Moving the race conversation forward. You've probably noticed that when our news media talks about race, when they talk about racism, when they talk about racial justice issues, they quite often talk about it all wrong. But have you ever tried to quantify exactly how and why the media gets it wrong about race?
and what we can do to fix it? Well, there's a new paper published by Race Forward entitled Moving the Race Conversation Forward that sets out to do just that by compiling nearly 1,200 articles from major newspapers and cable news outlets. And systematically... breaking down the most common mistakes we fall into when we talk about race. And in their research, Race Forward identified seven harmful practices, the seven most common bad habits in media coverage of race, as well as recommended strategies to get us back on track.
And I recommend reading all seven for yourself, but right now I want to focus on just one of the biggest traps that racial justice conversations fall into, which is our tendency to focus too much on individuals instead of systems. Because when we talk about race, when we talk about racism, when we talk about racial justice, it's important to remember that there are levels to this thing. There are at least four different levels of racism that each need to be considered. The first level is internalized racism. which is all the prejudice, bias, and blind spots you might have within yourself as an individual.
The next level after that is interpersonal racism, which is what happens when we act out that internalized racism on each other. Those two levels, the internalized and the interpersonal, are the two individual levels of racism. And those are the simplest ones to focus on, the easiest to recognize in our day-to-day lives, the ones we spend most of our time talking about, but I'm here to tell you, there's something else.
systemic racism. Once you get past those individual levels, first of all, you have to deal with institutional racism. The racist policies and discriminatory practices in schools and work- places and government agencies that routinely produce unjust outcomes for people of color. And when you step beyond that level, you have structural racism, the unjust, racist patterns and practices that play out across the institutions that make up our society. The individual and systemic levels of racism are both important, both necessary to reckon with, and they're both usually interrelated.
But if you want a real, fully clear-sighted conversation on racial justice, you have to be talking about both levels. And one of the most common ways we fail to see the big picture on race is by failing to think about systemic racism, by failing to be systemically aware. In their research, Race Forward found that our media coverage far too often falls into that trap.
They found that approximately two-thirds of race-focused media coverage fails to consider how systemic racism factors into the story. Two-thirds of their coverage of race fails to be systemically aware. And that is a problem. When we constantly focus only on individual stories, it distorts our sense of how racism works. It encourages us to see racism only as the product of overt, intentional racist acts by individuals that can be fixed simply by shaming and correcting those those individual defects.
And it encourages us to see individual stories of transcending racism as proof that there is no more racism. That if we have a black president and Oprah is a billionaire, then there must not be anything else to talk about. And any problems that other people of color still face must be due to deficiencies on their part. It must be a problem with them instead of a problem with the system. And that is no.
No, just no. We cannot have a real, thorough conversation about incarceration rates for people of color, about the thousands of families torn apart by our immigration policies, about the perennial disparities in education, housing, healthcare, employment opportunities, there we cannot no, we cannot have real talk about any of the biggest issues that affect us all as individuals if we are not also thinking about the systems involved. We cannot have a discourse that brings us closer to racial justice without being systemically aware.
So next time you listen to the news, or read the news, or watch the news, or surf the news, you should take a minute to ask yourself, is this coverage systemically aware? And read Race Forward's new research paper entitled Moving Our Race Conversation Forward for more on these issues and for intervention strategies to help us have some real talk about racial justice.