amigocabal wrote:
I am aware that courts struck down institutional racism the past. See e.g., Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). It does beg the question of how it continues despite the threat of Sec. 1983 actions.
It's not legal institutional racism, as in "enshrined in law", but rather racist attitudes that people within different governmental and non-governmental bureaucracies and administrations, and is especially rampant in the U.S. Criminal Justice System in a way that benefits whites and is detrimental to minorities, especially blacks who are more likely to face harsher punishments (especially incarceration, leading some to call it the "Prison Industrial Complex" where private companies get state contracts to run private prisons and/or administer the state owned facilities that get paid per prisoner).
I'm not going to go more in-depth other than to say you should look it up because it's a self feeding machine of ruined lives involving everything from high powered lobbyists to congressional representation. But basically if you're black and commit the exact same offense and have the same criminal history as a white person, you're much more likely to face a harsher penalty, including incarceration.
That's the type of institutional racism we're talking about.