The Layers of Racism

As I was working to develop my understanding of the complexity of race and racism in the United States, I found the Layers of racism model presented by The Equity Literacy Institute the most succinct. This model presents and defines six types of racism- Sociohistoric, Ideological, Individual, Institutional, Cultural, and Structural and describes how each type lays onto the others (kind of like a layer cake) to produce systemic and predictable racist barriers and outcomes in the United States. While this model focuses on racism, iit can be used to explain the systems of classism, ableism, sexism, xenophobia,  trans- and homophobia, or any other -isms used to describe the ways that society marginalizes people based on any of their identities.

Sociohistoric Racism is the history of how a society conceptualizes race and how that society treats people of that race.  As you read earlier in this chapter, the concept of race was invented as a way to justify slavery, colonization, and forced assimilation.  The sociohistorical context of racism in the United States dates back to the days when the first Europeans settled here. The next section offers brief histories of the ways in which various racial and cultural groups have been marginalized in the United States.

Ideological Racism describes the ways that cultural messaging about race burrows into our brains and creates biased or prejudiced ideas. While some people hold explicitly racist ideas, most of us are more implicitly biased.  Implicit biases live in our subconscious. Implicit biases are often in direct opposition to our stated values.

An example of ideological racism that a person may hold is the idea that Black men are bad fathers or are not present in their children’s lives.  This idea can be either explicitly known to the person who holds it or can lurk unknown in their subconscious as it did in mine. During my first year teaching, I worked in Bronzetown, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Chicago.  I distinctly remember having a conversation with my mentor teacher about how pleasantly surprised I was by the number of dads who came to parent-teacher conferences and showed up to chaperone field trips. I know that if you had asked me my thoughts about Black dads, I would not have thought I had biased thoughts about their lack of involvement. However, my surprise at their level of engagement indicates that I definitely held implicit biases about Black fathers.

Ideological racism can lead to deficit mindsets and White saviorism, especially in those of us who value equality while still harboring implicit biases. A deficit mindset is one in which an educator or person in a helping profession attributes the poor outcomes associated with a marginalized group to that group’s individual traits and circumstances rather than acknowledging the systems that create inequities. A common deficit mindset in early intervention is that families that have high cancellation rates for their EI appointments do not prioritize their children’s developmental progress. Conversely, a practitioner without a deficit-based view of families would notice that a family was canceling their EI appointments frequently and wonder if perhaps the time of the sessions was bad for the family, if the family had multiple competing priorities for their time, or if perhaps the practitioner was not the right fit for the family.

A White-savior mindset is one in which a person with a privileged background or social identity believes that they are uniquely called to save marginalized people from poor outcomes. Those with white savior mindsets understand they have privileged social identities and that they hold more power in our society than the marginalized groups they work in. Saviors hold deficit mindsets about the communities they work in and take a paternalistic approach to help-giving.

Individual Racism is what happens when a person’s racist ideology shows up in their interactions with people of color.  Our society often thinks of this as big, obvious actions like being a member of the Ku Klux Klan or calling someone the N-word.  This example is the kind of racism that most of us think about when we conceptualize racism.  More often, individual racism shows up in subtle microaggressions, sometimes unintentional comments or actions toward a person with a marginalized identity that express a prejudiced belief.

For example, if I were grocery shopping and I said, “Oh, It is so nice to see a dad like you so engaged with his baby” to a Black father who was making silly faces at an infant in the checkout line, that would be an example of a microaggression. This statement conveys my biased beliefs that Black men are not engaged fathers.  It is given as a compliment but implies that this particular dad is exceptional because my racist expectation is that Black men are not involved in parenting their children.

Institutional Racism is what happens when a group of people with racist ideologies work at and/or run organizations.  Their prejudiced thoughts and actions become normalized as the standard of practice and get written into the organization’s policies.

Once I leave the grocery store and am in a family home as an EI provider, an individually racist act becomes institutional racism because I am acting not as a private citizen. Rather, I am working with families as a representative of both the organization I work for and the larger Early Intervention system.  If I continue to hold an ideology about Black fathers being absent, it’s likely that I will unintentionally exclude Black fathers.  When I supervised EI interns, It’s likely I would teach them that in families with Black fathers, the coaching model won’t be very effective as “those” dads aren’t involved with their kids. This would lead to an unofficial policy of not working to engage Black fathers in early intervention sessions. It may feel that there is a big leap from one person’s implicit biases to a racist policy, but research shows that many EI providers hold biased ideas about how Black fathers are not good targets for early intervention coaching because the providers don’t see them as engaged parents (McBride, et. al., 2017).

Cultural Racism relates to the ways that our cultural mediums reflect and reinforce our collective racist ideologies. This happens when institutions of popular culture produce television, movies, music, books, social media reels, news articles, etc that reinforce bias and prejudice.  This presents biased messages that feed the ideological racism of new generations.

When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a common narrative in news reports about the breakdown of the Black family due to high numbers of Black men being drug-addicted or incarcerated and the rise of Black single mothers. These contextless and exaggerated reports about absent Black fathers sunk into my subconscious to create the ideology carried with me into my EI practice about how Black men are not present fathers. Many of our current cultural artifacts perpetuate the idea of the absent Black father, despite the fact that this stereotype is false.  In fact, Black men tend to be more engaged in their children’s daily care than their White counterparts (Raikes, et al., 2005).

Structural Racism describes how the layers of racism converge into myriad policies and practices at the institutional and systems levels. Policies from multiple systems stack onto each other to create an overall structure of outcome disparities for Black, Latine, Indigenous, and People of Color in the United States.

