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We can debate all day long about the merits of explaining systemic racism to young black kids vs keeping them ignorant about it. However the people ignoring the

We can debate all day long about the merits of explaining systemic racism to young black kids vs keeping them ignorant about it. However the people ignoring the facts are the ones who deny systemic racism exists. It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background.

rayiner 5y ago
> We can debate all day long about the merits of explaining systemic racism to young black kids vs keeping them ignorant about it. However the people ignoring the facts are the ones who deny systemic racism exists. Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. Not only that, it deliberately repurposes a label that ordinarily refers to prejudiced beliefs, and applies it to structural forces that operate without any individuals being consciously racist. The same academics who talk about “systemic racism” readily admit that prejudiced beliefs have actually declined. If you educated people about the history of e.g. FHA redlining and how that affects people today, I think you’d find far fewer people deny that those effects exist. Besides that, we’re now teaching it to all children of color, who definitely don’t suffer from systemic racism. Asians and Latinos are on a course to achieve economic parity with whites, just like previous immigrant generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 > It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background. Sure, we should definitely teach kinds about the history of these things, how they create structural barriers, statistics on persistent disparities, when they’re old enough to understand. But even then, we should actually say what we mean instead of using rhetoric chosen by activists for shock effect.
- vitus 5y ago
  There are more factors to systemic racism than just worse economic outcomes, so it's naive to assert that only black people experience its negative effects. 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - rayiner 5y ago
    > There are more factors to systemic racism than just worse economic outcomes, so it's naive to assert that only black people experience its negative effects. 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.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  > Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. 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.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Many of the phenomena it describes are real, for sure, at least with respect to Black people. My Maryland county wasn’t desegregated until 1968, in my parents’ generation. That has produced statistical disparities that persist to this day.
    - Klinky 5y ago
      Then what are you arguing? That it exists and doesn't exist at the same time?
      - andi999 5y ago
        I think he argues that it exists, but it is not relevant/does not deserve attention, because there are more important things (like prejudice).
      - rayiner 5y ago
        I never said it doesn’t exist, I’m talking about how it’s taught to children in school.
  - cbnotfromthere 5y ago
    Could you please give us 3 examples of what you consider to be "systemic racism" nowadays in the US? Since you claim the phenomenon is real, I'm sure coming up with a few examples won't be difficult.
  - slowmovintarget 5y ago
    The data don't support racism being the causes of the disparate outcomes. That makes it unreasonable to start with the assumption that the "system is racist." 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.
- faeriechangling 5y ago
  I don't see systemic racism as being something activists say for shock effect. 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.
ne0flex 5y ago
I'd argue there's a lot more nuances to system racism than the general narrative that is currently being perpettuated. Looking into those nuances would be frowned upon because certain groups differ from other groups for reasons that are not truly understood but would cause us to ask questions we're not comfortable with. Though anecdotal, I know several adults who have fallen into the "it's because systemic racism that I can't get ahead" trap. One example is a low-achiever socially awkward friend of mine that complains about not being able to find a tech job, yet spends the vast majority of his days playing video games. Instead of recongizing that his skills (social and coding) are subpar and addressing it, he chalks it up to systemic racism, makes an angry post on Facebook and calls it a day.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  I think American culture has potentially gone down an ever-worsening path that comes from assuming blacks and whites are inherently identical. That leads to the belief that the persistent differences in life outcomes must be caused by oppression. That means there's an oppressor who is evil and deserves punishment. What if the fundamental assumption isn't true? How long do you keep punishing the oppressor for? Not to get all Godwinny but that's also how 1930's Germans saw Jews. They were the greedy bankers taking that reparations money and oppressing the native Germans. so they deserved punishment.