About the Project

Structural racism — the normalized and legitimized range of policies, practices, and attitudes that routinely produce cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color, especially black people — is the main driver of racial inequality in America today. This project explores how five key drivers of structural racism — housing, criminal justice, education, wealth and media — form a flexible, highly connected apparatus.

Racial discrimination in housing, for example, reinforces and exacerbates educational and economic discrimination. In turn, this enables and normalizes inequities in health, wealth, and employment, which leaves racially marginalized people exceptionally vulnerable to predatory lending, aggressive policing and draconian levels of imprisonment. This project argues that understanding structural racism requires not only grasping the details of specific inequalities as they take place in a given area, but also seeing how these inequities interlock, propel, and reinforce each other.