Chapter 3: Understanding and Addressing Systemic Racism

We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

The murder of George Floyd was a wake-up call that led to nationwide self-scrutiny, suggesting that something very powerful must be operating that runs counter to and undermines the commitment to liberty and justice that our institutions publicly espouse. These powerful forces have come to be conceptualized as institutional, structural, or systemic racism, indicating that they are embedded deep within the structure of organizations in the group unconscious.

Those forces are mobilized to entrench the existing order and its relations of power and privilege. Systemic racism opposes our conscious drive toward greater equity, inclusiveness, and diversity. Once deployed, the forces of institutional racism exert a decisive influence on thought and feeling and impel us to action. As the history of ongoing police brutality and violence against BIPOC individuals5 attests, institutional racism is highly resistant to change.

The problem of racial injustice extends responsibility for countering systemic racism and inequity from the individual to the system as a whole. A racist incident, for example, is now seen as signifying the existence of a deeper problem woven into the fabric of the institution, just as a symptom signifies the existence of a fundamental difficulty in the mind of an individual.

Addressing the institutional aspect of the problem requires collective self-scrutiny and action. All members and segments of organizations need to ask: How might the things we do routinely be contributing to racial inequity? What are we unaware of or not noticing? What knowledge base