inference," with many additional levels of social complexity, summarizes the challenge when we confront systemic racism. On the one hand, we "know" the facts about an economy purportedly mounted on free labor for 250 years, the undelivered promise of 40 acres and a mule, the failure of Reconstruction, the resistance to desegregation, the history of redlining and gerrymandering, a history of unequal access to education, jobs, housing, finance, healthcare, and a lack of equal protection under the law. On the other hand, the limited sensory, perceptual, learning, and memory systems of humans set up a built-in blindness and automatic inferences that generate the illusions that, for instance, White people experience more discrimination than Black people (Norton & Sommers, 2011). Or, if Black Americans have any challenges, they have created their own situation in America today (Pettigrew, 1979) and therefore are responsible for getting themselves out of that situation. Not that minorities have no illusions, but the illusions of the higher-status group have more consequences because they usually also have more power.

The features of human minds that feed into the production of systemic racism come in two forms: ordinary errors of perception, attention, learning, memory, and reasoning that are the hallmarks of all thinking systems with human-like intelligence. In addition, we add another level of theorizing familiar to psychologists, that of motivated reasoning, the idea that our preferences, goals, and desires can bias our reasoning and lead to prejudicial decisions and outcomes (Fiske & Taylor, 2021; Kunda, 1990).

Another hallmark of human cognition is the phenomenon of loss aversion, the finding human beings much prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Even as White Americans resist and deny the reality of systemic racism, they nonetheless feel the loss of White privilege and social status quite keenly, creating powerful resentments that motivate them to reason away the potential existence of systemic racism (Craig & Richeson, 2014; Parker, 2021).

Implicit racial bias

One such measure, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has demonstrated a wide array of group evaluative associations. Typically, people can pair own-group cues faster with positive concepts, and other-group cues faster with negative ones-compared with vice versa. For example, White and other non-Black Americans show robust race bias in their inability to associate "good" and "bad" equally rapidly with the social categories Black and White. The IAT has attracted considerable attention (see Greenwald et al., 2020, for best practices, reliable effects, and ongoing investigations). A public online location, since 1998, has provided data from millions of tests taken by volunteer participants at http://www.implicit.harvard.edu. Several signature results have replicated multiple times with large samples over time:

1. (a)
Race bias is consistently visible in the data.

2. (b)
A small positive correlation between stated and implicit race attitudes exists, but the two are largely dissociated, i.e., many of those who report being neutral (no negative explicit attitudes toward Black or White Americans), do carry implicit associations of Black + bad and White + good to a larger extent than White + bad and Black + good. This result prompts us to yet again note that the term "racism" has been used by contemporary psychologists to refer to conscious forms of race prejudice and to emphasize its semi-independence from less conscious or implicit forms of race bias. To make this distinction clear, researchers who study implicit race bias have gone to great lengths to reserve the term racism to only refer to conscious expressions of racial animus. Our usage of the term systemic racism in this article is undertaken is in the interest of including all levels of analysis (individual, institutional, societal) and all forms, from the most explicit to the most implicit. The result of a low correlation between explicit racism and implicit race bias makes the point empirically that the two are not the same. Of course, implicit race bias feeds into what may become racism, and for this reason it is best to think about implicit race bias as the roots of racism, not the above ground, visible structure. Implicit race bias also results from systemic racism.

3. (c)
Asian Americans show the same pattern as White Americans, even though as a third-party group in response to a Black-White test, they might be assumed to have neutrality. From the point of view of systemic racism, this is an example of what it means to live in a system of inequity at all levels. Even third-party groups will acquire negative and positive attitudes toward groups that are not their own.

4. (d)
Black Americans express strong positive feelings toward their own group but on the measure of implicit cognition, they show no preference for their own group, with scores of almost any sample of Black Americans showing relative neutrality, i.e., equal association of good and bad for Black and White Americans. This absence of ingroup-favoring attitudes-juxtaposed with the ingroup-favoring lack of neutrality in all other groups in the same society-is open to various interpretations, from moral balance to internalized racism to astute pragmatism; all await other data.

5. (e)
Tests of anti-gay bias revealed it to be quite high in 2007 but steadily dropping off (by 64% since 2013) to be at an all-time low today. By comparison, anti-Black bias has dropped, but to a much lesser extent, by about 25% (Charlesworth & Banaji, in press). A 25% drop-off in race bias is not insignificant, and although the genders differ in magnitude of bias, both men and women are losing bias at equal speed. Although all demographic groups are changing, young Americans are changing faster than older Americans, suggesting that the world they inhabit is signaling a less biased set of attitudes.

Together, these data point to the individual manifestation of systemic racial bias, hidden from view but robustly present. However, psychologists have also gone beyond such demonstrations of basic cognitive associations as markers of implicit mental content to show that individual and institutional change is possible if the will to create change exists.

Socially motivated (mis)perception

The idea of motivated reasoning or motivated cognition gathers several useful ideas to understand how individual humans shape and even distort perception to deal with real or perceived threats to self. Kunda ( 1990), for example, posited that the individual need for accuracy is thwarted by the demand to reach a conclusion prior to the evidence being satisfactorily in place and that one's goals and motives often drive decisions. These decisions reveal many identifiable biases that emerge to weaken the orientation toward accuracy (see Fiske & Taylor, 2021).

With more direct focus on motivated reasoning as it concerns social change, Kay et al., ( 2009) presented empirical evidence for a motivated tendency to view things as they are and conclude that such a state of affairs exists because it is reasonable and even representative of how things ought to be. The connection to systemic racism is quite clear, as the authors further demonstrate that motivated cognition exists in the interest of justifying sociopolitical systems that maintain inequality and resist change. People justify the status quo, preferring stability especially if they are privileged, but even if not (Jost & Banaji, 1994). Groups in a secure position show the cultural equivalent of inertia, seeking stability, but groups on the move express inertia as continuing to move (e.g., acquiring mainstream standing) (Zárate et al., 2019).

Two substantive theoretical accounts undergird these ideas as they concern complex interactions of within-person and across-person phenomena such as systemic racism. First, Sidanius and Pratto's ( 1999) Theory of Social Dominance offers evolutionary and cultural evidence to support the idea that hierarchies are an almost obligatory feature of human social groups. A related but independent idea may be found in Jost's System Justification Theory (Jost, 2020), which explicitly makes the case that individuals will sacrifice self and group interest in order to maintain larger "systems" of social arrangements and work to keep them in place. The reason, Jost argues, is that such a motivation serves to meet deep psychological needs for certainty, security, and acceptance by others. The overarching social structure is important to protect because if it is stable, then all within it will be safe, including those disadvantaged by established hierarchies.

