Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression

Joe Feagin

Sep 2013 · Routledge

About this ebook

In this book, Feagin develops a theory of systemic racism to interpret the highly racialized character and development of this society. Exploring the distinctive social worlds that have been created by racial oppression over nearly four centuries and what this has meant for the people of the United States, focusing his analysis on white-on-black oppression.

Drawing on the commentaries of black and white Americans in three historical eras; the slavery era, the legal segregation era, and then those of white Americans. Feagin examines how major institutions have been thoroughly pervaded by racial stereotypes, ideas, images, emotions, and practices. He theorizes that this system of racial oppression was not an accident of history, but was created intentionally by white Americans. While significant changes have occurred in this racist system over the centuries, key and fundamentally elements have been reproduced over nearly four centuries, and US institutions today imbed the racialized hierarchy created in the 17th century.

Today, as in the past, racial oppression is not just a surface-level feature of society, but rather it pervades, permeates, and interconnects all major social groups, networks, and institutions across society.

Ratings and reviews

this book is truly an exercise in prejudice. many of the claims in it are either unstained or misrepresented to press a worldview based on Freudian psychoanalysis that hasn't been considered valid, let alone worthy of contemporary debate, since the early 1940's. One particularly egregious example includes the author's oft repeated "implicit bias" statistics mentioned in the first part of the book. part one shows how the writer distorts the truth to serve his theory by taking a study of 43 MEN, both black and white, wherein they were shown flashes of strangers with faces of various ehtincities while in an MRI and the panic center of their brain became active. To reiterate: only men (both African-american and Caucasian men) were told remember faces, then panicked when the image only flashed for a split second. the author then extrapolates that ALL CAUCASIANS hate other ethnicities in "unconscious" aversions and prejudices, and furthermore: that their hate is so strong that it somehow infected american minority communities by proxy. this conclusion is entirely based on a study of 43 men that lasted about 2 seconds; and this conclusion is also directly contradicted by others studies such as the phantom face experiments, where, with the right prompting, people can literally panic at the sight of their own reflection in a dark room (suggesting that the panic was not caused by the ethnicity of the face shown, but simply by being shown a face that the onlooker does not recognize). Part two of the authors ridiculous theory refers to Harvard's implicit bias tests: wherein (this is a rough explanation of the study for the sake of brevity) participants make snap decisions on people by sorting them into the categories of good or bad. Note that these are snap decisions designed to be made in literal milliseconds. The study concluded that all people were least prejudiced against groups they had spent large amounts of time with: white people growing up around mostly white people would be most sympathetic to other white people, etc, etc, and therefore by that same coin, a black person who spent most their life around Hispanic people would be most sympathetic toward Hispanic people. the author somehow takes this to mean that LASTING PREJUDICE is found only in white people and caused by their own "innate" feelings of inadequacy or jealousy. This despite the prejudice being found in all races, for only for a couple seconds at that, and direct evidence within the study suggesting the causes of the racism is a learned tribalisic response based on the environment of an individual's upbringing. AGAIN, THIS IS ALL ONE PART OF THE BOOK, the rest of the book is even worse and even more poorly researched and unfounded. spotty work at best and deliberately misleading for the sake for selling copies at worst. Joe Feagin needs to stop reading Freud and start reading some real contemporary works.

About the author

Joe Feagin is Ella McFadeen professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M and is author of nearly a dozen books including several with Routledge including: Racist America, White Racism, and Black in Blue.