the discrimination that needs no bigot in the room, just business as usual.
means a pattern of unfair outcomes baked into rules, institutions, or systems, so it persists even when no individual intends harm.
from the term crystallized in 1970s sociology and civil rights law, when researchers noticed that removing prejudiced individuals from a system didn't remove the unequal outcomes, meaning the bias lived in the structure itself, not just people's heads.
redlining maps — 1930s us federal housing maps still predict wealth gaps today
amazon hiring ai — scrapped in 2018 for penalizing resumes with the word women
cash bail system — us courts set bail amounts correlating with race, not flight risk
facial recognition error — nist 2019 study found error rates 10-100x higher for darker-skinned faces