Are there actual, current examples of systemic racism where an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-based biased outcomes?
If you removed all racists from the economy, black people as a demographic would still be at a huge disadvantage for a very long time (or forever?). The playing field might not level on it's own.
If a system starts out with biased functions and runs long enough so that the distribution of the state is biased, removing the biased functions doesn't necessarily guarantee the state will return back to an unbiased equilibrium.
Removing explicitly racist laws doesn't remove the biases embedded in the system from two hundred years of slavery and terrorism. There is a complex feedback loop of education, economics, and cultural attitudes that have locked the imbalances in.
This is what I tune out of the conversation whenever someone mentions "patriarchy" (the "modern" version, i.e. "men are in power" not "men own women") - I'm a man, but I've never received any benefit just because (most of) our presidents / businessmen are men (in fact, arguably (individual) women receive more benefits, because most of those men are heterosexuals).
I was offered a permanent contract immediatly after my first month, while there were also a lot of women with kids working there who had been on temp contracts for years. Probably because I could work at night; the mothers worked during schooltimes. Any time someone got pregnant, their contract was not renewed.
In this situation I had an advantage because of my gender. This was not because the business itself was specifically sexist, in fact almost all of management were women. Instead, the systems in place made it so that financially smart decisions negatively impacted women.
I mean, sounds it literally wasn’t sexism, you were just a better worker.
Obviously, it’s a problem that society doesn’t value people having children. But that’s an orthogonal issue to sexism, I’m pretty sure that if a father couldn’t work nights, he’d be treated exactly the same. Ideally the society would subsidize people having kids, or businesses employing workers with kids, or something...
You have, it is just that these benefits are so ingrained in society that you didn't notice. That's what people mean when they talk about systemic issues.
how is a poor black person any worse off than a poor white person?
It's also important to note that just because you fixed a racist practice, that doesn't immediately endow an underprivileged group with the full fruits of equality. For example, redlining may now be illegal in the United States, but middle class white Americans have been benefiting from nearly a hundred years' worth of wealth accumulation through housing that black Americans were locked out of. This is a good example of how the "system" produces racially-biased outcomes without any racist human input in the present day.
What is the end goal here though? The most wealthy ethnicities in the US are Asian-Indians, Jewish and East-Asians. Is that also systemic racism (against Whites) and these groups should be knocked down?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-asian-quotas-repeat-an...
I think this is describing how the system includes momentum, and you're saying that the system (momentum) is producing racially-biased outcomes _without_ racist input today. That's true in the strictest, most technical sense, but is this supposed to be a motivation for reparations or something?
Along those same lines I suppose we also suffer from systemic genocide, systemic famine, systemic war, and every other crappy thing that happened to people in history and were not somehow complete corrected for by a counter redistribution of wealth and status.
The problem with your counterexample ("systemic famine"/"systemic war"/etc.) is that those are one-off events in the past, and thus they don't cumulatively add up and compound to create very unequal outcomes today. A more appropriate hypothetical would be that the last 400 years of one's ancestors all experienced genocide, war, or other similarly "crappy" things.
As for one-off events, it seems like just a matter of degree, not principle. Though surely genocide continue to have negative affects on the victimized group to this day.
Your argument is mostly "whataboutism" - you point out that terrible things have happened to groups of people in the past and those things have inter-generational effects. Of course it's true.
That being said, of course it's a matter of degree, but at that point you're just arguing semantics. Driving your car at 25mph vs 125mph is only a difference of degree, and yet one is totally permissible and the other is incredibly dangerous and would land you with a big fine. The key point here is that speeding becomes increasingly more dangerous as you drive faster, to the point that exceeding speed limits by a given amount becomes reckless driving because you're much more likely to cause injury and/or death to yourself and others. In the same way, racist systems create a compounding disadvantage that is almost impossible to rectify simply by changing the laws to make them "colorblind" in the modern day.
For example, the normalized Western image of something like a caucasian Jesus or a caucasian Santa Clause influences ways of thinking and who we see as our cultural betters.
Surely you would agree during slavery it was?
I'm going to assume you agree, so then can you explain when systemic racism ended? And what caused it to end? Can you also help me understand how you are so sure that the negative impact to Black people while this country was systematically racist does not still hurt people today?
[1]: FBI murder statistics by race from 2018, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-... 2018 was the latest year I could find such data on.
It's odd you continue to focus on crime statistics, something I haven't mentioned at all, as a way to push back on the narrative of systemic racism. For anyone who is Black or a person of color, we know first hand systemic racism is much more than that.
[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...
how many young poor black mothers have children too early (16) with gang members who end up dying from gang violence? isn’t that a modern day common black narrative?
how is a poor white person any worse off than a poor black person? they have same access to all resources. it’s systemic poverty for poor people. it has nothing to do with blacks.
some blacks bootstrap themselves out and make it, most don’t. how broken is the system for those that make it out? not very.
This is a good point imo. Are they poor because they're black or because their family was poor before them?
I agree people put too much emphasis on more visible bias (ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation) and blame a lot of things which arguably may have originated from these bias, but are furthered by other factors (e.g. slow social mobility - all bias accounted for).
>In other words, the problem is not that there are racist people in the system, but that we have these systems that give racist individuals the perfect excuse to achieve their nefarious ends.
Even this just doesn't fully explain away systemic oppression that impacts people on a day-to-day basic like Black people not getting job interviews due to their name sounding Black or job offers because the interviewers have unconscious bias.
In this scenario, is it not the racist individual (the interviewer) impacting minority success, rather than the system itself?
(I take no position here as to the existence of systemic racism. I'm just not certain the example you have brought supports your argument.)
> [1] If you don't believe this, you're in the minority now: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/11/21286642/george-floyd-protests....
This part was a little odd. It sounds like you're saying "because this belief is widely held by people, we should treat it as true"?
I definitely am in the minority, but I find a much more logically consistent view than the modern definition of systemic racism to actually be "there are systems of authority/control/oppression, which by their nature can be exploited by racists (or other groups) to advance their ends".
In other words - and I hope this isn't too off topic of a tangent - one of the primary goals of the BLM protest seems to be "racism is leading to excess death/imprisonment for black americans, so let's try to purge any traces of racism to eliminate these excess deaths". Which to me is missing the point: practices/systems like no-knock raids, the war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, etc give police officers an excuse to be able to violently invade someone's home (no-knock), violate 4th amendment rights (war on drugs wrt "I smelled weed in your car"), criminalize behavior that happens to be broken along racial and class lines (non-violent drug usage/possession/distribution). In other words, the problem is not that there are racist people in the system, but that we have these systems that give racist individuals the perfect excuse to achieve their nefarious ends. That's because we've built a system that justifies and encourages oppression, and we can see that without having to introduce racee.
Anyway, I'm not hear to debunk "systemic racism" since like so many of the new-speak definitions/words, as soon as you try to debunk it people claim that you're using the wrong definition. But I do think it should be noted that when it comes to looking at actual research literature on, say, likelihood of being shot by police in a given encounter broken down by race, the "systemic racism" doesn't seem to be borne out in the data. Whereas we can make incredibly important societal change without needing to introduce the idea of systemic racism, simply by addressing the actual systems of oppression we have set up that give police officers the ability to randomly pull a citizen over and harass them since at any given moment each of us is violating a nonzero number of laws.