Perception of phenotypes, deadly associations, and system-maintaining behavior

With regard to perceptions of race, the mere categorization of someone as Black shifts perceptions of their phenotype. For example, a series of experiments documented that people's knowledge about race phenotypes drives perception of lightness of the skin tone (Levin & Banaji, 2006). In other words, experiments held skin-tone constant and varied only the features, from Afrocentric to Eurocentric; this variation in features shifts perception of skin tone, such that Afrocentric faces are viewed to be darker skinned than Eurocentric ones, despite the same gray-scale tone.

Skin tone and features are critical cues to make life and death decisions, especially in ambiguous situations that are often present in so many interactions between police and Black citizens. In simulations of police-citizen encounters, people are more likely to "shoot" unarmed Black men than otherwise equally unarmed White men (Correll, Wittenbrink, Park, Judd, & Goyle, 2010). Black men with more phenotypically Black features are more likely to receive the death penalty for murdering a White person, holding constant the features of the crime (Eberhardt, 2019). The phenotypicality effect extends even to Whites with Afrocentric features (Blair, Judd, & Chapleau, 2004). Judgments of criminality can be primed by a Black face (Eberhardt, 2019).

And there's more: the race-crime association overlaps the dehumanizing association of Black faces with great ape faces, that Staples ( 2018) called the "racist trope that won't die"; Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson ( 2008) provide evidence from policing that links apes and Black people, from the first moments of perception to the radio dispatch and other media, with systemic implications. In more recent work, Morehouse et al., ( 2021) have shown that White Americans associate White with human and Black, Asian, and Latinx with animal with greater ease than the opposite pairing (White with animal), regardless of the category of animal (generic or specific). Implicit racial biases (Whites favoring Whites) are consequential, correlating with judged trustworthiness and economic investment (Stanley, Sokol-Hessner, Banaji & Phelps, 2011).

More recently, Kurdi et al., ( 2021) measured attitudes toward a phenotypic feature that happens to be a dominant perceptual marker of race, Afrocentric and Eurocentric types of hair. First participants took an IAT measuring their implicit attitude toward Black women with natural or straightened hair. Then, subjects read a summary of a real legal case involving a corporation that fired a Black employee for refusing to change her natural hair ( Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, 2016). The more negative the implicit attitude toward Afrocentric hair, the greater the sympathy with the corporation's position rather than the plaintiff's position in the legal case.

A relatively new approach to racial associations comes with the promise of epitomizing the term "systemic" in systemic racism. These are studies of large language corpora that are now possible using machine learning approaches to natural language. With the increasing availability of trained datasets-including large samples of the language of the Internet (content archives continuously collected by the nonprofit Common Crawl) or specific trained datasets of media such as books, TV shows, etc.-allow measuring the extent to which language contains attitudes and beliefs about Black and White Americans across time. Charlesworth and Banaji (in preparation) analyzed data from Google Books from 1800 to 1990. Setting aside the data from older books to focus on whether bias is present in the language today, these are the traits most associated with Black Americans (and not with White Americans) in the late twentieth century: earthy, lonely, sensual, cruel, lifeless, deceitful, meek, rebellious, headstrong, lazy. By contrast, these are the traits associated with White Americans (and not with Black Americans): critical, decisive, hostile, friendly, polite, able, diplomatic, belligerent, understanding, confident. Other work in natural language processing (NLP) sorts adjectives into 13 stereotype-content dictionaries (Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, 2021). The above adjectives convey ambivalent reactions to Black Americans on several dimensions, but notably neglect competence; Whites in contrast feature several competence adjectives. NLP allows efficient analysis of language in the culture or in spontaneous, open-ended descriptions (Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, under review).4

Words have an important role to play. People often express surprise about implicit biases in the minds of individuals who have no intent to harbor them. Considering how and why it occurs-plausible mechanisms-may prove convincing. One causal candidate is language, the predominant way humans communicate and express themselves. Words undertake much of the labor of creating racism in thoughts and feelings that are reflected in speech. Machine learning approaches to understanding racial bias in language will likely be a critical method to objectively uncover how words, spoken and written, create systemic racism. That is, linguistic patterns connect groups with valenced concepts, and the repeated pairings create associations. Without awareness, language produces the inbuilt in the architecture of social cognition (as an example, the NLP stereotype-dimensions dictionaries capture more than 80% of spontaneous stereotype content; Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, under review).

From cognitive racial bias to aggregate racialized behavior

For example, the studies reviewed reveal that the greater the implicit bias against Blacks in a region (using average IAT scores of a region) the greater is the lethal use of force by police, the greater the Black American deaths from circulatory diseases, the lower is spending on Medicaid disability programs (more likely to assist Black Americans), the greater the Black-White gap in infant low birth weight and preterm births, the greater the Black-White gap in school disciplining (suspension, law enforcement referrals, expulsions, in-school arrests), the Black-White gap in standardized testing scores (3rd-8th grade for math and English), and lower upward mobility.

To grasp the meaning of systemic racism as it exists at the individual level within larger society, not just in a single moment by across time, a study by Payne, Vuletich and Brown-Iannuzzi ( 2019) is illustrative. Their analysis of IAT data today yields strong correlations with the ratio of enslaved to free people in the southern US in 1860. States with a larger ratio in 1860 are the states with greater race bias today, 160 years later (r = 0.64). This correlation is much larger in magnitude than even the correlation between regional IAT race bias and Black American representation across the US (r = 0.32). As Charlesworth and Banaji ( 2021) note, "the result also suggests that today's Americans who live in regions with greater historical legacies of slavery must be acquiring the particles of race bias embedded in the social atmosphere. Systemic discrimination is a useful term in this case as it helps capture the pervasiveness of race bias as it extends across both space and time."

Summary. As explicit bias decreased, measured forms of implicit bias have persisted, potentially attributable to racial segregation. White Americans have limited direct experience with Black Americans, so cultural associations substitute for more individuated impressions. Implicit associations of "Black-bad" and "White-good" are weakening, but far from neutral. Meanwhile, socially motivated (mis)perception favors these system-justifying biases. Together, they support a syndrome linking racial phenotypes, deadly associations, and system-maintaining behavior. Further, cognitive racial biases underpin aggregate racialized behavior. These are some cognitive-motivational mechanisms of systemic racism. Other mechanisms involve everyday interactions that perpetuate bias. In particular, predictable patterns of disrespect and distrust maintain the interpersonal racial divide.

