Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, seeking to pander as hard as the rest of his clown-van cohorts, recently played the race card in an interview on NPR. Namely, he asserted that:
Systemic racism [is] all around us. It’s the air we breathe.
I’m struck by the fogging up of the phrase “systemic racism.”
It used to refer to the laws and structures that forced discrimination even when individuals didn’t want to discriminate, i.e. slavery and Jim Crow laws. Laws. As in the government put them in place and enforced them. In that context, “systemic racism” refers to institutionalized racism.
Many years back, when I was working for a defense contractor, we went through a set of management training and exercises. One such involved reading 8 or so sentences, each with a blank, then figuring out what the best single word to fill that blank was. The exercise was leading, in that “computer” would have worked just fine for the first 6 of 8, but didn’t for the last two. I saw through the gambit, and that they were leading us to the word “system.” Most didn’t – they wanted to shoehorn “computer” in because it was their first idea, because they didn’t read through to the end, and because they hated the vagueness of the word “system.”
The lessons of that exercise aren’t of prime relevance here, but the notion that “system” can be vague is.
“Systemic” can mean a lot of different things, both in context and based on a reader/listener’s predilections, and it can be used to refer to both the era when the system aka government was explicitly rigged against blacks and to a vaguer and more latent sense that there’s lots of racism lying below the surface today.
A better word to describe the latter would be “pervasive.” Problem is, if you assert that there’s “pervasive racism,” people will balk, not only because it may not ring true in their view, but because it tags almost everyone, not just the not-me otherness of a “system.” It’s easier to get away with using the vagueness of “systemic racism” and imply pervasive racism, because the implication can be denied or deflected if challenged by someone who doesn’t agree.
“Systemic” lets people point a finger away from those around them and at a faceless and nebulous bogeyman, which is much easier to attack because it doesn’t exist in any concrete way and therefore cannot fight back or even be debunked. In declaring the continued existence of systemic racism, baiters and self-servers like “Mayor Pete” rely on the vagueness, fogginess, and looseness of the word system to let people fill in the blanks in a way that satisfies their preferences, but often won’t stand up to scrutiny.
The term “equivocation” refers “to the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself,” and it’s a very common tactic in politics. As actual racism in our society has waned, equivocation surrounding the word has increased, because some people don’t actually want racism to go away, lest they lose a raison d’être.
Are there racists out there? That’s like asking if water is wet or if the sky is blue. There’ll always be racists, and no rational person will assert otherwise. They are best handled individually, via the mechanisms of a free society that include challenging, shunning, etc.
Is racism “systemic?”
Define “systemic,” then judge the question within the definition you choose. And, then, if you believe the answer is “yes,” use that definition instead of “systemic.” If you can’t define “systemic,” then don’t ask the question until you can. Otherwise, you’re equivocating, you’re cheating, you’re selling an agenda rather than addressing a social wrong.
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Thanks for an excellent article. My definition of racist would be “making a substantive decision about someone based solely or primarily on their race. I suppose that folklore could argue that other bases are used to cover up covert racism, but good luck proving that.
Smokey Callaghan-Stover
Two errors: end quotes after race. Folklore was intended to be folks ( thanks, autocorrect!)
I find this post intentionally obtuse. You seem to be closing your eyes to reality and demanding this be shown to you as originating in a “system” or you don’t believe it.
Have the protests of the last decade over every white-cop-on-black-victim, or the kerfuffle over Kaepernick not narrowly defined this for you? While there are certainly other impacts, racism is systematically embedded in our legal system. People of color are more likely to be stopped by the police, detained pretrial, charged with more serious crimes, and sentenced more harshly than white people. Black students are 3x as likely to be suspended and expelled from schools for identical infractions as white students.
Do you want a “system”? The “War on Drugs” started in 1970 by Nixon, and amply documented as having racial motivations, and statistical analysis clearly points to this as the root cause of many of the inequalities we see. And it’s still going on. It’s a system.
Please don’t bury your head in the sand and pretend the problem doesn’t exist unless it’s more narrowly defined.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that it challenges and condemns over-policing rather consistently. Here is just one: http://www.pigsandsheep.org/harvesting-the-poor/
You’ll also know that the War on Drugs is a constant target here, and you’ve probably even been offered a download of my booklet “End The War on Drugs.”
Moreso, you are actually doing what I suggested at the end of the article, i.e. being specific in defining “systemic” i.e. in law enforcement. The error lies in conflating that area of legitimate concern with everything else.
For example, there’s an “outcome based” idea of racism that basically says that if a neighborhood is mostly white or mostly black, that demographic state of being is itself the product of “systemic racism.”
In New York City, the fact that black and latino students have a very low rate of enrollment the eight elite public high schools is proof of systemic racism, and not the failure of the system itself to educate those kids. Meanwhile, the ‘systems’ that *are* educating those kids with great success, the charter schools, are under siege by the same people asserting “systemic racism.”
“Systemic racism” as it is used today is a catch-all excuse for imposing (arbitrary) dictatorial control over just about everything in society. Nowhere in the post did I suggest that racism no longer exists. The point of this article is to challenge the broad brush that is being painted, and the gimmick of pointing at X to justify government interference in Y.
Dan,
Your response was attached as a response to my response rather than the original post. Regardless, I would agree that all of the examples you mentioned constitute racism by my definition, viz. “making a substantive decision about someone based on their race”. To the extent that the formal “system” does not define those actions racially, I would suggest that the appropriate term would be “prevalent” rather than “systemic”. I think it does make a difference, because a response to a “systemic” problem entails changing the official system, whereas changing a prevalence problem requires education (or re-education).
Make no mistake about it, Peter: the corollary indictment is that you and I are White Privileged beneficiaries, never mind that we’re respectively Americans of Jewish and Greek immigrants – immigrants who were thoroughly despised and discriminated against in their time.
Indeed, we are now privileged; to be the descendants of Americans who worked hard, and more than suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes to provide us, their children, with greater opportunity.
Let’s turn Alinsky on his head and take back control of the language of this conversation!
Some of this systemic racist stuff is over the top.
Cops are out hunting blacks, They even make this claim when the cop is black…
There is also the continued use of stories narratives that have been proven false, hands up don’t shoot did not happen in Ferguson, the guy who died because he resisted arrest for selling loose cigarettes, they seem to leave out that he was not cooperating, (though I think selling loose cigarettes is a pretty clever way around the stupid law)
Yes more blacks by percent of population are killed than whites but police make more contact with the blacks than they do with the whites so there are more chances for things to go wrong. This maybe because of systemic racism but nobody seems to want to go to the root cause.
I’ve read of a study on one of the highway/turnpikes in NY or NJ where they studied speeding and blacks were more likely to be speeding (admittedly this could be an urban myth…)
I think some of the problem is that blacks expect to be hassled by the police, so they think why cooperate, or heck I’m going to be stopped anyways why not speed…
and honestly I think some fear the police and thus don’t cooperate, and try to run and maybe even do something dumb like point a facsimile of a gun at them hoping it will buy them the time to get away.
its a problem that feeds itself, and I’m not sure how we as a society break the chain, it will have to start with the police but I’m afraid that will create more problems…