College campuses are quiet on summer weekends and it’s hard to find your way. You might know which building you’re looking for — it’s named after a rich donor, a distinguished graduate — but it doesn’t have an address. You squint at a campus map. You look around for someone to ask for directions.
A few weekends ago, I stood with another volunteer near a small parking lot at Sacramento State, holding a Black Lives Matter sign. We were there to let Freedom School attendees know they had found the right place. Drivers who were just passing by gave us confused looks, thinking we had chosen to hold a mini-protest on a comically low-traffic street. Campus police circled us the first weekend; city police circled us the next.
Once everyone had arrived and eaten lunch, we started the workshops, which were put together into a powerfully cohesive program by BLM Sacramento organizers1,2. Here, I am going to focus in on lessons learned from Flojuane Cofer’s wellness workshop. Flojuane is an epidemiologist working to articulate how oppression affects our heath. In this workshop, she queued us into some of her preferred terms for describing different forms of racism. These terms have been clarifying for me in my own work, so, I will offer them here with my interpretation and elaboration.
Personally mediated racism
This occurs when a person or small group acts abusively due to racial hatred (conscious or subconscious) towards another person or small group. In these cases, the roles of perpetrator and victim are clear. These are cataclysmic events that rely on underlying structural and cultural racism to ensure that the perpetrators avoid consequences as a general rule.
Personally mediated racism is easy to identify and is often misleadingly used as a straw-man in discussions of race. In other words, the absence of personally mediated racism is said to mean that racism isn’t at play. This line of reasoning is deeply misleading, because there are other forms of racism that work in more insidious and significant ways.
Institutional & structural racism
This is what happens when racism meets institutional power. Institutional racism is present when racism is incorporated into laws and corporate policies or into the unwritten norms of organizations. Structural racism is institutional racism multiplied across a wide variety of different institutions. Even if personally mediated racism disappeared overnight, structural racism would continue to maintain our deeply unjust status quo.
The past couple centuries of property rights in the U.S. offer some very clear lessons in how structural racism works. The origins of property rights in the U.S. are themselves rooted in racial domination, especially chattel slavery (by which Africans were turned into property) and forced relocation and genocide of Native Americans (by which occupied land was turned into property)3. Post-emancipation, property rights continued to ensure that resources were extracted from black communities. Segregation, red-lining, and discriminatory banking worked to concentrate black residences in ghettoes and to prevent us from owning our homes. Today, where we attend school, how we are policed, where we get our food, and the financing options we receive are dictated by this history4.
Cultural racism & appropriation
Cultural racism occurs when characteristics associated with blackness and other oppressed identities are devalued and considered deviant, while characteristics associated with whiteness are valued and considered standard. Anything we do can be policed by cultural racism: the way we speak5,6, the way we move, the way we dress7, and the way we act in relationship to others8. It can cause us to experience exclusion and alienation in white spaces, even without instances of personally mediated racism taking place.
Cultural appropriation is a painfully ironic twist to cultural racism. Cultural appropriation occurs when the practices of oppressed groups that were once devalued and scorned are lifted out of their original cultures and incorporated into mainstream white culture. Immense profits tend to follow, accrued almost entirely outside of the communities that came up with these things in the first place; practices are commodified and their original contexts are tossed aside9.
These terms are not all-encompassing, nor are they totally distinct from one another. Still, I hope they will help you clarify your thoughts and discussions on race. Go forth, and argue productively!
1 Check out and support Black Lives Matter Sacramento.
2 Check out the Freedom School program.
3 For more on blackness and property ownership in the U.S., check out this scholarly article by Margalynne Armstrong.
4 For more on structural racism and housing, check out this popular article by Ta-nehisi Coates.
5 For more on language, check out this short interview with H. Samy Alim (who was also at Freedom School!), discussing his book, Articulate While Black: Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S.
6 “This is AMERICA and anything is possible when you sound white on the phone.” -Jaboukie Young White on instagram will make you laugh/cry.
7 This dress code posted a couple years ago at Blake’s in Atlanta, GA, is such a neatly packaged example, it is almost too easy.
8 For a black feminist perspective on cultural racism, check out Controlling Images and Black Women’s Oppression by Patricia Hill Collins.
9 For a quick and easy read on cultural appropriation and yoga, check out this article by Maisha Z. Johnson and nisha ahuja.