Racialized social interactions

Disrespect communicates Whites' view of Blacks as low status and incompetent

The default representation of Black Americans is low status (Dupree, Torrez, Obioha & Fiske, 2021). Whites spontaneously associate Black faces with low-status jobs, compared to Whites. The structural belief that Blacks are low status appears in associating them with jobs such as janitor, dishwasher, garbage collector, taxi driver, cashier, maid, prostitute. This race-status association correlates with endorsing social dominance (believing that some groups inevitably dominate others, and it is better that way) and with meritocracy (group get what they deserve). All these judgments share a common element of disrespect and assumed incompetence.

Race-status associations emerge in behavior that maintains Black people at the bottom of the hierarchy. Respondents endorsed Black applicants for lower status jobs and withheld support for organizations and government policies aiding minorities. Thus, racialized associations, assumptions, and preferences all identify a view of Black people's structural position as low status, on average. Behavior communicates these attitudes, whether examined or not. Thus, race-status associations imply Black incompetence, covarying with feeling-thermometer (0-100) ratings of interracial bias, social dominance orientation, meritocracy beliefs, as well as hierarchy-maintaining hiring and policy preferences.

Disrespectful behavior that presumes incompetence of Blacks appears in another series of studies. Well-meaning liberals, expected to introduce themselves to a Black partner, dumbed-down their speech, as they did in vocabulary for a task assignment (Dupree & Fiske, 2019). Similarly, White Democratic presidential candidates also showed a competence downshift in speeches to minority audiences only (Dupree & Fiske, 2019).

This pattern reproduces itself when respondents imagine introducing themselves to a lower-status person (race unspecified) at work (Swencionis & Fiske, 2016). They claim their goal is to communicate their own warmth (as they downplay their competence), but this rests on the presumption of the other's incompetence. Trying to be folksy does not communicate respect.

The presumption that structural status predicts competence is widespread (averaging r > 0.80 across US and international samples; Fiske & Durante, 2016). The implication is that for most White Americans, the association that pops into their minds will link a Black person with incompetence. People communicate such disrespect by failing to bet on or invest in the other's performance (Walsh, Vaida, & Fiske, under review).

Structurally, this amounts to racism. Black people are widely perceived as inferior in these ways, which are baked into the social hierarchy, reflecting disrespectful patterns of interpersonal behavior. All of this perpetuates the social hierarchy and the image of Blacks as incompetent.

Worse yet, disrespect surfaces in police encountering Black drivers. From the first moment ("Hey" instead of "Sir" or "Ma'am"), police officer language shows computationally derived, measurably lower respect (Voigt et al., 2017). Given the already fraught relationships between police and Black community members, this worsens an already dangerous encounter and undermines the chances to create trust.

Distrust communicates Whites' views of Blacks as uncooperative and not warm

Besides incompetence, the other major dimension of social cognition is warmth (trustworthy, friendly), as noted. The default stereotype of a Black person is probably also untrustworthy, but the data on this point are surprisingly indirect. Whites can be expected to distrust Blacks as part of the larger principle that, categorically, people mistrust outgroups. More specifically, as noted, Whites associate Blacks with crime, which certainly undermines trust.5 This configuration fits survey data showing that ratings of poor (i.e., explicitly low-status) Black people allege incompetence (disrespecting them) but also lack of warmth (distrusting them).

Plotting these ratings in a warmth x competence space, poor Blacks are frequently judged as low on both. Because White Americans link race and status, the low-income Black person is the default Black person, allegedly incompetent, but also untrustworthy. Mistrust is indicated by excessive surveillance of Black Americans (driving while Black, shopping while Black, false accusations of theft or assault, police shootings...).6

Distrust can be operationalized as behavior: In the economic Trust Game, a player must decide how much of their starting endowment to share, on the knowledge that it will be tripled, and on the hope that their partner will share back, generously. Incentivized trust-game behavior closely tracks warmth ratings; that is, societal groups rated as low warmth and untrustworthy receive less shared endowment, presumably because they are not trusted to share it back. In nationally representative samples, people of color do not fare well in the Trust Game (Walsh et al., under review). In more prosaic settings, non-verbal behavior reveals unmonitored dislike (if not specifically mistrust), as noted.

Black Americans experience repeated treatment as incompetent and untrustworthy. Because this stereotype and ensuing behavior is racially category-based and negative, as well as potentially controllable, it is racist. Because the behavior comes from societal stereotypes, which come from social structure,7 it is systemic.

Whites' potential control implies responsibility for reinforcing system racism

The challenge in controlling racist habits is that they are the cultural default. Much of this systematic behavior results from White Americans' inexperience with Black Americans, thereby substituting societal representations for individuating information about the unique human (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). People use especially those default representations that fit their natural human tendency to detect and prefer people they view as similar to themselves. To unpack this, consider some basic principles of affiliation that would predispose Whites to favor other Whites and exclude Black people. First is the basic tendency to categorize others and to favor those of the ingroup. For decades, principles of attraction have established its foundations in similarity (Byrne, 1971; Montoya & Horton, 2013) or homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook, 2001). And mere categorization suffices to produce ingroup favoritism (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). No animus is necessary, although it easily develops. As a basis for categorization, race is arbitrary (more so than gender and age; Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides, 2001) but common (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Thus, race-based ingroup favoritism is a default, in the absence of other experience.8 This makes it hard to over-ride.

Societal segregation by race makes difficulties for overcoming the racial default. Segregation limits White exposure to Blacks, undermining their direct experience, leaving Whites to rely on cognitive shortcuts to represent Blacks as a group. Indeed, the less exposure people have to outgroups, the more clearly they differentiate among them-stereotypically. That is, White Americans who know the least about other races have the clearest stereotypes about them; the less diversity, the more differentiated their cognitive representations (Bai, Ramos & Fiske, 2020).

What's wrong with that?

As a scientific question, a skeptic might ask, what's wrong with differentiating by stereotypes? One set of answers concerns the demeaning individual and face-to-face interaction, just addressed. The other answers pertain to sheer demographic diversity of Black Americans, covered next.

Race-status associations, in practice, ignore all the structural contributors to race-status associations, such as the neighborhood effects, already described. Whites assume meritocracy, believing that status accurately reflects individual competence (Fiske, Dupree, Nicolas & Swencionis, 2016); globally, the perceived status-perceived competence correlation hovers around 0.80. (The only countries where people are more cynical about the status-merit link are former Communist ones; Grigoryan et al., 2020.) The point here is that status has many antecedents, and not all of them are merit (or other personal, stereotypical explanations, e.g., innately good/bad at math). Systemic factors such as neighborhood, school, family resources, connections, and especially race all receive no mention in the meritocracy account.

