Individual, institutional and structural racism

Conversations about racism in public agencies often stall because people are using the same word for different things. One person hears an accusation about someone's character. Another is describing a pattern in outcomes that no single person created. Leaders can make these conversations more productive by naming the level of analysis first. The Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE), in its Racial Equity Toolkit, separates three levels. Individual racism is pre-judgment, bias or discrimination based on race by an individual. Institutional racism is policies, practices and procedures that work better for white people than for people of color, often unintentionally. Structural racism is the history and current reality of institutional racism across many institutions, combining to create a system that negatively affects communities of color.

Race Forward uses a similar map. It describes internalized and interpersonal racism as the individual level, and institutional and structural racism as the systemic level. Its definition of structural racism stresses that inequities accumulate across institutions, policies, history and culture, so that an advantage or burden in one system (housing, for example) carries into others (schooling, employment, health, benefits). The details of wording differ between organizations, and you should cite the definition you actually use. What the definitions share is more important than their differences: the institutional and structural levels are about how systems operate, not about what is in any one person's heart.

This matters for DHS and DSD leaders because most of our influence is institutional. We write eligibility procedures, design notices, set office hours, choose which data to collect, approve contracts and decide how quickly an appeal is heard. Each of these is a place where a pattern can be reproduced or interrupted. An individual-level response, such as training one employee about bias, cannot fix a procedure that produces unequal results no matter who carries it out. An institutional-level response, such as changing the procedure, can.

Naming the level is not a way to avoid individual accountability. Discriminatory conduct by an employee is serious and goes to the Equal Opportunity and Access Division and Human Resources, which make formal determinations. The point is to match the response to the problem. When outcomes differ by race and nobody can point to a biased act, the right next question is usually not who did this, but which rule, default or resource is producing the pattern and who has the authority to change it.

Fictional case: In a DSD program team meeting, Marisol shares that families of color on the team's waiting list are less likely than white families to return a required follow-up form within the deadline. Dennis responds that the form is the same for everyone and staff treat all families the same. Priya, the supervisor, notices that Dennis is answering an individual-level question about staff conduct, while Marisol is raising an institutional-level question about how a deadline, a mailing process and an English-only form perform across different households.

Choose one routine process your team owns, such as a notice, a deadline or an intake step. Write two questions about it: one intent question (did anyone mean to treat people differently?) and one effect question (does it work equally well for people in different circumstances?). Bring the effect question to your next team meeting.

Think of a recent conversation about fairness in your work where people seemed to talk past each other. Privately, which level of analysis was each person using, and how might naming it have changed the conversation?