> 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.

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?

I don't think it's just the "strictest, most technical" sense. It's a significant example of how "if you took the people out of the system, you'd still get biased outcomes based on race." (or, if you prefer, an example of where "an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-based biased outcomes")

Ok, I understand what you mean. Thanks for being considerate, I usually don't express my opinion in these discussions, hopefully I didn't come across very rudely.

This seems to fit with the charge that you are arguing momentum is racist. They were born in a poor household. That household is poorer than it would otherwise be because of racism in prior generations (but which no longer exists today) leading to a lack of inheritance among other things. This is your evidence of systemic racism.

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.

That is one piece of evidence of systemic racism.

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.

Focusing on one piece at a time is how we do logic. You need to defend the weakest link in your case. Or are you suggesting that the various pieces of systemic racism are not themselves racism, until aggregated together?

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.

Regardless of whether you think it's a "weak link", this isn't a logical proof where you can disprove one statement rendering the entire proof invalid. Rather, you have to disprove each piece of evidence for systemic racism in order to disprove it exists.

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.

I'd call it reductio ad absurdum personally, an application of your logic elsewhere to reach absurd conclusions. And the existence of inter-generational effects are the undisputed facts I started with, not the conclusions reached via your logic, which are that the existence of these effects support the charge of systemic war/famine/etc. Whether it's just semantics depends on what you think the supposed existence of these "systemic evils" requires morally.

Not really. You've said that because the difference between the intergenerational harm caused by "other crappy things" and 400 years' worth of racism is only quantitative, the intergenerational effects of "other crappy things" ought to be considered systemic. Your logic implies that because driving your car at 5mph and 100mph is only a quantitative difference, driving at 5mph ought to be considered "speeding." Or because the difference between heating cold water 1 degree and 100 degrees is only quantitative, cold water heated 1 degree ought to be considered "steam." Quantitative differences eventually become qualitative differences; that much should be trivially obvious.

Ah I missed that little gem. So genocide would be the safe slow driving extreme in this analogy?