Understanding Systemic Racism: Why All Oppression Is Connected
- Brittany Glasscock
- Jun 9
- 7 min read
Hopefully you know by now that I don’t do surface-level shit. I’ve completed my first year of running The Lesbian Agenda Project, executing, observing, and expanding. So heads up: I’m officially introducing a systems literacy learning track as a core education pillar of The Lesbian Agenda Project. Alongside queer history, neurodivergent learning, and child advocacy, we’re gonna dive deep into anti-racist education. And you know my nerdy ass is going to be building practical, actionable tools for people who were conditioned to believe they were the problem, rather than seeing the predatory architecture built around them.
I’m not claiming that racism is the absolute root of every single human suffering. However, in the United States, systemic racism is one of the foundational blueprints that engineered our laws, labor, land, education, policing, healthcare, wealth distribution, family structures, and public definitions of what is "normal." My goal for us here is simple: pattern recognition, repair, and action. Leave your white narcissism at the door. Shame is nothing but a tool that systemic racism uses to keep you compliant, frozen, and defensive. We don’t have time for it. Let’s do authentic work.
Connecting the Dots: How Systemic Racism Taught America How to Rank Human Worth
We’re often taught to look at social justice issues as a menu of independent struggles. You care about queer rights, or you care about neurodivergence, or you care about racial equity. But that’s a trap. Systemic racism is the foundational structure in the United States that taught this country how to rank human worth. Once a society normalizes the logic that one group of humans is inherently more valuable, safe, and logical than another, that exact same ranking logic gets copy-pasted onto queerphobia, transphobia, ableism, misogyny, classism, and child control.
When you look closely, the exact same pattern repeats across every institution:
In Education: White students are systematically perceived as more competent and inherently innocent than their BIPOC peers, drastically decreasing their likelihood of being expelled, suspended, or left without educational supports.
In Generational Wealth: White homeowners are culturally perceived as cleaner, safer, and more responsible than homeowners of color, artificially inflating white home equity while defunding communities of color.
In the Justice System: White criminals are perceived as less blameworthy, less dangerous, and more redeemable than BIPOC individuals. This bias means they are statistically less likely to face maximum sentences or execution (and, let's face it, significantly more likely to be elected President. I said what I said).
What Is Systemic Racism? Deconstructing the Foundational U.S. Architecture
To dismantle a system, we have to define it accurately. Systemic racism is not simply "someone was mean to me because of my skin color, and it hurt my feelings." That’s just interpersonal prejudice, snowflake. Systemic racism is a daily, recurring, institutionalized pattern based on melanin that centers, prioritizes, and protects white people at the expense of everyone else. It’s the integration of racial hierarchy into the nation's earliest legal, economic, and political structures.
On the United States of America’s soil, it’s a meat-grinder that flattens rich, diverse world cultures into binary colors for the sake of labor and control. It is why colonists could rape, torture, and attempt to completely erase Native American cultures, calling them "uncivilized,” while systematically stealing their land and lives. In their seminal essay, "The Psychology of American Racism," researchers Steven O. Roberts and Michael T. Rizzo outline seven distinct psychological and social factors that keep this foundational machine running:
Categories: Organizing people into distinct groups, promoting essentialist and normative reasoning.
Factions: Triggering ingroup loyalty, intergroup competition, and perceived threats.
Segregation: Hardening racist perceptions, preferences, and beliefs by denying meaningful intergroup contact.
Hierarchy: Emboldening people to think, feel, and behave in racist ways that preserve dominance.
Power: Legislating and institutionalizing racism on both micro and macro levels.
Media: Legitimizing overrepresented, idealized representations of White Americans while marginalizing and minimizing people of color.
Passivism: Overlooking, minimizing, or denying the existence of racism, which obscures reality and allows it to fester and persist.
When we stay quiet and passive because the conversation is uncomfortable, we actively feed the machine.
The Intersection of Racism and Queerphobia: The Double Burden on LGBTQ+ Youth
When you look at queer advocacy through a lens that ignores systemic racism, you leave the most vulnerable behind. Research shows that sexual identity formation itself isn’t significantly influenced by race or culture. Studies show no statistically significant differences between white youth and youth of color regarding the timeline of their self-awareness:
Milestone | Young Women (Average Age) | Young Men (Average Age) |
Out to Self | 16 | 15 |
Out to Others | 17 | 17 |
First Same-Sex Sexual Experience | 17 | 16 |
Black and Latino youth also don’t differ from white youth in their levels of self-acceptance. But here is the catch: while LGBTQ+ youth of color develop at the exact same rate as their white peers, they don’t inherit the same world. They’re expected to bear the twin burdens of systemic racism and homophobia. Economic and cultural disparities, driven by structural discrimination, make queer youth of color significantly more vulnerable to housing instability, healthcare barriers, sexual violence, and mental health crises.
