Definition
Racism is the constellation of beliefs, practices, and institutional arrangements that produces and sustains inequality between groups defined as racial categories. It operates across scales — from individual prejudice and everyday encounters to organisational routines and the legal architecture of states.
Contemporary scholarship distinguishes interpersonal racism (attitudes and actions of individuals), institutional racism (the routines of organisations that produce disparate outcomes even without discriminatory intent), and structural racism (the wider distribution of resources, opportunities, and protections across racialised groups). The Macpherson report's adoption of institutional racism in policing is a landmark statement of this layered view.
Why it matters
How it works
Analytically, racism is traced through patterns rather than incidents. Stop and search rates, sentencing disparities, victimisation surveys, and police use-of-force statistics are compared across racialised groups while controlling for offence and circumstance. Where disparities remain unexplained by legally relevant variables, the analysis points to institutional or structural racism.
The concept is contested. Some accounts foreground individual bias; others emphasise colour-blind practices whose effects are nonetheless racialised; still others tie racism to colonial histories and the political economy of labour. Criminology draws on all three, and on the lived experience of policed communities, to explain how racial disparity is reproduced.