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This is uncharitable. Sometimes systems disproportionately favor certain outcomes, and systemic racism describes a subset of those systems. If you were playing

This is uncharitable. Sometimes systems disproportionately favor certain outcomes, and systemic racism describes a subset of those systems. If you were playing a boardgame, and the rules said I get to role 2 dice for every 1 dice you roll, at that point the game wouldn't be fair. If we were playing chess and I got to start with 2 queens, then you would be within your rights to complain that the game wasn't fair. And if you complained about the rules of the game, and said that game wasn't fair, and I hand-waved that by saying that you were misusing fairness to push back against "any outcome where you lost", it would be reasonable to take issue with that. Systemic racism isn't just any outcome where Black people get hurt, it describes a reinforcing mechanic in society where Black people are repeatedly hurt and where their disadvantages perpetuate themselves. Crime drives people into poverty, which imposes social and economic disadvantages which keep them from rising out of poverty, which drives them into crime -- increased attention on those neighborhoods leads to preconceptions and biases among officers, it leads to fewer opportunities for the people in those neighborhoods, and the cycle continues. It's reinforced by the system itself, and by people inside the system who mean well but contribute to it, and by people outside of the system that use it to support their own racist agendas. It's a lose more mechanic that reinforces unequal outcomes for Black communities, and its a mechanic that was very obviously set in motion by redlining, voter and wage suppression, by explicitly racist housing policies, and by slavery itself. It is not an accident that poor neighborhoods tend to be predominantly Black, that happened deliberately. "Racist" is a perfectly fine word to describe the outcomes of that system, it's nothing like an asteroid.

temp8964 6y ago
The word "racism" or any "xxxism" always indicate the underlying intention or psychological leaning. You can say there are systemic reasons to explain the current racial discrepancies, but unless the reasons are intentional, such like the policies are directly explicitly demanding a differential treatment on the basis of race, use the word "racism" is just to obscure different levels of mechanisms in the society and try to use the language to confuse people. The users of the word "systemic racism" on the one hand claim it does not necessarily mean there is intentional racism, on the other hand they ride on the listeners' emotional response of intentional racism. As the matter of fact, the only racist policy nowadays demanding a differential treatment on the basis of race is Affirmative Action promoted by the left. But the left doesn't care Asian kids are heavily penalized by their skin color.
- didibus 6y ago
  Systemic racism means the system discriminates against race and that it does so as a result of racism. So yes, it does imply the intention was always to discriminate against black people, because that was the explicit intent of a large number of people over centuries in the country is why the current system shows discrimination against a particular race. It's possible the current policies no longer harbor direct racism, but that the effect of prior policies and attitudes still lingers. Thus it is necessary to recognize their residual effect, and find ways to mitigate it, otherwise it is not true that the current system isn't racist, if racist driven intentions of the past still have an effect on the outcomes of the system today.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > always indicate the underlying intention or psychological leaning You can say that all you want, but words have cultural meanings, and it's just not true. We're not going to get very far if your argument boils down to "the way that people commonly use the word racism is wrong." Society disagrees with you, and they get to choose what words mean. More to the point, I think it's a little naive to say that the current situation with Black neighborhoods doesn't have intentionality behind it. Redlining was on purpose, it was not an accident. Regardless of whether every single person participating in that system today is trying to be racist, the position we're in exists because of intentional action during America's history. If you want to argue that the intentionality goes away or should be ignored as soon as a law is passed, first I disagree that racism is completely absent in modern policy decisions, but second, it's just a silly thing to argue even if racism had ended when we passed civil rights. It's like if I start a chess game with 2 queens, and halfway through the game I throw one of my queens away. Is the game suddenly fair? No, because I've built myself a structural advantage during the first half of the game, pushed you into a worse position, captured more pieces, and that advantage can't suddenly be ignored during the second half just because I'm no longer actively cheating. > the word "racism" is just to obscure different levels of mechanisms People say this, but I have noticed a strong correlation between people understanding what the words "systemic racism" means and understanding a lot about how these systems operate. If people using the words "systemic racism" were just running around doing nothing, and it was everyone else trying to get rid of problematic housing policies or qualified immunity, then I might be more sympathetic to this concern. But that's not what I see. The people who understand the racial origins of ghettos are also the people on the ground working hard to reform housing policies. They're very much not using systemic racism as a distraction, they're using it as a motivation to examine how our modern systems work and to try and make them more equitable. That's unequivocally a good thing for everyone, regardless of race.

temp8964 6y ago

The word "racism" or any "xxxism" always indicate the underlying intention or psychological leaning. You can say there are systemic reasons to explain the current racial discrepancies, but unless the reasons are intentional, such like the policies are directly explicitly demanding a differential treatment on the basis of race, use the word "racism" is just to obscure different levels of mechanisms in the society and try to use the language to confuse people. The users of the word "systemic racism" on the one hand claim it does not necessarily mean there is intentional racism, on the other hand they ride on the listeners' emotional response of intentional racism. As the matter of fact, the only racist policy nowadays demanding a differential treatment on the basis of race is Affirmative Action promoted by the left. But the left doesn't care Asian kids are heavily penalized by their skin color.

didibus 6y ago
Systemic racism means the system discriminates against race and that it does so as a result of racism. So yes, it does imply the intention was always to discriminate against black people, because that was the explicit intent of a large number of people over centuries in the country is why the current system shows discrimination against a particular race. It's possible the current policies no longer harbor direct racism, but that the effect of prior policies and attitudes still lingers. Thus it is necessary to recognize their residual effect, and find ways to mitigate it, otherwise it is not true that the current system isn't racist, if racist driven intentions of the past still have an effect on the outcomes of the system today.
danShumway 6y ago
> always indicate the underlying intention or psychological leaning You can say that all you want, but words have cultural meanings, and it's just not true. We're not going to get very far if your argument boils down to "the way that people commonly use the word racism is wrong." Society disagrees with you, and they get to choose what words mean. More to the point, I think it's a little naive to say that the current situation with Black neighborhoods doesn't have intentionality behind it. Redlining was on purpose, it was not an accident. Regardless of whether every single person participating in that system today is trying to be racist, the position we're in exists because of intentional action during America's history. If you want to argue that the intentionality goes away or should be ignored as soon as a law is passed, first I disagree that racism is completely absent in modern policy decisions, but second, it's just a silly thing to argue even if racism had ended when we passed civil rights. It's like if I start a chess game with 2 queens, and halfway through the game I throw one of my queens away. Is the game suddenly fair? No, because I've built myself a structural advantage during the first half of the game, pushed you into a worse position, captured more pieces, and that advantage can't suddenly be ignored during the second half just because I'm no longer actively cheating. > the word "racism" is just to obscure different levels of mechanisms People say this, but I have noticed a strong correlation between people understanding what the words "systemic racism" means and understanding a lot about how these systems operate. If people using the words "systemic racism" were just running around doing nothing, and it was everyone else trying to get rid of problematic housing policies or qualified immunity, then I might be more sympathetic to this concern. But that's not what I see. The people who understand the racial origins of ghettos are also the people on the ground working hard to reform housing policies. They're very much not using systemic racism as a distraction, they're using it as a motivation to examine how our modern systems work and to try and make them more equitable. That's unequivocally a good thing for everyone, regardless of race.