A 2023 study by Duncan et al. published in Social Science & Medicine used GPS and geo-located social media data to track how place-based negative racial and sexual-orientation sentiment impacts young sexual minority men (YSMM). The researchers discovered that experiencing place-based negative racial sentiment directly degrades mental well-being. Crucially, at high levels of exposure to negative racial environments, Black sexual minority men reported significantly higher numbers of poor mental health days. Queer liberation is a myth if your physical safety and mental health are still dictated by the racial climate of the zip code you walk through.
Weaponizing the Spectrum: How Systemic Racism Fuels Ableism and Neurodivergent Disparities
The intersection of neurodivergence and race is another battleground where ranking logic ruins lives. The exact same neurological traits are interpreted entirely differently based on the skin color of the individual exhibiting them.
Consider how systemic racism alters the trajectory of autistic and neurodivergent individuals:
The Diagnosis Gap: BIPOC Americans are significantly less likely to be diagnosed with autism or ADHD at an early age compared to their white peers, leading to a massive disparity in accessing early intervention services.
Support vs. Punishment: When a white autistic student experiences sensory overload and elopes (leaves the classroom) or melts down, they are far more likely to receive in-class support, accommodation, and grace. When a BIPOC peer exhibits the exact same behavior, they are perceived as defiant, dangerous, or disruptive.
The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Because their traits are criminalized rather than accommodated, BIPOC neurodivergent students face disproportionately higher rates of physical restraint, suspension, and isolation by both peers and adults.
Funneled by Design: The Impact on Child Advocacy and Public Education
If you care about kids, you have to care about housing and history. The current state of American public education is a direct product of historical design:
Historical Redlining -> Depressed Property Values -> Underfunded Schools
White Americans were legally permitted to be landowners centuries before BIPOC Americans. On top of that, public school funding in the United States is overwhelmingly tied to local property taxes and neighborhood income, so lower-income neighborhoods are systematically funneled into lower-funded schools. This means fewer resources, outdated materials, lack of mental health counselors, and fewer extracurricular programs.
White children in this country are already ridiculously disrespected by an adultist society that wants to monetize and control them, but let’s be so for real: their BIPOC peers face an entirely different level of systemic violence. They’re exponentially more likely to be harshly punished, funneled into the juvenile justice system, and killed by state violence. And when defenders of the status quo cite biased, historical studies claiming that Black populations commit disproportionate amounts of crime, they conveniently omit a vital piece of context: the white supremacy built into the institutions that designed, funded, and conducted those very studies to justify segregation.
Dismantling the Mirror: Why White Queer Communities Must Confront Whiteness
To my white queer readers: we have to talk about whiteness. Too often, marginalized white people use their queer identity as a shield to bypass auditing their own racial privilege. As Roberts and Rizzo noted:
"American Racism is reinforced by all Americans, to varying degrees. Just as citizens of capitalistic societies reinforce capitalism, whether they identify as capitalist or not... citizens of racist societies reinforce racism, whether they identify as racist or not, and whether they want to or not."
Being oppressed in one arena doesn’t give you a pass in another. If you’re a white queer person who refuses to examine how you benefit from systemic racism, you’re choosing compliance over solidarity. You’re allowing the dominant culture to use your whiteness to fracture the collective power required to dismantle all of these interlocking systems.
The Next Chapter: What The Lesbian Agenda Project Is Becoming
The Lesbian Agenda Project is evolving because it has to. The Lesbian Agenda isn’t just about lesbians. It is about who gets erased, who benefits from that erasure, and how we build a world where no one has to beg to be recognized as real. I talk about lesbian history, trans rights, neurodivergence, child advocacy, education, and parenting because they are the exact same beast wearing different masks. They’re all shaped by systems designed to control bodies, erase histories, dismiss pain, and treat human dignity as a conditional privilege. And we cannot have an honest conversation about those systems in the United States without putting systemic racism front and center.
My goal isn’t to be the loudest voice in the room or to make oppression an aesthetic lifestyle brand for social media clicks. My goal is to build hard-hitting tools, timelines, explainers, and comprehensive learning tracks that help you see the blueprint, map the overlaps, and take action. This platform is for the queer folks, the neurodivergent rebels, the parents, the educators, the late bloomers, the white folks trying to build a genuine backbone, and anyone else who looks around and knows something is deeply wrong, but just needs the language, history, and practical strategy to fight back.
We’re turning rage into repair. If you’re ready to stop being compliant and start building systems literacy, join the agenda.
