Ethnic studies-structural or institutional racism

Abstract

Structural or institutional racism is formed by the social, economic, political, or educational forces that foster discriminatory outcomes or give preference to members of one group over the other deriving its genesis from the concept of race. The biological fact for the race has been invalidated by biologists, but the social aspect of it is established by the community. The physical traits still possess the meanings of social race identity. It is these social race identities that deliberate placement in the social hierarchy, which dictates the access to or denial of privileges and or power.

Assignment of status based on skin color character has evolved to a complex social structure that promotes power differential between whites and people of color. The use of physical features in classifying individual, institutional groups trace its history from the extended encounter between the Europeans and non-European back in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. In the United States, the cognitive dissonance between values and beliefs of the human rights, liberty, democracy and equity founders alongside with the practice of Africans' enslavement. The move made Mexicans a foreign minority in their land was determined by the classification of citizens by their characters as inferior and not worthy of any entitlement. The concept of race has been widely used to institutionalize benefits to one group of people and deny the same benefits to other people.