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In San Francisco, sociologist Christina Jackson conducted an ethnography from 2008 to 2010 in Black neighborhoods in the city: in particular, Bayview – Hunters Point. She joined a diverse community group called Stop Redevelopment Corporations Now (SRCN) that was created to organize against the erasure of Black San Francisco and other groups of color due to redevelopment, gentrification and environmental justice struggles associated with the Hunters Point shipyard. Residents conceptualized redevelopment and delayed environmental clean-up as implicit racism within a social structure that sought to erase their community. Through interviews and participant observation, Jackson captured the effects of redevelopment on the remaining low-income Black residents in the city. She interviewed Brother Ben, a 41-year-old small-business owner and member of SRCN who grew up in the Fillmore neighborhood and organizes in the Bayview – Hunters Point section. When asked about desirability, redevelopment and the SRCN movement he responded:

This [redevelopment] is about removing the people and [to] repeople the area with rich white middle-class people, a dog population, children playing, not even children playing in the street but a playground for rich people. And they want to make it this high-class area where most people make $75,000 or more a year, and just completely remove anyone who’s not what they call a desirable population. And, this is what plays into the depopulation also of Black people in San Francisco, which we say is being done intentionally…. So, SRCN is like a conscious movement or body that just allows people to get information, even beyond just the environment … but educate the people that they must take back the city government and must become aware of what’s happening not just on the hill, but politically aware of what’s going on in the city.

The Stop Redevelopment Corporations Now movement sought to educate the community about scientific language, connecting with trusted scientists to communicate clearly and translate jargon about levels of contaminants in their neighborhood and to help put pressures on the Navy team to clean up the area to residential standards. SRCN also sought to shine a light on the racial and class dynamics of the intended renewal of neighborhoods to prevent erasure of the Black community.

Racism is not an ideological tool nor a purely historical phenomenon, but it serves as a contemporary basis for the allocation and receipt of differential rewards that operates not at the level of racial attitudes but at the level of the social system. Racism in contemporary America can be seen as inherent in the social structure and manifest in our social institutions such that “old-fashioned racism” is no longer necessary to perpetuate the existence of the racial order (Bonilla-Silva 2001).⁵ A clear example of this can be found in the American educational system. While education is commonly thought to be the great equalizer, and the purpose of public education was to ensure the formal training of citizens to be literate, permitting their social and civic engagement, it has structurally defined and maintained racial inequality. This is not accidental or simply a result of historical or contemporary class dynamics. The educational inequality and achievement gaps we are familiar with today were produced. In the section that follows, we examine access to and the quality of education for Blacks and Whites in America as an instance of institutionalized racism.