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Wait, what? We went from "teaching about systemic racism might be harmful", to "systemic racism doesn't exist", to "Blacks are inherently different from other races, which will naturally lead to different outcomes" to "critical race theory might lead to nazism." This is a wild rollercoaster of a thread and I want off of it. To jump off the original commenter's point, if you're concerned that there might be harmful outcomes from teaching students that society is keeping them down, why aren't you worried about similar outcomes that might come from teaching them that their race makes them inherently less suited for certain tasks? I mean, think about what you're implying here. To claim that inherent race differences is the reason there's a Black wage gap -- ignoring everything else about that statement, it's way more fatalistic than telling kids that there are adverse social structures they should be aware of. Imagine being a teacher in a poor neighborhood and telling your class that the negative experiences in their life exist because of the fact they're Black -- not because of systemic racism, not because of laziness, not because of luck, but because of how they were born. You really can't get more fatalistic and harmful than that. It's so utterly embarrassing to see comments like this on HN, directly under other comments that claim that racism is a solved problem. Sometimes this community really creeps me out, I'm watching people in the same breath argue that racism is solved and that Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor. How does this pass muster?
exporectomy 5y ago
Instead of just saying systemic racism exists, why not point out examples? Then people can judge for themselves what effect it may have on them instead of feeling like there's this oppressive "other" which is the cause of anything they don't like about their life and there's no point struggling against it because it'll just crush them anyway.
- nverno 5y ago
  "systemic racism" is intentionally deceptive language. I think you'd be hard-pressed to constructive uses of this jargon where people are actually trying to solve specific, well-defined problems.
  - breakyerself 5y ago
    Systemic racism isn't intentionally deceptive. It's self explanatory, but just like anything the more you investigate the more layered and multifaceted it becomes. For me it's 3 main things. 1. The way historical oppression can set a group behind another group even after any specific policy has been repealed. Poverty is often a cycle that can go on indefinitely for generations especially depending on things like upward mobility which has coincidentally been getting weaker since the period of official apartheid ended in the USA. Strange that we seem to be uninterested in spending much on the uplifting of our people now that such spending would need to include all people. 2. The way that bias against a group can result in that group being disadvantaged despite there being no rules or laws in place that require that and even in spite of it being contrary to policies. Like the way that black people are half as likely to receive a callback for a job interview as an identically qualified white applicant or that despite being less likely to be found with contraband black people are twice as likely to be searched by police. 3. Would be laws and rules that do not target racial groups, but unfairly benefit or disadvantage racial groups. This would be local property tax based school funding resulting in poor neighborhoods getting inadequate funding for schools resulting in predominantly black schools being underfunded. This is also drastically harsher penalties for crack compared to cocaine.
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fallingknife 5y ago
True. I don't see how you can possibly deny the existence of systemic racism in a country where all the top educational institutions actively discriminate against asians.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  What do you think about Affirmative Action? Is it systemic racism or systemic antiracism?
  - wsc981 5y ago
    > What do you think about Affirmative Action? Is it systemic racism or systemic antiracism? Racism of course. Since it’s selecting people based on race. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      In theory but there is effectively already in many cases greater affirmative action for white people already. Lets look at Harvard as a case study. 43% of white students at Harvard are legacies, athletes, or related to staff and 75% of these 43% wouldn't have been admitted on merits. Around 1/3 of white people at Harvard are there because of effectively white affirmative action. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-percent-white-students-are-legacy-athletes-n1060361 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-... A drive to pick people solely on merits would sound more meritorious if we applied it to white people first. I say this as a white man who believes in theory colorblind meritocracy in an imaginary world where such a thing can actually exist.
      - deleted 5y ago
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      - rayiner 5y ago
        So explain the drive to eliminate test based admissions at heavily Asian NYC and VA public high schools
prestigious 5y ago
Systemic racism no longer exists or at least I’m completely unaware of it. I find proponents of this theory like people who believe in big foot. Somehow he’s out there but they have zero evidence for it
- breakyerself 5y ago
  There is a mountain of academic study on the subject. I don't blame you for being unfamiliar with it, but without doing the research I don't know what you think you would have stumbled across by accident that would have proven things to you. Especially if you're already primed to think it's not real.
