Our next guest is an award-winning writer, Brown University Professor and scholar of African-American culture, racial inequality, and gender. Her latest book, Metta Racism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives and How We Break Free, provides an essential account on American inequality and what we can do to change it. Professor Trisha Rose joins us now to unpack her findings. In plain language for us, explain what meta-racism is.

Meta-racism is the outcome of systems that produce effects that are greater than the sum of their parts. If you are thinking about health care and how access to health care might have an impact on jobs, and jobs might have an impact on schools, and schools might have an impact on housing, those interactions and interconnections produce effects that are more powerful than if you had any one of these alone. Instead of just adding them, you have to think, these are compounding effects. That's one of the things that my research has been able to reveal, is that we can't think as if these moments of discrimination in each individual place is in fact to be understood separately. When you see them together, that's when you get the devastation.

You've been doing this research now for more than a decade. Why did you decide now was the time and that you were going to write a book about it?

Well, I had been really looking for ways to think about how systems can produce consistent kinds of outcomes. When I realized that no matter what the policies were, and I looked at over 100 of them in the last 25 or 30 years, and I wanted to see how they interacted and how they impacted Black people in particular. I realized that across the board, almost 100% of them created containment, extracted resources, and punished Black people disproportionately. It wasn't just containment, it was containment and punishment. It wasn't just punishment, it'd be punishment and extraction. You start looking at these combinations, and that's where the meta effects become clearer.

You picked several people in particular, like Trayvonne Martin, Michael Brown, in order to be able to tell a very specific story to explain the larger problem. How did you go about choosing the individuals?

Yeah, that's a great question. Systemic thinking, once you get the hang of it, it's really quite intuitive, but it takes a minute because we tell stories in this country that talk about individual responsibility for race. Criticism. We talk about individual people who want to harm or have say something problematic. We don't have much energy and focus around the bigger picture. I'm going to retell these stories for you. I'm going to say, let's raise up the conversation from the intention of Zimmerman or what was in Zimmerman's heart, or was he afraid, to say, Well, let's look at the policing in the schools that Trayvon was in. For example, in his high school, he should have never been suspended for the infractions that he suspended for. When you look at the continuous form of containment, punishment, and extraction that goes on where he left, right? At his mom's house in Miami Gardens, you see that the incident was not just about Trayvon, on when he got to Sanford, Florida, but was in fact about a system that puts many Trayvons in that situation.

You're well aware, over the weekend, former President Trump made some comments that were deemed controversial. We're going to get your take on it after we take a listen.

A lot of people said that that's why the black people like me because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against. They actually viewed me as I'm being discriminated against. It's been pretty amazing. But it possibly, I don't know, maybe there's something there. You know who embraced it more than anybody else? The black population. It's incredible. You see black people walking around with my mug shot. They do shirts.

I interviewed a panel of black Conservatives after this, but none of them said that those comments were racist. Your thoughts?

I think when you trade in racial stereotyping that results from racist policy, mass incarceration was a policy of hyper-incarceration with lengthy sentences, with limited resources for poor people to defend themselves in court that targeted African-Americans and other poor people as well. But it absolutely disproportionately had a profound effect on Black people. It began in the 1980s, largely as a massive expansion of incarceration. To make jokes about the affinity of people who've been subjected to that system is really to reinforce the illusion that it's like a cultural practice rather than the origin being society's discrimination. Who he is, whether he's a racist, that's not my business. That's for him to worry about.

Professor Trisha Rose, what a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. I want to let our viewers know Metta Racism will be released on March fifth. You can find it wherever books are sold.

Hi, everyone. George Stefanopoulos here. Thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel. If you'd like to get more videos, show highlights, and watch live event coverage, click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel. Don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts. Thanks for watching.