Racism in the United States operates on multiple levels simultaneously — from individual acts of bigotry to calculated political strategies to deeply embedded institutional structures. Understanding these distinct forms reveals how racial inequality persists even as explicit prejudice becomes less socially acceptable.
Explicit racism — overt expressions of racial prejudice through discriminatory attitudes, slurs, or intentional acts — represents the traditional understanding of racism centered on individual hatred. But this framework fails to capture how racism functions as a deliberate political tool. Strategic racism, by contrast, is not an expression of prejudice but a coldly calculated decision to seek advantage by manipulating the prejudice in others, intentionally using veiled terms to stimulate racial animosity and stoke dangerous resentments, as detailed in Dog Whistles and Ballot Boxes: Race in Republican Electoral Strategy.
The distinction lies in motivation and mechanism. Strategic racism involves powerful actors — including political parties, right-wing propaganda systems, and wealthy corporations — purposefully stoking racial conflict to advance economic agendas that benefit the rich while harming working-class voters of all races. Politicians strategically use language to push people to react to their unconscious racial fears while assuring them they are acting in concordance with their conscious commitments to rejecting racism. This allows voters to react in racist ways while believing they are not racist.
Beyond individual prejudice and strategic manipulation lies a third dimension: structural racism embedded in the organization of institutions themselves. Social Equality & Civil Rights defines systemic racism as pervasively and deeply embedded in systems, laws, policies, and entrenched practices that produce, condone, and perpetuate widespread unfair treatment and oppression of people of color. These structural mechanisms do not require the actions or intent of individuals — once you create an organized system, it continues to produce the same outcomes regardless of intent.
While institutional racism refers to discrimination within a single institution, structural racism describes broader racialized phenomena involving interconnected systems across societal domains: economic, educational, political, social, and criminal-legal. Examples include residential segregation, unfair lending practices and barriers to wealth accumulation, schools' dependence on local property taxes, environmental injustice, biased policing and sentencing, and voter suppression policies. The key aspect is that these macro-level mechanisms operate independent of individual intentions, so that even if individual racism were completely eliminated, racial inequities would likely remain unchanged.
As explicit prejudice became less socially acceptable, racism evolved into subtler forms. Colorblindness — the ideology that posits the best way to end discrimination is by treating individuals without regard to race — has become the dominant framework. Yet as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva noted, contemporary racial oppression operates through structures that "are increasingly covert, are embedded in normal operations of institutions, avoid direct racial terminology, and are invisible to most Whites," according to A History of Racism in the Americas.
The 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard exemplifies this adaptation: The Court ruled against affirmative action in college admissions, using colorblind rhetoric to dismantle policies designed to address historical inequities. Justice Clarence Thomas argued that "all forms of discrimination based on race — including so-called affirmative action — are prohibited under the Constitution," framing race-conscious remedies as equivalent to historical discrimination.
Implicit bias — mental processes that stimulate negative attitudes about people outside one's "in group" without conscious awareness — operates alongside colorblind ideology. Research by Derald Wing Sue at Columbia University documents how BIPOC experience microaggressions every day, from morning until night. These everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights communicate hostile or derogatory messages based solely on marginalized group membership. Implicit biases impact nearly every aspect of life for marginalized people, from how teachers view them in preschool to how doctors understand their pain to whether they get callbacks for jobs.
Healthcare provides stark evidence of how structural racism produces measurable harm. Oceania Philosophy-Sir Mason Durie documents how structural racism in US health care policy structures the system to advantage the White population and disadvantage racial and ethnic minority populations. Race-adjusted algorithms exemplify this: race-corrected estimations of glomerular filtration rate are based on the unscientifically supported belief that Black people are more muscular and have higher creatinine levels, which may result in delays in diagnosing renal disease and reduced access to transplantation. There is no biological evidence for the concept of race as a genomic human subspecies to explain health disparities.
Maternal mortality remains a public health crisis disproportionately affecting Black women. In 2021, the national maternal mortality rate was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, but the rate among non-Hispanic Black women was 69.9 per 100,000 — nearly 2.6 times higher than among non-Hispanic White women. A 2023 KFF survey found that about one in five Black women report being treated unfairly by healthcare providers because of their racial background, and 22% of Black women who were pregnant or gave birth in the past ten years say they were refused pain medication they thought they needed.
