Discussions of racism have shifted from treating it as a psychological problem regarding individual mindsets toward understanding it as a structural issue, where discrimination is born from social and legal structures. As early as the 1960s, the civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) observed:

When a Black family moves into a home in a White neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which most people will condemn. But it is institutional racism that keeps Black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.

Frantz Fanon is one of the key non-American thinkers on this subject, whose works sparked much of postcolonial studies and critical theory. As early as 1952, Fanon argued that the colonial project left no part of the human person and the human experience untouched. His 1961 magnum opus, The Wretched of the Earth, is a full examination of how colonialism affected societies; he describes his taxonomy of the colonized, which includes the “worker,” the “colonized intellectual,” and the “lumpen proletariat.” The colonized intellectual is the middleman between the colonizer and the colonized, trading in the cultural capital of the colonial power without ever getting to be a part of it. An example is that of elites from Asia studying in Ivy League schools and then seeking jobs in the leading Western corporations, especially in investment banking or finance, which are made out to be the most sought-after careers.

Fanon’s work sparked further extensions of critical theory throughout the world, with one particular development being the creation of “critical race theory,” which applies critical theory to racial issues in the United States. First developed in the mid-1980s, the theory has two particular tenets:

  1. Legal systems play a role in preserving and maintaining systems of racial supremacy.
  2. The relationship between law and racial power needs to be transformed in order to achieve an antiracist agenda.

However, this is an understanding of race, racism, and structural discrimination that is born out of an American context and its particular history with race and race relations. It does not examine the use of White power on a global scale and over centuries to dehumanize and oppress other nations for economic gain.

Read the full article about global white privilege by Chandran Nair at Stanford Social Innovation Review.