Researchers and organizers often describe racism at four levels: internalized, interpersonal, institutional and structural. A slur is interpersonal racism. A lending rule that keeps Black families from getting mortgages is institutional. When housing, schools, policing and health care reinforce each other, that is structural racism.
In the US, racism was written into law for most of the country's history. Slavery was legal until the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Jim Crow segregation was upheld by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 and lasted until the civil rights laws of the 1960s. The 1968 Kerner Commission concluded that white racism was the main cause of the conditions that led to urban uprisings.
Outright legal racism ended, but its results did not. In 2022, the median white family held about $285,000 in wealth, compared with about $44,900 for the median Black family, according to the Federal Reserve. Gaps like that persist in health, incarceration and schooling because the systems that produced them were never fully rebuilt.