Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian). Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.

Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.

And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.

Immigration quotas that you speak of were created to increase diversity of immigrants. If we didn’t have them, then Chinese and Indian immigrants would get most of the visas pushing out other countries. It’s actually the opposite of systemic racism since it’s increasing racial diversity of immigrants.

Must be systemic racism.

In the US economic disparities drive pretty much everything else.

> Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian).

As a brown guy with a beard, maybe I get screened more at TSA, or maybe I don’t. (I definitely do outside the US.) At most that’s just regular racism caused by the preconceptions of TSA officers. It doesn’t lead to some systemic or persistent disadvantage.

> Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.

I’m not sure I would even call this racism.

> Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.

This is backward. It proceeds from a false premise “non-white solidarity” that’s broke by the use of wedge issues. The opposite is true: Asians have distinct interests and people trying to get them to support affirmative action measures are trying to get them to vote against their own interests. Ibram Kendi-style “equity”—where races are represented in proportion to their share of the population—would be disastrous for Asians. We would go from 20-40% in top universities to 6%. We’d go from 35% in Silicon Valley to 6%-10%. And that’s not a hypothetical thing. I went to TJHSST, where progressives voted to eliminate the admissions test. That will cut Asians from 70% to 20%. NYC is trying to do the same thing.

Asians, and to a great extent Latinos, have very little self-interest in rocking the boat. While immigrants in Europe are seeing generational poverty, Asians and Latinos enjoy similar or even higher levels of income mobility as whites. Cubans and Vietnamese came over as refugees with nothing, and achieved economic parity with white Americans within a single generation. There’s only a handful of countries (UK, Canada, Australia) where that sort of thing happens. We have very little self interest in messing with the current system.

It’s fair to argue that we should give up some of our privilege to help reduce systemic disparities. But that’s a completely different argument. But telling us that these changes are in our own self interest, because the existing system is racist against us, is just gaslighting.

> And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.

Yes, virtually all of them are. When you see people incoming intra-Asian disparities it’s almost invariably based on pointing to Asian groups that are recent immigrants. That’s why you suddenly started seeing articles about the plight of “Bhutanese Americans.” Virtually all of them came here during the Obama administration, as refugees. They might be poor now, but that’s to be expected at this stage.

I’m Bangladeshi. Bangladeshi Americans are one of the poorer Asian groups. But Indian Americans are one of the richest. That’s not the product of “racism”—that would be absurd, even we can’t usually tell each other apart by sight. Instead it’s because Indians started immigrating in the 1960s and Bangladeshis only did so in significant numbers since the 2000s. But even Asian groups who come here in poverty quickly move up the ladder. In 1980, Vietnamese were among the poorest ethnic groups, having come here as refugees. Today, they have reached economic parity with whites.

(Immigration quotas are a weird one -- on one hand, you want to keep all the H1B visas from going to the mega-consultancies like Tata or Infosys that end up not paying very much, but on the other, of the 18 most populous countries, US is at #3, Russia is at #9, and the rest are outside of Europe. It's probably not racism! But at the same time, it does limit immigration from these larger countries which disproportionately skew Asian in favor of smaller countries that skew white. Europe is split into roughly as many countries as Asia, despite having a sixth of the population!)

I mean, affirmative action as a wedge issue for Asian Americans is already in place, whether it's achieving proportional representation or not -- the premise is that there are already higher admission standards at elite universities for Asian Americans than even whites (see: Harvard lawsuit). I agree with you there, that on the face of it, when taken in isolation, affirmative action is bad for Asian Americans! At the same time, you know which group is really under-represented at Harvard and would benefit from proportional representation? Non-hispanic whites (with "only" 40% of the student body, versus 60% of the US population).

I'm honestly curious to what extent the stats on median household income or whichever metric(s) you're using to gauge economic parity are skewed by the tendency of Asian Americans to concentrate in high cost-of-living urban areas. For instance, it's not a fair comparison to say "oh, Asian Americans who disproportionately live in NYC / SF make more than the median white American who lives in Wisconsin".

But we can agree that it exists, right? Whatever term you’d use, the phenomenon it describes is real. And it refers to present injustices as well as historical ones.

If you want to understand why, I'd encourage you to read Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell.

Here's one example:

> These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so that the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be "yes." Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.

> The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole. In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.

> Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today's black married couples exempt from slavery and other injuries?

The problem is the language around "systemic racism" cites outcomes as proof of preexisting conditions. That is, it asserts a tautology without presenting causal links, or ruling out other factors as causes.

When you do consider other factors, the detection of systemic racism collapses into one of point-stupidities (bad policies) and fairly ordinary economic forces not subject to racial choice. This is especially so when you start examining things like South Africa during apartheid (which was an example of systemic racism), or America at the turn of the 20th century.

There are a bundle of assumptions rolled up into that term that each merit discussion. If we're going to ever seriously talk about what behaviors and policies we should adopt, we ought to at least get the causes straight rather than leaping to the conclusion that "it" exists.

The effects of Systemic racism is quantifiable and reproducible. You can simply do things like sending resumes to different employers with no meaningful changed but making the resume seem more like it's written by somebody of a different race. From what I see westernized Asians and Caucasians are preferred, anybody who sounds too foreign or too much like another minority is not.

Affirmative action is meant to counterveil this but in itself is the most brazen and blatent example of systemic racism in society, involving both power and prejudice, since affirmative action has teeth. The entire function of it is to put your finger on the scale to ensure certain racial groups get hired in preference of others.

Sure prejudiced beliefs have likely declined in general since say the 60s but racism is prevalent and omnipresent and hidden behind euphemisms and not called racism. The big reason why "systemic racism" specifically has come into vogue is that people are more opaque and dishonest about their prejudices for the sake of social survival.

People advocate for systemic racism while proudly calling themselves anti racists. Those against affirmative action and such also consider themselves anti-racists, but seem unconcerned that no affirmative action would effectively lead to a society where certain groups will certainly disperportionatey suffer from systemic racism - often conveniently to their own benefit.

I can't see racism as not pervasive, although I think it's easy to start fearing prejudice and microagressions from others that simply don't exist out of paranoia, to end up getting oppressed by phantoms.