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“Individual racism” is best known to the American public as overt, conscious, and deliberate individual acts intended to harm, place at a disadvantage, or discriminate against racial minorities. Serving Black patrons last, using racial epithets, preventing a White son or daughter from dating or marrying a person of color, or not showing clients of color housing in affluent White neighborhoods are all examples. At the other end of the spectrum, hate crimes against people of color and other marginalized groups represent extreme forms of overt individual racism. In 2015, during Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, 21‐year‐old White supremacist Dylann Roof pulled out a Glock .45‐caliber pistol and fired 70 rounds at the parishioners, killing nine people and injuring one. In his racist manifesto, he explained that he was fighting for the White race. He was charged with 33 federal hate crimes and convicted on all counts. Also reflecting individual acts of violence, a report in 2017 by the National Coalition of Anti‐Violence Programs documented the highest number ever recorded of homicides of LGBTQ people (approximately one per week). When we think about these extreme forms of individual racism and violence, most people are able to say “That's not me. I'm not racist … I'm not homophobic.” It must also be noted, however, that the majority of individual racism and heterosexism is more subtle, indirect, unintentional, and outside the level of conscious awareness of perpetrators. Often these forms of expression are referred to as everyday racism (Essed, 1991) or implicit bias (Dovidio, Pearson, & Penner, 2019).

“Institutional racism” refers to any policy, practice, procedure, or structure in business, government, courts, places of religious worship, municipalities, schools, and the like by which decisions and actions unfairly subordinate persons of color while allowing White individuals to profit from the outcomes. Examples of this racism include racial profiling, segregated churches and neighborhoods, discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, and educational curricula that ignore and distort the history of minority group members. Institutional bias often is masked in the policies of standard operating procedures that are applied equally to everyone but that have outcomes that disadvantage certain groups while advantaging others (Jones, 1997; D. W. Sue, 2003). Systemic or institutional biases that reside in the philosophy, programs, practices, and structures of communities and organizations are referred to as macroaggressions (D. W. Sue, Alsaidi, et al., 2019). Before proceeding, it is important to distinguish between microaggressions and macroaggressions. First, microaggressions are manifest in the biased attitudes and behaviors of individuals, whereas macroaggressions reside in the rules, regulations, and sanctioned practices of institutions, communities, or society. Second, microaggressions generally are directed toward a specific individual target, while macroaggressions are group‐focused and affect an entire class of people. Third, combating microaggressions means directing action toward the personal bigotry of the person (biased attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors); confronting and eliminating macroaggressions means altering biased institutional policies and practices.