The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

by Peter Joseph

The 1960s civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael was perhaps the first to popularize this kind of systemic observation. Coining the term institutional racism, he stated: “Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks [and] in the operation of established and respected forces in the society [that] receives far less public condemnation than the first.”41 He continues: “This is not to say that every single American consciously oppresses black people. He does not need to. Institutional racism has been maintained deliberately by the power structure and through indifference, inertia and lack of courage on the part of white masses as well as petty officials.”