This Article builds upon the insights of Professor Calmore in fashioning a structural model for conceptualizing racism in its contemporary form. This model extends beyond our commonly understood, traditional model of racism as either a product of individual intentional racism or formally race-neutral policies and practices that have the effect of disadvantaging certain racial or ethnic groups. Structural racism or racialization emphasizes the interaction of multiple institutions in an ongoing process of producing racialized outcomes. Research in the field of dynamic and complex systems theory teaches that the structures matter. The structure of a system gives rise to its behavior. A systems approach helps illuminate the ways in which individual and institutional behavior interact across domains and over time to produce unintended consequences with clear racialized effects. Research in cognitive psychology demonstrates how subconscious attitudes can produce discriminatory decisions without conscious awareness. The individualistic anti-discrimination approach to addressing racism will have great difficulty interrupting these processes.
The racial and economic stratification of our urban metropolises is a product of federal subsidies a half-century ago and early housing policy decisions, as well as contemporary land use policies that encourage large lot development and low-income housing policies that concentrate poor renters into struggling pockets of poverty and isolation. The case of Thompson v. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development provides an instructive example of how a structural racism framework can inform legal advocacy efforts to reverse these trends. Remedying racial isolation and promoting access to opportunity requires an approach that is goal-driven and adaptive to the dynamic nature of the housing market. An "opportunity index" composed of variables that correlate to opportunity can be utilized by institutional actors to guide their efforts.
By adding a structural lens to previous individual and institutional analyses of racism, we arrive at a more accurate diagnostic tool for the social ills that develop along racial lines. A structural racism lens will help us identify macro-level dynamics that have micro-level consequences for all American citizens and the policy areas that we can tap to rebuild our failing structures.