Early Intervention exists at the intersection of multiple systems with long histories of racism-  law, public education, and medicine. Part C of what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) established early intervention to fill in the service gap that existed for very young children with disabilities.  This law mandates that states set up a service delivery system to meet the needs of families with very young children with disabilities. These Early Intervention services include special education instruction and myriad support services including physical, occupational, and speech therapy, nursing, and disability diagnostic services that typically fall under a medical umbrella.

Racism and the Law

Legal Racism in the United States dates back to the inception of the colonies and was written into the Constitution.  In the founding documents of the United States, enslaved people were defined as ⅗ of a person.  Even after chattel slavery was abolished in 1865, politicians continued to use state and federal laws to segregate public spaces, keep Black people from voting, limit Black people’s access to federal loans, limit or disallow the immigration of people of color into the U.S., and criminalize interracial marriage. American laws were used to legalize the removal of Indigenous people from their lands and onto reservations as part of American Westward Expansion in the 1830s.  During World War II, the United States government forced Japanese Americans into internment camps. Although there have been some laws and Supreme Court judgments that push our country toward a more equitable place, laws that harm marginalized communities remain on the books. A law dating back to 1890 prohibits anyone convicted of a felony from voting after they have completed their incarceration (Levine, 2022). Further, many lawmakers continue to use the American legal system as a means to limit the rights of others or impede systems-level equity work. As of 2024, over 30 bills have been introduced to state and federal legislatures in efforts to ban Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) work in public schools and universities, ten of which have been passed by their state legislatures and signed into law by state governors.

Racism and Public Education

American public schools were established, in large part, as a tool to assimilate citizens, especially immigrants, into the dominant American culture. “The Father of American Education,” Horace Mann, based the first public schools on the Prussian school model, which had the explicit purpose of creating a society of obedient soldiers and workers. At the time, Mann believed that public schooling would be “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” While this sounds similar to statements that today’s school reformers may make, the socio-historical context is essential to understanding what Mann actually meant. Horace Mann and American leaders in the 1800s believed that the only way to equalize opportunities for men was to assimilate them into the English-speaking, capitalist, Protestant American culture. It’s helpful to remember that Horace Mann was working to found freely accessible public schools, slavery was still legal and widely practiced.  Enslaved Americans were not able to attend school.

Additionally, during this time, Indigenous children were removed from their family homes and sent to Native American boarding schools across the United States.  These schools’ sole purpose was to “kill the Indian… to save the man” (Pratt, 1892). Children attending these schools were not allowed to speak their heritage languages or engage in their cultural practices. This resulted in language loss and inability to communicate across generations. Many children died while living at the boarding schools and were buried in unmarked graves. Children who survived the often harsh and abusive schooling experiences grew up to be 44% more likely to have chronic physical and mental health problems (Newland, 2022).

Despite modern school reform efforts, Black, Indigenous, Latine and many other People of Color continue to have harmful interactions with the public school system. Curriculum continues to focus on the language and cultural practices of the White, English Speaking, Christian dominant culture, often to the exclusion of content related to the languages, histories, and cultures of People of Color. Racist state laws have been enacted in efforts to maintain public schools’ role in assimilating students into the dominant White, Eurocentric, English speaking culture.  Massachusetts and California had state laws prohibiting bilingual learning programs until the 2010s. Bilingual education remains illegal in Arizona where policymakers have also been trying to prohibit ethnic studies programs since 2010 (Stephenson, 2021).  Texas has laws that specifically prohibits public school teachers from using the Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project which presents the history of slavery and the founding of the United States with critical race lens (Powell, 2021). Multiple states have passed laws prohibiting public colleges and universities from having Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices and resources on campus.

Educational harm extends beyond assimilation efforts. One in eight Black high school students were disciplined with out of school suspensions, while only one in 20 White kids were suspended (Leung-Gagné et al., 2022). Suspension rates double for Black boys with disabilities. Often these suspensions are linked to cultural differences between White teachers and their Black students. Teachers’ implicit biases about Black boys begin as early as preschool.  A 2016 study asked preschool teachers to watch a video of preschoolers playing and look for potentially challenging behaviors. Researchers recorded the teachers’ eye gaze while watching the video and found that the majority of teachers watched the Black children more closely than the white children, and in particular kept looking at the Black four-year-old in anticipation of problem behaviors (Gilliam, et al., 2016). Black children are about 20% of preschoolers, but account for 50% of preschool suspensions (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). .

Racism and Medicine

As referenced earlier in this section, the field of medicine contributed to the justification of slavery and segregation by providing (false) biologically based reasons for enslavement and racially-based discrimination. James Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology,” practiced experimental surgeries on enslaved pregnant women throughout the 1800s without using anesthesia or asking for their consent (Prather, et al., 2018). Forced and coerced sterilization of Black, Indigenous, and Latine women occurred through the1970s (Kluchin, 2009). In 1951, the cancer cells of a 31 year-old Henrietta Lacks were harvested without her consent.  These cells, referred to as HeLa cells, were replicated, shared, and continue to be used in medical research today. Neither Ms. Lacks nor her family consented to the harvesting and use of her cells. Another known abuse of Black patients was the 40 year -Tuskegee Syphilis Study.  In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service began studying the impact of untreated syphilis in poor, Black men. Men enrolled in the study were denied access to treatment even after it became available and were thus unnecessarily and cruelly subjected to dementia, seizures, aneurysms, and heart failure (Jones, 1992). Although some improvements in the medical treatment of Black and other People of Color have been made, Black and Latine people have a 42% higher risk of death after surgical procedures than their White peers (Mpoody et al., 2023).  Black women are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women (Hoyert, 2021). Black and Indigenous babies are also significantly more likely to be born prematurely than White infants in the United States (Centers for Disease Control, 2021).  Public health researchers found that doctors often dismissed Black women’s concerns during pregnancy which put them at high risk for preterm births and maternal death.

Case Study: Deficit Mindsets about Family Engagement