Stop treating politics as a game of football and look at how power is distributed and who benefits from that distribution. Material analysis, not color coded appearances.
Jagmeet Singh, current leader of the NDP, tweeted the other day something along the lines of "Systemic racism comes from the power structures in place. If you want to find the source of systemic racism in Canada, you have to look at the parties who have been in power for the last 150 years: the Liberals and the Conservatives."
I can understand what "institutional racism" means when we speak of things like legal slavery and Jim Crow. Racism is right there, in black and white, in the law. It is legally instituted and thus institutional.
However, when we speak of "systemic racism" and claim that disparity in outcomes is racist, then we're starting to go off the deep end. Statistical disparity is no proof of racism. You must be able to explain the disparity and not simply claim that disparity is identical with racism or assume that there must be a racist, sinister cause behind it. By definition, racism is something only individuals can do and so racist laws are the product of racist people.
The best examples I can come up with are case where policies and programs exploit incidental facts to conceal true motives. For example, if you know the location of black neighborhoods, and you know that they tend to be poor, and your aim is to reduce the black population of Americans (i.e., a racist motive), you might plant more abortion clinics within walking distance of black neighborhoods[0] under the bogus claim that you're trying to alleviate poverty. Given the statistics, non-Hispanic black women had the highest abortion rates. About 80% of Planned Parenthood's surgical abortion facilities are within walking distance of black or Latino neighborhoods. Black women are three times more likely to have an abortion than white women. Now couple that with Margaret Sanger's overt racism and eugenics/population control fanaticism and you could begin to suspect racist motives even if the majority of employees, supporters, and those involved are not necessarily racist (though I expect a certain unacknowledged patronizing attitude toward blacks and the poor among many supporters).
Or consider the extremely high rates of black children born out of wedlock (comparable to rates among poor whites, IIRC). We know that the absence of the father from the home is a strong statistical indicator for future delinquency and the perpetuation of poverty. So are the perverse welfare incentives that work against marriage and stable families racist? You would have to show that the intent was racist, but in the absence of such proof, it is more reasonable to assume that well-meaning Great Society-type policies were poorly considered in much the same way well-meaning NGOs aid programs actually hurt those they seek to help by, e.g., wrecking local economies by flooding the market with free goods even during times where there is no crisis (examples are Haitain agriculture, Nigerian textiles, cobblers in Africa).
The murkiness of the idea is extremely dangerous because it begins to resemble a conspiracy theory. Sinister forces are vaguely assigned to myriad realities which means that various injustices, including accusations of racism, become permissible in the name of "justice". Furthermore, such things can distract from the real problems facing a particular group, minority or otherwise, and thus stifle solutions and consequently prevent such groups from truly flourishing.
Well here's your problem buddy. You decided that racism is something that by definition can't be systemic. There's no way to argue a definition but one can evaluate what it's useful for. Your definition is really convenient for someone who doesn't want to reckon with systemic injustice against Black people, huh?
There's plenty of intellectual heavyweights who will explain in great detail what systemic racism looks like. Go read James Baldwin or Angela Davis or something.
Who's definition? Yours? It seems rather obvious that when you start from a basis of assuming that racism is only the consequence of entirely atomized individuals, you fail to have any kind of understanding of what people mean by "structural."
The issue here isn't semantics. It's that you are obviously working backwards from a conclusion you've already reached
Are hackers criminals? You may think that hackers == people who like to tinker. Alas. Society coopted the term.
Please don't get stuck on formal definitions. I doubt that pedantry over "racist", "systemic racism" will much help public discourse, the current debate. As evidenced by the push back you've received here.
Maybe whenever you hear "racism", you can realtime translate to "prejudice and bias, often times racially motivated, or even just adjacent."
"...you could begin to suspect racist motives even if the majority of employees, supporters, and those involved are not necessarily racist..."
Go on.
FWIW, my favorite take on this is James Mickens, CS prof at Harvard, entertainingly makes this point in a way that even geeks can understand. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...
https://www.revealnews.org/article/for-people-of-color-banks...
The rest of your post appears to be a lot of goofy far-right talking points.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
> The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service. The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis; the African-American men in the study were only told they were receiving free health care from the Federal government of the United States.
I know that things aren't that simple, but where is that "systematic racism" actually coming from, then? It can't be from the law, since the civil rights era has removed any legal discrimination.
And it can't be just coming from Fox News, 4chan and the odd corporation that doesn't tweet BLM stuff either.
Saying Black Lives Matter is not even the bare minimum. It is very easy for corporations and politicians to pay lip service to grievances without materially addressing them. In fact, that is usually what they do. There's a reason why the protesters are demanding to defund the police and a reason why the political machine is doing everything but negotiate on those terms. The protesters want concrete, radical reorganization of the police system so they have staked a bold position. Corporations want to protect their PR image and avoid losing profits. Politicians want anything but touching the police apparatus.
Just look at Joe Biden. His response to the protests was a proposal to increase police funding for "community policing" initiatives.
> but where is that "systematic racism" actually coming from, then?
Idk where you've been if you haven't seen the extensive documentation that the police are a big part of systemic racism. But it goes beyond them. It's also companies not investing in black neighborhoods, it's politicians pandering to Black voters in election years and then ignoring them for the rest. It's automated computer systems having bias baked into them [0]. It's a whole lot of stuff and I can't even know where you should begin.
[0] https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801
At least it would solve the issue of racism. Get white cops to police white neighborhoods and black cops to police black neighborhoods. I suspect it's what's going to happen regardless of any explicit policy change.
This is because we extrapolate any incident within the big org to apply to the whole organization, whereas we obviously don't extrapolate out incidents in small orgs to apply to different small orgs.
So if you have 1 big police department with 5 fatal shootings, and 20 small police departments with 5 fatal shootings in total, all in different departments, people will think, "wow, that big police department is trash, but 15 out of the 20 small police departments are good! Small police departments are so much better!"
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/police-are-killing-fewe...
edit: Regarding cities having a much larger percentage of minorities: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e...
It took me all of 2 minutes to look these things up, the fact that you didn't just shows that you care more about a particular ideology than facts.
> "In my city of Charlotte, with the Keith Scott shooting, it was: 9 democratic council members to 1 republican, democratic mayor, democratic governor, black police chief, and a black police officer that did the shooting, but somehow it was institutional racism."
Why does the political affiliation or the colour of the people involved mean that it cannot be institutional racism. Isn't the idea that the racism is baked into the policies, the modus operandi of the police and judicial system?
> "There is a policing problem in this country. Period. Color of your skin be damned. If people started from there, things might have been a little different at this point."
Let's assume that this was the case. How will this improve things compared to now?
Of the 11,514 murder offenders in 2018 where the race of the offender is known by now, 6,318 of the offenders were black: 54.9%. Blacks make up 13.4% of the us population.
I don’t get how growing up in a city with a poor economic policy causes one to become a murderer.
No, I think that personality traits are inherited. There are genes which are correlated with aggression in the phenotype. There are other genes that are correlated with the expression of black skin the phenotype.
>If you took someone who was black and raised them in a world where racism never existed, would they still be more likely to be murderers than someone who was, for example, white?
Are you asking that question in good faith? See this and tell me what your conclusions are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...