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Roundtable on Community Change
Racial Equity
Research & Theory in the Service of Action: The Roundtable's work on structural racism began in response to a call from leaders in fields such as community revitalization, social policy, anti-poverty, and philanthropy. The leaders were concerned about the racial disparities that they were observing in their work and frustrated by their inability to talk about race and racism, much less get a handle on it. In order to directly address this need, the Roundtable developed a project on racial equity.
Our racial equity work consists of four interrelated components:
- Racial Equity & Society Seminars
- Dismantling Structural Racism Initiatives
- Publications
- Convenings & Presentations
By structural racism we mean the following:
"Racism in twenty-first century America is harder to see than its previous incarnations because the most overt and legally sanctioned forms of racial discrimination have been eliminated. Nonetheless, racialized patterns permeate the political, economic, and socio-cultural structures of America in ways that generate differences in well-being between people of color and whites. Structural racism, then, refers to the system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity in every key opportunity area, from health, to education, to employment, to income and wealth."