  - open0 5y ago
    > * I don't blame you for being unfamiliar with it* I do.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Other people have linked direct stats in this thread, and I encourage looking around at them. But also, just think about your theory in the abstract for a second. Less than one full generation has passed since redlining was made illegal. It's been less than 60 years since segregation was ruled illegal across the board. Do you really believe that the entirety of society has been reshaped in that amount of time and every negative system has been eliminated? In what is essentially less than the lifespan of a single generation? People treat the civil rights movement like it's this very old event that we've all moved past. I don't necessarily blame people for having that perspective, because that's the way we're taught about it in schools. But the civil rights movement was very recent. You think we overhauled the entire housing market in 60 years? We have not yet had even a single president that was born after the civil rights movement. So from my perspective, even ignoring the stats and research on this subject, I keep hearing people tell me that when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the voting rights act of 1965 passed, all the racists just, I don't know, died or something. That they can't possibly exist anymore, and they can't possibly have taught anything negative to their immediate kids who went on to be CEOs and politicians.
deleted 5y ago
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jollybean 5y ago
It's not just about explaining, it's about identity, ideology and activism. To posit the issues as 'merely explaining' is kind of to strawman people's legit concerns. CRT, for example, goes way beyond 'explaining' - on purpose. If this were an in issue of merely 'explaining to people who systematic limitations might work' - and being sufficiently nuanced about it, then I think this whole thing would be a lot less controversial. I think there's a way for us to talk to kids about the potentialities of systematic racism without using the language of activism.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  > CRT, for example, goes way beyond 'explaining' - on purpose. That is not true. Critical Race Theory is a framework for viewing legal and social structures through the lens of race and racism. I’m not an expert here, but this seems to be a fairly balanced summary: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
  - jollybean 5y ago
    CRT is a form of activism and ideology that goes far beyond explaining. The link you provided is a nice reference, but it's a very small-c conservative description and avoids the harder parts of the issue. The notion that 'minorities face challenges that majorities will have difficulty perceiving' is not unreasonable. But CRT uses language such as 'White Supremacy' - reminiscent of Men in Pointy White Hats' to describe those 'majority systems'. Their stated objective is to 'deconstruct and destroy Whiteness', implying that the 'majority culture must be removed', and that those who do not realize this and actively participate are holding up structures of White Supremacy. So they use 'whiteness' in kind of an abstract way, something that 'stands in contrast to blackness' - but they also mean every classical cultural trait. Things like a 'focus on the correct answer', 'focus on literacy', 'objectivity' etc. - these are artifacts of 'whiteness and white supremacy'. The link you provided actually is fairly decent, if that text represented CRT then I think there would be controversy, but much less so. But CRT in practices uses the language of race war: 'Destroy Whiteness or you are a White Supremacist'. In that case 'Whiteness' is effectively an ethnicity, broadly 'Westerners' or 'White People'. Finally, even if we can agree on what CRT is, it plays heavily into ideological victimhood: 'the student failed to learn to read at a high level because that's a racist, colonial imposition, and shouldn't have to achieve literacy to graduate high school' etc.. When we're talking about 'systematic issues' then those who have a propensity for victimhood can view racism/sexism in literally everything. The 'truck' toy with the 'boy' on the front cover? Gendered language? Your company founders are white and male? It's all oppression. On one hand, while the notion of systematic racism has legitimacy, CRT ideology opens up an ugly pandora's box that allows people to take an activist perspective on the basis of conjecture about literally everything and it plays directly into, and validates people's worst bigotries. This article about how 'the sidewalks are racist' is not a joke. They make completely unsubstantiated and bigoted notions about how 'White people walk on sidewalks' at Northwestern U. This is the kind of crude, fantasy racist bigotry, supported and endorsed by CRT thinking. [3] From the University of Toronto [1] Wikipedia [2] [1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjKmOurrbfwAhXUaM0KHbKYDroQFjAAegQIBhAD&url=https%3A%2F%2Fhandbook.law.utoronto.ca%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fusers%2Falzner%2FAdditional%2520Reading%2520Resources.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0Tmc2-3NN-cEuHRua82eLx https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory [3] https://dailynorthwestern.com/2021/04/05/opinion/allen-are-the-sidewalks-at-northwestern-too-white-too/ https://dailynorthwestern.com/2021/04/05/opinion/allen-are-t...
lawnchair_larry 5y ago
It doesn’t exist.

