“Structural” is a technical term in this literature, and when claimants of “structural racism” and “critical race theory” use it be aware that they are not allies of the anti-racism of the Martin Luther King judge-individuals-by-the-content-of-their-character variety. What they mean by racism is something profoundly different. Three quotations on what they mean by structural:
From philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s essay “Robespierre or the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror”: According to structuralism:
“the true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals not as autonomous subjects, but as elements in a structure which follows its own laws.”
(“Robespierre or the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror”, 2006)
From professor Chris Weedon’s book Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory:
“In this century, the move towards structuralism in many disciplines has been a (secular) seeking out of hidden rules that regulate human behaviour. Structuralist approaches challenge the humanist concept of the self as an autonomous agent by laying bare the extent to which its apparently free choices are predetermined.”
(Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, 1987, p. 33.)
And from professor Rainer Friedrich in Philosophy and Literature, on how the post- in post-modernism assumes and moves beyond the structuralist point:
“In the postmodernist perspective, modern subjectivity in all its concrete forms and manifestations—as person, as individual, as self, as res cogitans, as moral agent, as aesthetic subject, as author, as bearer of human rights—is theoretically and practically at the end of its tether, if not already defunct.” Postmodernism is “the dissolution of subjectivity into overarching structures and systems.”
(Rainer Friedrich, “Brecht and Postmodernism.” Philosophy and Literature 23:1. April 1999, 44-64. P. 46.)
Note the consistent use of structural by theoreticians across three decades, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s.
So next project what happens in current applied discussions about racism. First, one tells the victims of racism that they are passive elements manipulated by structural forces they cannot control. Second, one tells the perpetrators of racism that they are passive elements manipulated by structural forces they cannot control. Consequently, both parties are profoundly disempowered, and everybody is just flotsam carried along by malevolent racist-power forces.