Introduction to the Special Issue: Racism of Omission

Abstract

Racism, in both the popular imagination and academic conceptualizations, is often characterized as an act of commission. Scholarship sees racism as the actions of individuals, organizations, and states whose choices and policies disadvantage marginalized groups. Discrimination is conceptualized as actions that deny access to housing, work, schooling, or other resources, or as differential treatment once people of color gain entrance to white-dominated spaces. Studying racism as acts of commission has provided insight into the emergence and persistence of racialized exclusion. Yet, focusing disproportionately on commission may downplay long-standing claims about the “structural,” “institutional,” or “systemic” aspects of racism, which can be effectively reproduced through strategic inaction or omissions. This special issue inverts the dominant logic in the study of racism, arguing that scholars should pay greater attention to racism as an act of omission or choosing not to act. As the articles in this special issue show, conceptualizing the racism of omission provides a theoretical bridge between individual and structural accounts because once processes of racial exclusion are institutionalized, they are perpetuated through normalized inaction.