Whites do differentiate Black Americans by subcategories, e.g., by status, specifically social class, viewing low-income Black people as incompetent and untrustworthy, but Black professionals as competent and trustworthy (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002). Black Americans themselves differentiate several subtypes of Blacks likewise along a social-class dimension (Fiske, Bergsieker, Russell & Williams, 2009).

Status-keeping shortcuts are easier to maintain without information to the contrary, such as experiencing human variability. Whites with less exposure to Blacks are more overtly prejudiced as a function of structural features such as rural residence, where they encounter less diversity (Bai et al., 2020), and lack of education, where they experience less variability of ideas. As a structural matter, segregated White rural residence also predicts lower school quality partly because of the American policy of locally funding schools; this creates an association between a weaker tax base, rural location, ethnic homogeneity, and overt bias. These systemic factors interact to produce prejudice. As an earlier section shows, the social structure permeates American arrangements since the arrival of Whites on native lands.

Nevertheless, for most Whites, their isolated lives make them inexperienced about their Black fellow citizens. Housing segregation disfavors most Whites in experience with diversity, making them often inept and naïve when speaking about issues that are facts of Black lives. This means that Whites rely on cultural shortcuts to understand the Black people whose life experience they do not know. These cognitive representations derive from perceived structural patterns such as race-status associations and race-resource unfairness (Krysan & Crowder, 2017).

We have seen that Whites' racial beliefs are relatively automatic (implicit bias) and ambivalent (warmth/competence). The resulting associations (stereotypes) are more subtle than most people believe. They are consequently hard for anyone to detect in themselves (unexamined) or in any one person (under the radar), but the patterns appear systemically as aggregate biases. Supposing the aggregate biases are problematic, at least because they ignore variability, examine that more closely.

Aggregate bias ignores diversity

So far, this review has described the relentless systems of racism that limit opportunity and outcomes by race. Many Black Americans nevertheless succeed despite the rigged system. Black diversity thus results from those who escape the system, but also from African and Caribbean immigration, and from intermarriage. For Black students enrolled at selective colleges, especially, the diversity of their backgrounds is the main fact that underscores their success (Charles, Kramer, Massey & Torres, 2021). Any given White student's background is far more predictable than any given Black student's, which potentially ranges from extreme disadvantage to extreme wealth. For that minority (a third) of Black students whose segregated neighborhoods entail underfunded schools, gang violence, and concentrated police violence, their presence in college testifies to extraordinary resilience (Charles, Fischer, Mooney & Massey, 2009).

Most non-Black people do not realize that Black Americans are more diverse than most American ethnic groups. Underestimating their variety allows an oversimplified image to dominate every level, from mind to society, making it a systemic racism. This section describes diversity based on place, intermarriage, immigrant experience, parent education, and sheer escape.

A century ago, most Black Americans lived in the rural South, but after the Great Migration, most lived in cities, often in the North, usually hyper-segregated, but with family roots in both the North and South. By the turn of the current century, Black American student bodies at selective colleges were the most diverse in history, more biracial, more immigrant, more middle or upper class, and equally identifying themselves as both American and as Black (Charles et al., 2021). Black students, even as elites, show "unprecedented variation in terms of racial origins, skin tone, nativity, generation, class, and segregation" (Charles et al., 2021, Ch. 10).

Clusters of characteristics and attitudes illustrate the variety. Mixed-race students identify less with being Black, are comfortable with both Blacks and Whites, see Whites as less discriminatory, and report deep parental involvement in their schooling and cultural experiences. Mixed race students also have more White friends and fewer Black friends than their monoracial peers and are more likely to date outside the group, especially with Whites. In addition, mixed-race students are less likely to join majority-Black organizations on campus, and thus report less intense interaction with Blacks. Psychologically, the White view of biracial individuals continues to demonstrate hypodescent, i.e., the view that biracial individuals belong to the less advantaged group, or the cognitive expression of the "one drop rule." Combining the sociological and psychological angle demonstrates the lack of consistency between how biracial Americans are viewed and the way they see themselves.

Black students with an immigrant background are most comfortable with other Black students, and report having strict parents who expect obedience, respect, hard work, and family loyalty without hands-on, hovering involvement. First-generation immigrants, especially African immigrants (versus Caribbean ones), believe in meritocracy and see Whites as not so discriminatory. After a generation, idealism gives way to pragmatism: Hard work pays off. African immigrant origins predict reliably higher grades.

As for segregation, Black students growing up with more exposure to Whites feel closer to them but also view Whites as more discriminatory, a psychologically complex mental state to manage. In contrast, living in segregated neighborhoods especially exposes Black students to higher (the top third) levels of disorder and violence, leading them to view Whites as more distant and discriminatory. But parents are more protective, relying on strict discipline but not trying to use shame or guilt as an influence strategy (more frequent in Asian families).

As with all students, high-school GPA predicts college GPA. Besides that, again as with all students, Black women do better than Black men, as do those with educated parents. Differences in academic preparation vary by segregation in two ways: the more White students in their schools, the worse Black students' grades but the higher their SATs, suggesting more rigorous standards. Thus, the portraits of Black college students are diverse; generalizations are unreliable, except perhaps for one: resilience in the face of systemic bias and a diversity of adaptations to a variety of challenges.

We document Black diversity here for these reasons: First, to avoid making the litany of systemic Black disadvantages the sole image conveyed here. Second, because of segregation, many White people, including University faculty, see a Black person on campus and-assuming they realize this is a student-they presume the person comes from a low-income background, unprepared for college, with uneducated parents, native born, but with little experience outside the imagined ghetto, etc. This may be true for some small fraction of students, but not just the Black ones, and not true of most Black students on campus today. A third reason to remind the reader of Black diversity on campus is to highlight experiences of inter-racial contact as important one mechanism for overcoming racial bias, and-if scaled up to integrated neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces-for shifting systemic racism.

Contact: exposure to racial diversity

Psychology has 70 years of research to explain how this works, following Allport's ( 1954) contact hypothesis. In one meta-analytic perspective (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006), intergroup contact reduces prejudice, the more it meets Allport's conditions: shared goals, non-trivial interactions, authority sanctions, and rewarding results. Much of the process seems to be affect-driven. If the contact setting would afford the opportunity for friendship, the contact effect is stronger (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005). This is a useful reminder that much prejudice is emotional, not cognitive. In fact, a meta-analysis of 50 years of research on racist attitudes found that they predict racist behavior the most when they are emotions ("hating them") rather than stereotypes ("they are lazy") or even simple evaluations (2 on a 5-point scale) (Talaska et al., 2008).

