[asciident]

I think most people recognize that this is the "new definition" of racism, or sometimes people refer to it as structural racism. But when people use the term racism, they usually mean the standard dictionary definition, which is about being prejudice against someone because of their race.

It's probably better if people used "structural racism" to define what you mean here. Similar to how "sex" retained the original definition of sex, and "gender" was used for the social construct. If people tried to say "There is no such thing as being born with a binary sex, because sex is a social construct" then it would be equally confusing.

[snowwrestler]

The "old" definition of racism was something like "having an opinion about someone based on their race" and was essentially indistinguishable from the concept of stereotyping, where someone "judges a book by its cover" and makes assumptions based on what someone looks like.

Today we understand that that kind of stereotyping is a universal attribute of human cognition and therefore not explanatory. That is, you can't get from that definition of "racism" to the society we see around us today. Every human does it--everyone is "racist" by that definition--yes, including black people. And yet black people are still far worse off, on average, than whites in American society.

So that definition of racism is useless. It doesn't explain why things are the way they are, and we can't change the way our brain works at such a fundamental level anyway. It has even become a joke--see Stephen Colbert's riffs on "I don't see color."

So yes, the concept of racism has evolved to include power. Without power, stereotypes don't have an opportunity to cause actual harm. You have to consider power to understand why American society, on average, treats white people and black people so differently.