Understanding Racism as a Form of Structural Violence

When we hear the word “violence,” we usually picture a fist, a weapon, or a riot. But some of the most damaging harm in society leaves no visible wound. It works quietly through institutions, laws, hiring practices, and everyday social norms, slowly limiting how long and how well certain groups of people can live. This is what peace researcher Johan Galtung called structural violence, and racism is one of its clearest and most enduring forms. Understanding racism this way moves the conversation beyond “a few bad people” and forces us to look at the systems that keep inequality alive across generations.

What structural violence means 🔗

Galtung introduced the term in his 1969 essay “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” His core idea is simple but powerful: violence is anything that stops a person from reaching their full potential. If the gap between what people could achieve and what they are actually allowed to achieve is created by society itself, that gap is violent, even if no single attacker can be named.

Unlike direct violence, which has a clear perpetrator and victim, structural violence works through social structures and institutions that deprive people of basic needs. It is indirect, slow, and often invisible. Nobody “decides” to harm a community on a given afternoon. Instead, the harm is built into how resources, power, and opportunities are distributed. Galtung pointed to institutionalized racism, sexism, and classism as leading examples. The damage is real, measured in shorter lifespans, denied education, poor health, and lost economic mobility, but it is far harder to spot and far harder to repair than a single act of aggression.

How racism becomes structural 🔗

Racism is often imagined as personal hatred, a slur, an insult, an act of cruelty by one individual. That version exists, but it is only the surface. Racism becomes structural when prejudice is woven into the rules and routines of a society so thoroughly that it no longer needs hateful individuals to keep running. Schools, police, courts, banks, and workplaces can reproduce racial inequality even when many of the people inside them hold no conscious hatred at all.

Galtung later added a third category that completes the picture: cultural violence. This refers to the beliefs, stories, religion, and “common sense” that make direct and structural violence look natural, acceptable, or even right. The old claim that some races were primitive or intellectually inferior, for instance, gave moral cover to slavery and colonial rule. Cultural violence is the glue: it justifies the system so that the harm feels like the normal order of things rather than something to be questioned.

Cultural racism and the making of hierarchy 🔗

This is where cultural racism enters. Cultural racism is prejudice and discrimination based on perceived cultural differences between groups, the belief that some cultures are superior, or that certain cultures simply cannot fit into “mainstream” society. It differs from biological racism, which relies on supposed physical or genetic differences. Cultural racism instead targets language, food, dress, religion, customs, and accent. It says, in effect, that the problem is not your body but your way of life.

The crucial move in cultural racism is the creation of a standard. As the writer Ibram X. Kendi has argued, whoever sets the cultural standard also sets the cultural hierarchy. Once the dominant group’s habits are treated as the default, the “correct” way to speak, eat, worship, and behave, every other culture is automatically ranked against it and found lacking. A hierarchy of cultures is born, with the dominant group at the top imposing its norms on everyone below.

Controlling positive traits and marking negative ones 🔗

Within this hierarchy, traits are sorted in a revealing way. Positive qualities tend to be claimed and controlled by the dominant culture, while traits coded as negative are pinned onto subordinate groups and read as proof that they have failed to “fit in.” A community’s distinctive customs are then interpreted not as difference but as deficiency, a sign of refusing to assimilate. The same behaviour can be praised in the dominant group and punished in the marginalized one. This double standard is not accidental. It keeps the boundary between “us” and “them” firm, and it justifies why one group deserves opportunities while the other does not.

Assimilation as a condition for acceptance 🔗

Assimilation is often presented as a friendly invitation to join the mainstream, but cultural racism turns it into a demand with a heavy price. Assimilation is the process by which a minority group takes on the language and attitudes of the dominant culture, sometimes by choice and at its own pace, but often under pressure. The catch is that acceptance is conditional. People are told that if they shed their religion, accent, dress, or traditions, they will be welcomed, yet for groups marked as visibly “other,” that promise frequently fails. The message becomes clear: your own identity is unvalued, and even surrendering it may not buy you equal treatment.

The three faces of disparity 🔗

When racism is locked into structures, it produces measurable gaps in economic, social, and political life. These three dimensions reinforce one another, which is why the disadvantage is so difficult to escape.

Economic exclusion 🔗

Wealth and work. Structural racism shapes who gets hired, who gets loans, who inherits property, and who is trapped in low-paid, insecure labour. When a group is pushed into the least valued jobs for generations and blocked from building assets, poverty becomes inherited rather than individual. Talent and qualifications get suppressed because skin colour, surname, or origin decide opportunity before merit ever gets a hearing.

Social marginalisation 🔗

Daily life and dignity. Marginalized communities often face unequal access to good schools, healthcare, and housing, alongside constant verbal abuse and stereotyping. This social exclusion damages mental and physical health and, in Galtung’s terms, literally shortens lives. The harm is cumulative: a child who grows up stigmatized, under-resourced, and told they do not belong carries that disadvantage into adulthood.

Political underrepresentation 🔗

Voice and power. Dominant groups maintain control partly by limiting who gets to make decisions. When marginalized communities are kept out of legislatures, bureaucracies, courts, and the media, the rules continue to be written by and for the powerful. Even where formal equality exists on paper, the absence of real representation means grievances go unheard and reforms stall.

Racism as structural violence in India 🔗

The framework applies powerfully at home. Many scholars argue that caste functions as a form of structural and cultural violence built into the social order itself. Human Rights Watch has described caste discrimination against Dalits as a kind of “hidden apartheid,” in which ideas of purity and pollution govern who may cook, eat, draw water, or live where. The hierarchy is justified through culture and religion, exactly the legitimizing mechanism Galtung described, and it translates into deep economic and educational disadvantage.

A second clear example is the treatment of people from the Northeast. Citizens from states like Manipur, Mizoram, and Nagaland routinely face racial abuse and violence in mainland cities because their features are read as “foreign.” Commentators note that while caste discrimination is recognized as a penal offence, racial discrimination against Northeastern citizens is often overlooked and under-addressed. Both cases show the same structure at work: a dominant cultural standard sets the norm, and those who differ are ranked below it, denied full belonging, and harmed across economic, social, and political life despite constitutional guarantees of equality under Articles 14, 15, and 16.

Why this violence is so hard to see 🔗

The greatest strength of structural violence is its invisibility. Because there is no single villain and no dramatic moment of attack, the suffering can be blamed on the victims themselves, their supposed laziness, backwardness, or failure to assimilate, rather than on the system producing it. Cultural violence then steps in to make the whole arrangement feel normal and inevitable, reproduced uncritically from one generation to the next. Naming racism as structural violence is the first step toward seeing it clearly. Once we recognise that the harm lives in structures and not just in individual hearts, we can start asking the right question: not “who is to blame?” but “what needs to change?”

What do you think? Can a society truly claim to value equality while still expecting marginalized groups to abandon their culture in order to be accepted? And in your own surroundings, where do you notice “neutral” norms quietly rewarding one group while marking another as outsiders?

References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/structural-violence
2. https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/what-we-do/our-approach/peace-violence
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_racism
4. https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/what-is-cultural-assimilation/
5. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2021.1964558
6. https://thediplomat.com/2026/03/indias-refusal-to-acknowledge-its-racist-prejudices/