Conclusion: systemic racism is individual/interpersonal and institutional/societal but rarely recognized

Segregated housing disadvantages many Black Americans, and its effects are far-reaching, not only in life opportunities and outcomes (education, employment, health, well-being) but also in the psychology of systemic racism. We have argued that case here. Most Whites fail to recognize and appreciate the growing diversity of America's Black population, which has arisen from a mixture of Black resilience, a growing middle class, rising intermarriage, and global-South immigration. Generally, White Americans-because of the segregation perpetuated to sustain their advantage-have limited exposure to Black Americans, so their knowledge is indirect, and based on cultural caricatures. Segregation allows White people to be clueless about race, and because racial bias is more automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent than people think, they fail to detect it in themselves and others. As a result, White people have many unexamined biases, undergirded by earlier stages of information processing (e.g., attention, perception, learning, memory, reasoning) that sustain such a lack of awareness. These cognitive errors and biases stem from lack of exposure, lack of the accurate evidence, and a lack of necessary knowledge.

The assumption here is that if people were simply made aware of the facts that have been described in the earlier sections, they would slap their palm to their head and immediately vote for reparations. But as readers may no doubt deduce on their own, confronting accurate data and internalizing it is not a smooth or pretty process. That our minds resist information that challenges certain types of prior beliefs is a fundamental discovery from the mind sciences. Basic cognitive processes such as motivated cognition help to maintain a lack of awareness of racial experiences as they exist on the ground. But no lack of awareness need exist.

The human ability for conscious awareness, deliberate thought, and the motivation to link values to behavior cannot be underestimated as vehicles of change. We have accomplished this regarding how we understand the relationship of Earth to our Sun, so we know it is not as it seems. If we choose, we can similarly put our minds to derive the best evidence to learn about the presence or absence of systemic racism. If we can acquire the appropriate knowledge (often hidden from our conscious perception), we will be more likely to remain open to evidence that shows its presence.

If we do not undertake this effort, it is at our own peril. If, in the twenty-first century, we cannot mount a new struggle to see the social world for what it is, we are by choice dooming ourselves to extended ignorance that will be costly to us, our society, and the world we inevitably leave to our descendants. Earlier we provided evidence about unexpected (by scientists) decreases in implicit sexuality bias (massive drop) and race bias (more modest change) since 2007. These data provide optimism that mental content that we cannot change at will is nonetheless capable of movement toward racial neutrality across the US.

In other words, who-we-have-been need not be the future-selves-we-are-becoming. Here, we demonstrated that grappling with the correct data is a necessary step on the path to understanding our role in the creation of systemic racism. Among the blind spots that we will need to shake off, once and for all, is the belief that racism is the product of a few bad people in our society, and that removing them from power will suffice to deal with the issue.

Notes

1. Space and time preclude our covering the targets' perspective, identity, resilience. Nor do we cover racial socialization in children.

2. Through the sensory and perceptual systems granted to our species by evolution, these dyadic and small-group social interactions evolve into larger and larger social units, such as the hundreds of so-called friends or millions of so-called followers on more recent forms of social media. Today we transcend ancestral, small-group interactions to generate larger-scale groups whose interactions occur on an exponential scale. The internet provides avenues for the high-speed transmission of individual attitudes, beliefs, values, as well as for propelling action across communities and nations. These communications have the potential to spread both social good and social harm, with explicit racial animus and implicit prejudicial bias being examples of the latter.

3. Using the most common measure of segregation (the dissimilarity index), in that year 94% Black metropolitan residents lived under conditions of "high" segregation (an index of 60 or greater on a 0-100 scale), meaning that at least 60% of Blacks would have to exchange neighborhoods with Whites to achieve an even distribution of the races across neighborhoods (Rugh & Massey, 2014). Moreover, in a subset of metropolitan areas, not only were Black residents unevenly distributed across neighborhoods, they were also isolated within overwhelmingly Black districts that were themselves densely clustered near the central business district, a geographic pattern that Massey and Denton ( 1989) labeled "hypersegregation."

4. The NLP fits more traditional findings, a form of cross-validation. Based on content analysis of an 84-adjective checklist, the language describing Black Americans did not change much, across samples from 1933 to 2007 (Bergsieker, Leslie, Constantine, & Fiske, 2012, Study 4): The most recent data describe ambivalent view of sociality (aggressive, gregarious, passionate), and some specific stereotypes (loud, talkative, religious, loyal to family, sportsmanlike, musical, materialistic), but saying nothing about competence. Neglecting to mention an obvious dimension can reveal taboo topics, stereotyping by omission (Bergsieker et al., 2012).

5. Black people may distrust Whites, too, but they have less standing (status and power) to do damage.

6. An odd anomaly: Abundant research describes Black people's generalized trust as lower then Whites' generalized trust. Also, social science has studied Black Americans' mistrust of government, business, healthcare, and education systems that have historically abused them (see next section). This would hardly seem puzzling enough to be the lion's share of the trust literature and to eclipse White Americans' pockets of mistrust. Specifically, no one seems to study Whites' mistrust of Black people. Overlooking the obvious is one symptom of a systemic bias.

7. The combination of status-competence and warmth-trustworthiness creates remarkably stable perceptions of social structure (Durante et al., 2015). In social systems across the globe, middle classes are stereotypically competent and warm (trustworthy) whereas homeless people are neither. And in the mixed quadrants, rich people seem competent but cold, whereas old people seem well-intentioned but incompetent. These class and age patterns are nearly universal. In contrast, ethnic, racial, religious, and other cultural stereotypes are accidents of history, reflecting what subset of a group arrived under what circumstances. Compare stereotypes of Chinese railroad workers in the nineteenth century to stereotypes of Chinese entrepreneurs in the twenty-first century.

8. Implicit bias is difficult to monitor, as noted. Yet another way that prejudice goes undetected, is in its modern form, of being exhibited less as outgroup harm and instead as ingroup help (Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014). Despite this ambiguity, the net effect is the same-just harder to detect, and even lauded, because helping is a prosocial act that garners praise.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the constructive comments of James Jones, Jeremey Wolfe, and Reviewer 1.

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1. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Mahzarin R. Banaji

2. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Susan T. Fiske & Douglas S. Massey

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Correspondence to Susan T. Fiske.

