The Roundtable began its work on structural racism in response to a call from leaders in fields such as community revitalization, social policy, anti-poverty, and philanthropy who 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. It was commonly acknowledged among these leaders that although their work focused on low-income communities of color, they encountered very little discussion about race or racial issues or their effects on these communities and the children, youth, and families who resided in them. In order to directly address this need, the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change developed The Project on Structural Racism and Community Building.
The Project on Structural Racism and Community Building’s initial purpose was to provide a comprehensive picture and explanation of the nature of race and the causes of racial disparities in the US today, with particular attention to implications for initiatives for children and families in poor communities. Project methodology included extensive literature reviews, convenings of thought leaders, and the commissioning of papers by leading thinkers across social science fields. The Roundtable’s staff and advisors concluded that the nature of racism in the United States could best be described and understood by using the concept of structural racism. The Roundtable then went on to produce two publications that, we have been informed, have been important resources to the field: Structural Racism and Community Building and Structural Racism and Youth Development.
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, subtler 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.
The Roundtable’s work on dismantling structural racism and promoting racial equity consists of three interrelated components:
For more detailed information on the rationale behind the Roundtable's strucural racism work, see Background on the Project on Structural Racism and Community Building.
