Over the last century, social policies and programs and national support systems intended to help families and children improve their well-being were not necessarily designed to reduce burden or narrow gaps in access and outcomes for communities of color whereas white communities benefit from these supports. This brief presents lessons learned from projects that aimed to analyze three different national policies related to families in the US--the treatment of marriage in the tax system, child foster care placement, and the uptake of Social Security benefits--and the role of structural racism in the design and implementation of these policies. Urban Institute's Office of Race and Equity Research asked three experts and scholars in their respective fields, Dorothy Brown (tax law and policy), Darcey H. Merritt (child welfare policy), and Mikki D. Waid (retirement policy and Social Security), about the kinds of analytical and research challenges researchers should address when studying each of these policies with a structural racism lens.
Authors
- Pages
- 16
- Published in
- United States of America
Table of Contents
- Background 1
- Lessons Learned from Studying Structural Racism in National Policies 1
- Common Considerations Across Analyses 4
- Identify System-Level Design Choices and Drivers 4
- Include Contextual Analysis 5
- Design and Conduct Interviews for Trust and Nuance 5
- The Tensions in Studying Specific Policies 6
- Tax 6
- Summary of Project 6
- Social Security 7
- Summary of Project 7
- Child Welfare 9
- Summary of Project 9
- Lessons Experts Identified Across Three Projects 11
- Lesson 1: Studying racial disparities is not the same as studying racism, and studies aiming to assess the causal effect of structural racism are not the same as studies of the moderating effect of race or other demographic characteristics. Study desi... 11
- Lesson 2: The framing of a study of structural racism requires citing previous work that uses a structural racism lens, clearly indicating whether racism is being treated as a contextual or causal factor. 12
- Lesson 3: Project teams should include scholars and practitioners of color with expertise on and lived experience of structural racism. 12
- Resources 13
- Papers in the Interrupting Structural Racism Series 13
- Notes 14
- References 14
- About the Authors 15
- Acknowledgments 16
