Institutional Racism

Despite having no biological reality, race operates as a principal identity at local and national levels therefore race is culturally real. I strongly believe that race has become a factor that people use to understand each other through the use of stereotyping shaped by an individuals racial group. Race is important because it is measurement of phenotype, which is passed down through ancestry. In order to authentically claim a particular identity you must have the socially constructed phenotype of that racial group in order to have a holistic understanding of what it means to identify as that particular group. This is due to the fact that race often effects the experience a person has throughout his or her life. For example in the article …show more content…
According to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva the ideology of color-blind racism that has emerged today is viewed through abstract liberalism, which ignores the systematic issues at play, confuses individual and group issues, and ignores white privilege. This view excludes the long-standing discrimination that makes up a persons current social, economic, and political position. In the documentary Precious Knowledge, the superintendent of the school stated, “We don’t see ourselves through different races, but as individuals.” Institutional racism is deeply embedded in through laws, institutions, and agreed upon values and practices, which offers loopholes to the people with power within our country to claim that race is no longer of importance, but ideologies that support individuality. It would be incredible if we could “judge someone by the context of their character and not the color of their skin” as stated by the white male State Senator John Huppenthal, who privileges from his position within the system and political power. The ideology of individualism has allowed people to accept their privileges while others to do not have that option, and conduct policies and interpersonal racism that are aimed at racial groups as a whole, do not …show more content…
The classes taught the students about the systematic structures within the United States, which gave them a holistic understanding of the racial and ethnic issues at play that relate to their personal position, as well as others within the system. Holism is the idea that all the properties of a given system cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone, but instead the system as a whole determines an important way how they parts behave. This approach to the racial and ethnic issues that are occurring within the United States is vital, while politicians rely on the individualistic ideology, and disregard all of the parts of the system that make up their given position and experience. While the people who yield excessive power within the country use the very narrow racial optic view of the classes as a divisive issue based on the ideology of individualism, the teachers curriculum and structure of the class embodies a holistic approach to teaching the students that does not disregard or emphasize any one part of the system apart from the whole

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