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Banaji, M.R., Fiske, S.T. & Massey, D.S. Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society. Cogn. Research 6, 82 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00349-3
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With your help, we pressured AT&T to stop funding the far-right network One America News. OAN was a major vehicle for Trump, and has continued to provide a "friendly" platform for his allies. We've seen correspondents use racial slurs, call for the execution of election officials, suggest shooting unhoused people - all without consequence. OAN consistently promotes hate-filled content, and disseminates dangerous misinformation about the 2020 elections and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine, with the goal of provoking their audience. Research revealed a major reason for the network's success was support from AT&T. AT&T should know better. So thousands of Color Of Change members wrote to AT&T CEO John Stankey, and we were heard. One America Network has been removed from DirectTV. This is another step towards making sure the media isn't allowed to amplify racist lies that lead to real-world violence against Black people.

Biden Grants Clemency to 70 People on Home Confinement

Throughout the pandemic, we've fought to get incarcerated people who pose no risk to their communities but could fall deathly ill with COVID sent home. On April 26, 2022, nearly 150,000 Color Of Change members helped convince President Biden to free 70 people on home confinement. That means they can live independently, pursue their dreams, spend time with friends and family without electronic monitors or other dehumanizing conditions of confinement. It is historic for a president to grant so many clemencies in their first term. But thousands more people deserve to be free - and risk being sent back due to minor technicalities or bureaucratic errors. People on home confinement have had to turn down jobs or miss funerals because they're outside of the range they're allowed to travel. Biden promised he'd end mass incarceration and cut the prison population in half. Help us hold him to that.

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Color Of Change - Color Of Change helps you do something real about injustice.

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Last January we launched a rapid response campaign following a wave of evictions at Holly Court Apartments in Tampa. Victoria Lee, a tenant there, used our OrganizeFor platform to mobilize thousands of members and amplify tenant demands to fix the plumbing, honor leases, and support tenants who'd been illegally pushed out.

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"I'm not a racist."

That's what Amy Cooper, a white woman, said when she publicly apologized for calling the police on a black man bird-watching in Central Park.

The words rang especially hollow coming from Cooper. After all, the previous day she had used her position as a white woman to summon police - and the potential for police violence - against editor and birder Christian Cooper after he asked her to put her dog on a leash. "I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life," she says in a video that quickly went viral.

Not everyone acquires the overnight infamy of Amy Cooper. But her claim of non-racism was a familiar one. If asked, most people would probably say they are not racist. And they're especially likely to say it after they've already done something racist. As Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, notes in his book How to Be an Antiracist, "When racist ideas resound, denials that those ideas are racist typically follow."

But as Kendi also notes, it's not enough to simply be "not racist." "The opposite of 'racist' isn't 'not racist,'" he writes. "It is 'antiracist.'"

The idea of anti-racism has been getting a lot of attention in recent days as Americans around the country rise up against police violence. But the idea is far from new, with roots in decades of civil rights work by black Americans, said Malini Ranganathan, a faculty team lead at the Antiracist Research and Policy Center.

In recent years, thanks to the work of Kendi and others, the term itself has come to be used to describe what it means to actively fight against racism rather than passively claim to be non-racist. Anti-racism involves "taking stock of and eradicating policies that are racist, that have racist outcomes," Ranganathan said, "and making sure that ultimately, we're working towards a much more egalitarian, emancipatory society."

Part of that work is acknowledging our own positions in a white supremacist system. So I should acknowledge that I am a white woman, and as such, I can't talk about what it feels like to experience racism, or to fight against it as a person of color. But it's also not the responsibility of people of color to fix racism, or explain to white people how not to be racist. As Dena Simmons, a scholar and practitioner of social-emotional learning and equity and author of the upcoming book White Rules for Black People, put it, "Don't ask the wounded to do the work."

So I spoke to experts on the topic to help people - including myself - better understand what anti-racism means and what it looks like in practice. "White folks always want to know how they can do better," Simmons said. "I say, start by doing something."

The history and meaning of anti-racism

The concept of anti-racism has its roots in abolition, Ranganathan said - not just the end of slavery but also the call for structural changes in a post-emancipation society, like the eradication of prisons. The idea has "been around throughout the 20th-century civil rights movements" as well, Ranganathan said. More recently, Kendi and other scholars and activists have used the term "anti-racist" specifically to make the point that "it's not sufficient merely to be non-racist," Ranganathan said.

"One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist," Kendi writes in How to Be an Antiracist, published in 2019. " One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist."

"There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist,'" Kendi continues. "The claim of 'not racist' neutrality is a mask for racism."

"The opposite of 'racist' isn't 'not racist.' It is 'antiracist.'"

To be an anti-racist, Kendi and others say, requires an understanding of history - an understanding that racial disparities in America have their roots, not in some failing by people of color but in policies that serve to prop up white supremacy. The coronavirus pandemic, during which black and Latinx people in many communities have been disproportionately likely to become ill and die, is just one example. As Kendi writes at the Atlantic, "Why are black (and Latino) people during this pandemic less likely to be working from home; less likely to be insured; more likely to live in trauma-care deserts, lacking access to advanced emergency care; and more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods?"

The answer, he writes, is simple: racism.

Specifically, redlining and other forms of housing discrimination have made black Americans more likely to live in neighborhoods affected by environmental contamination that federal and state officials have been slow to respond to, which increases the rates of chronic illness. Those high rates of chronic illness, in turn, make people more vulnerable to Covid-19. In Flint, Michigan, for example, where much of the majority-black population has been affected by lead-contaminated drinking water, the pandemic is "a crisis on top of a crisis with a side of crisis," Mayor Sheldon Neeley told Vox's Khushbu Shah.

Anti-racism is understanding how years of federal, state, and local policies have placed communities of color in the crises they face today, and calling those policies out for what they are: racist.

It also requires an understanding of one's own position in a racist society, many say, an acknowledgment that you can't simply opt out of living in white supremacy by saying you're "not a racist" - you have to actively fight against it. "Anti-racism is an acknowledgment of privilege in a way that, I think, simply disavowing racism is not," Ranganathan said. "It takes seriously that we all are situated into different matrices of power and privilege, and the first step is to take stock of that and not to disavow it or invisibilize it."

Asked to define anti-racism, writer and middle-school teacher Christina Torres cited Beverly Daniel Tatum's conception of racism as a moving walkway. "We're all on the moving walkway," Torres said. "If you're not racist, you're kind of just standing still on the moving walkway, but you're still complicit in societal racism because you're part of society."

"The only way to be anti-racist is to walk in the other direction," Torres said.

The practice of anti-racism

As for how to actually walk against the tide of racism, experts say one key step is educating yourself. White people "need [to] listen to the things that people of color have been telling them for years," Cornelius Minor, an educator and author of the book We Got This.: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be, told Vox. "O ne of white folks' favorite things to do is to claim that they didn't know."