These disparities reflect systemic barriers. Black households' median income in 2022 was $52,860 compared to $81,060 for non-Hispanic white households, with Black households twice as likely to live in poverty. Non-Hispanic Blacks are about 70% more likely than non-Hispanic whites to lack health insurance coverage. Racial Bias in U.S. Law and Policing notes that the life expectancy of Black Americans is four years lower than white Americans — an institutional disparity that appears built into American society.
Housing, Education, and Urban Policy documents how racial and ethnic minorities and low-socioeconomic groups are disproportionately burdened by harmful environmental exposures in their homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Historical redlining created patterns that persist today: neighborhoods marked as high-risk for investment over eight decades ago are 74% low-to-moderate income and 64% minority today.
A 2022 study by UC Berkeley and University of Washington researchers found that neighborhoods subject to redlining in the 1930s tend to have higher levels of air pollution many decades later. Because over 60% of previously D-graded communities remain nonwhite, people of color are disproportionately exposed to greater pollution levels. Health impacts include respiratory problems such as asthma, bronchitis, and reduced lung function, as well as cardiovascular diseases, adverse birth outcomes, and premature death. People living in neighborhoods shaped by redlining have lifespans up to 30 years less than other nearby areas in the same city.
Environmental racism also constrains educational outcomes. Research using Florida data from 1994-2002 found that prenatal exposure to Superfund pollution has long-term consequences on academic achievement, behavioral incidents, grade repetition, and cognitive disabilities, with children living within two miles of an uncleaned Superfund site experiencing a 23% increase in cognitive disabilities. A nationwide panel study aggregating more than 250 million academic achievement tests from 10,921 school districts over 7 years found that ambient air pollution was associated with lower academic performance, with implications for children's educational and occupational attainment across the life course.
Property values suffer as well. Historical lack of resources, investment, and development in redlined areas resulted in poor infrastructure that increases vulnerability to environmental hazards. Redlining has served as a cyclical mechanism keeping certain communities underserved, overburdened, and impoverished, preventing minorities from building wealth and owning homes.
Recent scholarship has advanced methods for measuring structural racism empirically. In 2024, researchers Tyson Brown and Patricia Homan published groundbreaking work developing latent measures of structural racism across U.S. states, finding that structural racism is consistently associated with worse health for Black people but not White people. Less than 1% of studies on racialized health inequities have empirically examined their root cause: structural racism, representing a disconnect between conceptualization and measurement.
The persistence of structural racism demonstrates that addressing one aspect does not prevent inequity from shifting "the work of inequity from one institution to another." Although historical redlining was outlawed via the Fair Housing Act of 1968, associations between contemporary redlining and adverse health demonstrate how structural racism adapts. Recent policy developments have moved backward: On March 27, 2025, the Trump administration announced an Executive Order reorganizing HHS that disrupted key programs affecting maternal health, including laying off most staff in the CDC's Division of Reproductive Health, halting community-based maternal health grants, erasing the prior White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis, and closing several federal offices that supported state and local efforts to address racial disparities in maternal care.
Racism in the United States operates simultaneously as individual prejudice, strategic political manipulation, and structural institutional design. Understanding these distinct forms reveals why racial inequalities persist despite declining explicit prejudice. Strategic racism allows powerful actors to exploit racial fears for political and economic gain while maintaining plausible deniability. Structural racism embeds inequality into institutional operations that continue producing disparate outcomes regardless of individual intent. Contemporary adaptations like colorblind ideology and implicit bias allow racial hierarchies to function while appearing race-neutral.
The evidence from healthcare, environmental exposure, and educational outcomes demonstrates that structural racism produces measurable, life-threatening harm. Maternal mortality rates, life expectancy gaps, pollution exposure, and educational achievement all reflect interconnected systems that disadvantage communities of color. Addressing these inequalities requires moving beyond individual prejudice to dismantle the institutional structures and strategic political manipulation that maintain racial hierarchies. Little progress has been made in advancing equity in health care over the past two decades, and racial and ethnic inequities remain a fundamental flaw of the nation's systems. Recognition of structural racism as a fundamental cause of disparities represents a necessary first step, but meaningful change requires sustained intervention across interconnected institutional domains.
Composed with Quarex Compose