Covert Racism Quotes

Racism didn't magically go away just because we refuse to talk about it. Rather, overt racial language is replaced by covert racial euphemisms that reference the same phenomena-talk of "niggers" and "ghettos" becomes replaced by phrases such as "urban," "welfare mothers," and "street crime." Everyone knows what these terms mean, and if they don't, they quickly figure it out.

Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city - Birmingham, Alabama - five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. 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 many people will condemn - at least in words. 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.

There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep down you know they're uncomfortable. They're worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don't know what they're capable of.

Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.

Yes, it is true women of color have been the targets of a setup of monumental proportions, something that amounts to nothing short of a covert war against us. But it is also true that these attacks are their own proof of just how serious a threat to the status quo all women of color really are. So serious, in fact, that the very concept of the innocent white woman was constructed to keep us firmly in our place.

It behoves us all to confront racism wherever we find it, especially when it is covert or normalised in stereotypes and myth, and science is a weapon in that contest. The academic and political activist Angela Davis said that ‘in a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

Structural violence is expressed by the dominant society in racism, sexism, shunning, discrimination, among other ostracizing practices, and it restricts individuals from partaking in the opportunities afforded to those of a higher social status. Structural violence is covert and subtle and is perpetrated by social institutions (e.g., the government).

But we do not see. Our eyes have been closed by racist ideas and the unacknowledged bond between the institutional antiracist and the post-racialist. They bond on the idea that institutional racism is often unseen and unseeable. Because it is covert, the institutional antiracist says. Because it hardly exists, the post-racialist says.

institutional racism,” they were using, whether they realized it or not, a formulation coined in 1967 by Black Power activist Kwame Toure and political scientist Charles Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. “Racism is both overt and covert,” Toure and Hamilton explained. “It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals….The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts.

All forms of racism are overt if our antiracist eyes are open to seeing racist policy in racial inequity. But we do not see. Our eyes have been closed by racist ideas and the unacknowledged bond between the institutional antiracist and the post-racialist. They bond on the idea that institutional racism is often unseen and unseeable. Because it is covert, the institutional antiracist says. Because it hardly exists, the post-racialist says.

TOURE AND HAMILTON could not have foreseen how their concepts of overt and covert racism would be used by people across the ideological board to turn racism into something hidden and unknowable. Toure and Hamilton were understandably focused on distinguishing the individual from the institutional. They were reacting to the same moderate and liberal and assimilationist forces that all these years later still reduce racism to the individual acts of White Klansmen and Jim Crow politicians and Tea Party Republicans and N-word users and White nationalist shooters and Trumpian politicos. “ ‘Respectable’ individuals can absolve themselves from individual blame: they would never plant a bomb in a church; they would never stone a black family,” Toure and Hamilton wrote. “But they continue to support political officials and institutions that would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies.

Racism is both overt and covert,”2 Toure and Hamilton explained. “It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals…. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts.” They distinguished, for example, the individual racism of “white terrorists” who bomb a Black church and kill Black children from the institutional racism of “when in that same city—Birmingham, Alabama—five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities.

Mild though Obama’s observations were, all the tropes of the angry black man out to get revenge were thrown at him, especially in talk shows on radio and TV, with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck leading the charge. Among other things, Obama’s policies were accused of being covert attempts at getting ‘reparations’ for slavery, segregation, and discrimination.

the FBI chief also held secret talks with congressional isolationists whose campaigns received covert contributions from the German government and who did their utmost to keep the United States out of the antifascist war.

As we have seen in this trip through American history, racism consistently figured in the very structures of American evangelical life. Over the course of the twentieth century, racism persisted as poisonously as ever, though evangelical leaders learned how to deploy it covertly when they wanted to. Evangelical visions of political power would become a reality in the twenty-first century but came at the expense of the shield of morality that cloaked their ambitions. This vision and the activism that accompanied it have come at great expense to evangelicals. By 2000, evangelicals allowed, seemingly without ambivalence, their traditional religiosity and moralism to become yoked to national electoral politics, and the structural racism in evangelicalism clearly and visibly exploded.

The system's acts are covert, just as the racist ideas of the people are implicit. I could not wrap my head around the system or precisely define it, but I knew the system was there, like the polluted air in our atmosphere, poisoning Black people to the benefit of White people. But what if the atmosphere of racism has been polluting most White people, too?

I thought I had it all figured out. I thought of racism as an inanimate, immortal system, not as a living, recognizable, mortal disease of cancer cells that we could identify and treat and kill. I considered the system as essential to the United States and the Constitution. At times, I thought White people covertly operated the system, fixed it to benefit the total White community at the expense of the total Black community. The construct of covert institutional racism opens American eyes to racism and, ironically, closes them, too. Separating the overt individual from the covert institutional veils the specific policy choices that cause racial inequities, policies made by specific people. Covering up the specific policies and policymakers prevents us from identifying and replacing the specific policies and policy makers. We become unconscious to racist policymakers and policies as we lash out angrily at the abstract bogeyman of "the system.

their book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, Ture and Hamilton discuss the difference between individual instances of racism, which are often overt, and racism that exists as part of a system, which is often covert, and less recognisable should you be white yourself. Ture and Hamilton state that institutional racism ‘exists in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than individual racism’. While the functioning of systemic racism may be less conspicuous than individualised racism, it is just as dangerous, if not more so.

Damning documentation of LSD experimentation should not have been left in the hands of CIA Director Richard Helms. On January 31, 1973, one day before retiring from the CIA, Helms destroyed files on the fates of minds shattered over the previous ten years. Helms supported the mind-altering projects—Operation Chatter, Operation Bluebird/Artichoke, Operations Mknaomi, Mkultra and Mkdelta. By 1963, four years before Monterey Pop, the combined efforts of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, Army Intelligence and U.S. Chemical Corps launched covert operations that seemed necessary. U.S. agents were able to destroy any reputation by inducing hysteria or excessive emotional response, temporary or permanent insanity, encouraging suicide, erasing memory, inventing double or triple personalities inside one mind, prolonging lapses of memory, teaching racism and hatred against specific groups, causing subjects to obey instructions on the telephone or in person, hypnotically assuring that no memory remains of their assignments. The CIA has poison dart guns to kill from a distance, tranquilizers for pets so the household or neighborhood is not alerted by entry or exit. While pure LSD is typically 160 micrograms, the CIA issued 1,600 micrograms. Some of the LSD was administered to patients at Tulane University, who already had wired electrodes in their brain. Was insanity an occupational disease in the music industry? Or does this LSD, tested and described in Army documents, explain how a cultural happening that took place place in 1967-68 could be altered radically and halted?

Cognitive schemas—thought structures—influence what we notice and how the things we notice get interpreted.