But it's not the job of people of color to educate white people about racism or anti-racism. "I'm the victim of racism, and now you want me to try to solve the problem," Simmons says she recently told colleagues. "The problem does not lie within me, it lies within the system that you benefit from."

Instead, people can seek out the many resources already available on anti-racism. In recent days, many publications, including the Guardian, USA Today, and Time, have posted anti-racist reading lists. Many people have also shared resources on social media.

Resources for those wanting to educate themselves and our children about anti-racism. Please take some time so we can improve this world we're currently living in. I will continue to add resources as I find them. #BlackLivesMatter Anti-Racism Resources https://t.co/TAQZBXjqEl
- Augusta Baker Endowed Chair at the U of SC (@BakerChair) May 30, 2020

Once you've educated yourself, the next step is "to actually take action that benefits the members of your community," Minor said.

On Tuesday, many people posted black squares on Instagram as part of the "Blackout Tuesday" campaign. But some noted that the idea could actually harm the movement for racial justice by clogging the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, which activists use to share actual information, with blank posts. Moreover, as Recode's Rebecca Heilweil reports, some say that "just posting a black square and then logging off gives both brands and nonblack people a way of signaling support on social media without providing any real help."

Beyond just posting something, real action could include talking to friends and relatives about their own racism.

"White folks get really brave on social media, but then really scared when they're around their grandparents," Minor said. "Take that same energy that you got for Twitter, and go sit down with your uncle."

As with other aspects of anti-racism, there are many resources available for talking to white family members about racism - here's one from Teaching Tolerance, and another by Jamilah King at Mother Jones.

For white parents, it's also crucial to teach kids about race and anti-racism. That can be as simple as "pointing out who's in the cartoon and who's not present," Minor said. "Why do we think those people are not here?"

But it also requires thinking about who is in your child's world. "White folks have to actively choose not to live around white folks," Simmons said. For many white people in their daily lives, "You can see folks of color but they're serving your food, they're cleaning your houses," she continued, and so white parents need to put their kids in situations where they can interact with people of color in a meaningful way.

"Let them see the world outside themselves," Simmons said, but "be careful not to be voyeurs."

As with other aspects of anti-racism, there are many resources available for parents. Torres recommends Teaching Tolerance, a website with resources designed for the classroom that could be adapted at home, and the work of anti-bias educator Liz Kleinrock. The New York Times has also compiled a list of books to help parents explain racism and protest to kids.

And beyond educating those in your family and community, anti-racism is also about identifying and fighting racist practices and policies when you see them, Ranganathan said. Policing is an obvious one in this moment, but others include standardized testing that favors white students and air-pollution standards that leave black and Latinx people living in toxic neighborhoods. "To be anti-racist would be to be bold enough to call out these policies as racist," Ranganathan said.

It's also about identifying the teachers, politicians, and thought leaders who are working against these policies. "To be anti-racist would be to give support to these actors, and to throw your weight behind these organizations and these types of conversations," Ranganathan explained.

The work of anti-racism can't stop next month, next year, or when the news cycle moves on. Right now, a lot of white people are paying attention to racism and police violence "because they have no choice," Simmons said. They're stuck at home because of the pandemic, and the protests are all over the media.

But anti-racism can't be something people think about only while it's convenient, Simmons said. "It has to be a commitment that you make."

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It's not enough to be "not racist," experts and educators say.

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Anti-Asian racism and violent attacks on Asian elderly have only increased in recent months. Since COVID-19 became news in the United States, hate speech and violence against the AAPI community has run rampant. In February 2021, attacks, particularly on elderly Asian Americans, have spiked. Unfortun…

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Listen to ‘1619,’ a Podcast From The New York Times (Published 2020)

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An audio series on how slavery has transformed America, connecting past and present through the oldest form of storytelling.

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This is how the news should sound. Twenty minutes a day, five days a week, hosted by Michael Barbaro and Sabrina Tavernise and powered by New York Times journalism.

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What's CODE SWITCH? It's the fearless conversations about race that you've been waiting for. Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race with empathy and humor. We explore how race affects every part of society - from politics and pop culture to history, food and everything in between.

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10 Documentaries To Watch About Race Instead Of Asking A Person Of Colour To Explain Things For You

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It's important now more than ever that Australians engage in important conversations about race.

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Racial Diversity and Retention Rates of Psychology Faculty in Washington State Public Universities

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Racial Diversity and Retention Rates of Psychology Faculty in Washington State Public Universities

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Ethnic-Racial Socialization of White Children by White Parents: A Systematic Review

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Ethnic-Racial Socialization of White Children by White Parents: A Systematic Review

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Advancing Anti-Racism and Anti-Ableism in Transition: Equity-Oriented Indicators for Research

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Advancing Anti-Racism and Anti-Ableism in Transition: Equity-Oriented Indicators for Research

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Race, Healthcare, and Health Disparities: A Critical Review and Recommendations for Advancing Health Equity

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Race, Healthcare, and Health Disparities: A Critical Review and Recommendations for Advancing Health Equity

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Racism and mental health | Black History Month

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From Woke to Work: The Anti-Racist Journey

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This is From Woke to Work: The Anti-Racist Journey. Hosted by Kamala Avila-Salmon, she talks about what it means to go from a self-proclaimed ally to an effective anti-racist. Whether you're an ally that's ready to take action or a Black person looking for a place to direct all those ally questio...

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What's CODE SWITCH? It's the fearless conversations about race that you've been waiting for. Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race with empathy and humor. We explore how race affects every part of society - from politics and pop culture to history, food and everything in between.

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Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

If I could only reply to others reviews

At _2020Unties_if that's even right but I always check out reviews to get a pulse on what a podcast is so I can listen an make my own decisions...but I haven't even heard this one yet an was blown away by the complaint that this podcast only talks on black people and black and white issues and how it's disappointing that it doesn't represent the country....welp did you see the title an the description of this podcast before you listened or made that wild statement???
Reading is fundamental...

Always informative.

I always learn a lot.

Powerfully informative

This podcast is compelling and very important. Every single episode presents a lesson on how we mitigate the disease of racism and achieve true liberation. Exceptional!

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‎Intersectionality Matters! on Apple Podcasts

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Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

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The Sharpeville Massacre - standing up against racism.

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Choosing love and finding power in Blackness

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Choosing love and finding power in Blackness

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EducAfro specifically focuses on the Quilombolas community, the direct descendants of enslaved Africans forcibly brought to Brazil, and other Afro-Brazilians pursuing higher education and living in society in general. With the NGO, in 2017, Rodrigues do Prado worked on a project to defend the constitutionality of affirmative action in the public sector in Brazil.

