Stokely Carmichael
2,468 words
To understand the term “institutional racism” as a political device, one needs to distinguish its natural from its anti-racist meaning. For most people it denotes pervasive racial discrimination in an institution, but in its anti-racist meaning it denotes the opposite: namely, an institution’s practice of treating all the same without regard to race. How can this be?
The term originated, apparently, with the Black Power advocate Stokeley Carmichael in the 1960s, as a way of attacking institutions that placed black people in less enviable positions than whites, such as schools, which black children left with fewer qualifications, and the police, who arrested young black men at a higher rate. But given differences between the races, this is just what...