"Back then, we had to convince ministros (judges at the federal level) of the importance of that law for the prosperity of African descendants in Brazil, draft reports on the efficacy of the law and show the low number of Black Brazilians in high positions as compared with the census. This revealed a lack of representation," she said. "Fortunately, we had 11 judges in favour who reaffirmed the constitutionality of the law."

In 2017, EducAfro also represented a client who endured racial discrimination in the workplace where her manager prohibited her from wearing her natural Afro hair, claiming it contravened the company's dress code.

"That dress code showed no images of people of African descent. After six months at the company, my client was summarily fired although she showed good performance," she said. EducAfro sued the company for discrimination based on race and unequal treatment compared with their client's white colleagues.

"They could wear their hair, even loosened, so our client was dealing with serious circumstances of institutional racism because of the dress code and the low number of employees of African descent," Rodrigues do Prado said. "We asked for compensation for moral damages and to amend the dress code to better represent people of African descent. We won our case when we appealed to the Labour Court at the federal level where the right was finally recognised as a national precedent."

In 2022, Rodrigues do Prado joined UN Human Rights' Fellowship Programme for People of African Descent. The Fellowship programme is an intensive human rights training for people from the African diaspora, who work to promote the rights of people of African descent. It enables participants to learn about and deepen their understanding of the international human rights law and the UN human rights system, the international legal framework to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and intersecting issues with a focus on people of African descent.

For Rodrigues do Prado, who said that her country has many complex contradictions in terms of race, gender, class and identity, the Fellowship Programme represented a good opportunity to engage with other human rights defenders from across the globe to advance the objectives of the International Decade for People of African Descent, particularly at a time when the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent was holding its first session in Geneva.

"[The Fellowship Programme] was even more powerful than I thought because, more than ever, the UN is concerned about the intersectionality of multiple forms of discrimination to eradicate racism and ensure the commitment of countries to achieve a world where people of African descent can live in dignity and non-discrimination," she said.

Rodrigues do Prado described the experience as "strengthening" for her Blackness and revealing of "how powerful it becomes once [people of African descent] are together."

"More than profound issues, people of African descent experience joy and happiness," she said. "Learning directly from UN human rights mechanisms and instruments, and about the measures that States have to take, especially through the [Permanent Forum on People of African Descent], I realized the importance of civil society to push those tools - which is crucial to understand that we have so many issues to deal with but we have to keep our voices very loud."
This story is part of an occasional series of stories of individuals or organizations that stand up for human rights. Throughout the month of March, chosen by UN Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, to highlight Racial Justice as part of his Human Rights 75 Initiative, we hear the voices of defenders acting against racism. The views expressed in these stories do not necessarily reflect the position and opinions of UN Human Rights.

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Choosing love and finding power in Blackness

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Monique Rodrigues do Prado, former UN Fellow of African descent, has adopted love as a spiritual practice to achieve equality and dignity for Afro-Brazilians. "My Blackness becomes more powerful once we are together," she says.

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www.kateschatz.com

www.radamericanwomen.com

I am Kate Schatz (pronounced 'Shots'). I'm a queer feminist writer, educator, public speaker, and activist. I am the co-author, along with W. Kamau Bell, of Do the Work: An Antiracist Activity Book, as well as the author the New York Times bestselling "Rad Women" book series, which includes Rad American Women A-Z (City Lights Books), Rad Women Worldwide, Rad Girls Can, Rad American History A-Z, and the illustrated journal My Rad Life: A Journal (Ten Speed Press).

I learned to read in a clawfoot bathtub filled with pillows in a bookstore called Hicklebee's; after that, I often got in trouble for reading at the dinner table (and now my daughter does the EXACT same thing). I wrote my first book when I was in 2nd grade: it was called Little Sisters, and it was basically Ramona Quimby fan fiction. I still have it! I organized my first protest in 6th grade when I became a vegetarian and convinced my friends to stop eating Burger King because they were clear-cutting rainforests to graze cattle. I've been reading, writing, and standing up for justice ever since. I still love Ramona Quimby, and I still don't eat meat.

My book of fiction, Rid of Me: A Story, was published in 2006 as part of the acclaimed 33 1/3 series. Stories, essays, and articles have been published in LENNY, Buzzfeed, Signature, Oxford American, Denver Quarterly, Joyland, East Bay Express, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. My short story "Folsom, Survivor" was a 2010 Notable Short Story in Best American Short Stories 2011. I wrote the introduction to "Kamala", a collection of feminist fairytales from Feminist Press, and I contributed an essay on whiteness, race, and post-election reckoning in the anthology "Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times."

I've appeared on msnbc; numerous NPR affiliates; lots of great podcasts; and at 100s of schools, universities, libraries, non-profit organizations, and fancy tech companies all over the country to talk about my books and how we can empower ALL young people to be "rad", and to work to make the world a better place.

I live in the Bay Area with my family.

I am represented by the fabulous agent Charlotte Sheedy.

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Do the Work!: An Antiracist Activity Book

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Do the Work!: An Antiracist Activity Book [Bell, W. Kamau, Schatz, Kate] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Do the Work!: An Antiracist Activity Book

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Anti-racist activist Faitth Brooks developed this revolutionary guided journal to help you commit to the cause and become an authentic ally. With this book you can work from the inside out as you unpack your own biases and shortcomings, work through the influence of interlocking systems of oppression, and figure out how to use your privilege for good.

Within these pages you'll find hard questions about race and the space for you to answer without judgment so you can examine, process, and grow in your anti-racist journey at your own pace. Each chapter starts with insightful anecdotes from Faitth's lived experiences to frame the themes you will explore through prompts designed to help you work through each concept.

This journal invites you to look at your upbringing and how it shaped you, investigate your fears in doing the work of anti-racism, learn how to practice humility when you make mistakes as well as engage with the history of racism and its legacy through homework curated to help further your understanding of each chapter's issues. By the end, you will be able to take inventory of your strengths and figure out how you can help make the world more just. In working through this journal, you can become a better ally one question at a time.

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The Anti-Racism Journal: Questions and Practices to Move Beyond Performative Allyship

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The Anti-Racism Journal: Questions and Practices to Move Beyond Performative Allyship [Brooks, Faitth] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Anti-Racism Journal: Questions and Practices to Move Beyond Performative Allyship

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How to Be an Antiracist [Kendi, Ibram X.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. How to Be an Antiracist