rayiner 5y ago

> We can debate all day long about the merits of explaining systemic racism to young black kids vs keeping them ignorant about it. However the people ignoring the facts are the ones who deny systemic racism exists. Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. Not only that, it deliberately repurposes a label that ordinarily refers to prejudiced beliefs, and applies it to structural forces that operate without any individuals being consciously racist. The same academics who talk about “systemic racism” readily admit that prejudiced beliefs have actually declined. If you educated people about the history of e.g. FHA redlining and how that affects people today, I think you’d find far fewer people deny that those effects exist. Besides that, we’re now teaching it to all children of color, who definitely don’t suffer from systemic racism. Asians and Latinos are on a course to achieve economic parity with whites, just like previous immigrant generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 > It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background. Sure, we should definitely teach kinds about the history of these things, how they create structural barriers, statistics on persistent disparities, when they’re old enough to understand. But even then, we should actually say what we mean instead of using rhetoric chosen by activists for shock effect.

vitus 5y ago
There are more factors to systemic racism than just worse economic outcomes, so it's naive to assert that only black people experience its negative effects. 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.
- deleted 5y ago
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- rayiner 5y ago
  > There are more factors to systemic racism than just worse economic outcomes, so it's naive to assert that only black people experience its negative effects. 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.
jakelazaroff 5y ago
> Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. 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.
- rayiner 5y ago
  Many of the phenomena it describes are real, for sure, at least with respect to Black people. My Maryland county wasn’t desegregated until 1968, in my parents’ generation. That has produced statistical disparities that persist to this day.
  - Klinky 5y ago
    Then what are you arguing? That it exists and doesn't exist at the same time?
    - andi999 5y ago
      I think he argues that it exists, but it is not relevant/does not deserve attention, because there are more important things (like prejudice).
    - rayiner 5y ago
      I never said it doesn’t exist, I’m talking about how it’s taught to children in school.
- cbnotfromthere 5y ago
  Could you please give us 3 examples of what you consider to be "systemic racism" nowadays in the US? Since you claim the phenomenon is real, I'm sure coming up with a few examples won't be difficult.
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  The data don't support racism being the causes of the disparate outcomes. That makes it unreasonable to start with the assumption that the "system is racist." 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.
faeriechangling 5y ago
I don't see systemic racism as being something activists say for shock effect. 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.

ne0flex 5y ago

I'd argue there's a lot more nuances to system racism than the general narrative that is currently being perpettuated. Looking into those nuances would be frowned upon because certain groups differ from other groups for reasons that are not truly understood but would cause us to ask questions we're not comfortable with. Though anecdotal, I know several adults who have fallen into the "it's because systemic racism that I can't get ahead" trap. One example is a low-achiever socially awkward friend of mine that complains about not being able to find a tech job, yet spends the vast majority of his days playing video games. Instead of recongizing that his skills (social and coding) are subpar and addressing it, he chalks it up to systemic racism, makes an angry post on Facebook and calls it a day.

exporectomy 5y ago
I think American culture has potentially gone down an ever-worsening path that comes from assuming blacks and whites are inherently identical. That leads to the belief that the persistent differences in life outcomes must be caused by oppression. That means there's an oppressor who is evil and deserves punishment. What if the fundamental assumption isn't true? How long do you keep punishing the oppressor for? Not to get all Godwinny but that's also how 1930's Germans saw Jews. They were the greedy bankers taking that reparations money and oppressing the native Germans. so they deserved punishment.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Wait, what? We went from "teaching about systemic racism might be harmful", to "systemic racism doesn't exist", to "Blacks are inherently different from other races, which will naturally lead to different outcomes" to "critical race theory might lead to nazism." This is a wild rollercoaster of a thread and I want off of it. To jump off the original commenter's point, if you're concerned that there might be harmful outcomes from teaching students that society is keeping them down, why aren't you worried about similar outcomes that might come from teaching them that their race makes them inherently less suited for certain tasks? I mean, think about what you're implying here. To claim that inherent race differences is the reason there's a Black wage gap -- ignoring everything else about that statement, it's way more fatalistic than telling kids that there are adverse social structures they should be aware of. Imagine being a teacher in a poor neighborhood and telling your class that the negative experiences in their life exist because of the fact they're Black -- not because of systemic racism, not because of laziness, not because of luck, but because of how they were born. You really can't get more fatalistic and harmful than that. It's so utterly embarrassing to see comments like this on HN, directly under other comments that claim that racism is a solved problem. Sometimes this community really creeps me out, I'm watching people in the same breath argue that racism is solved and that Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor. How does this pass muster?

exporectomy 5y ago

Instead of just saying systemic racism exists, why not point out examples? Then people can judge for themselves what effect it may have on them instead of feeling like there's this oppressive "other" which is the cause of anything they don't like about their life and there's no point struggling against it because it'll just crush them anyway.

nverno 5y ago
"systemic racism" is intentionally deceptive language. I think you'd be hard-pressed to constructive uses of this jargon where people are actually trying to solve specific, well-defined problems.
- breakyerself 5y ago
  Systemic racism isn't intentionally deceptive. It's self explanatory, but just like anything the more you investigate the more layered and multifaceted it becomes. For me it's 3 main things. 1. The way historical oppression can set a group behind another group even after any specific policy has been repealed. Poverty is often a cycle that can go on indefinitely for generations especially depending on things like upward mobility which has coincidentally been getting weaker since the period of official apartheid ended in the USA. Strange that we seem to be uninterested in spending much on the uplifting of our people now that such spending would need to include all people. 2. The way that bias against a group can result in that group being disadvantaged despite there being no rules or laws in place that require that and even in spite of it being contrary to policies. Like the way that black people are half as likely to receive a callback for a job interview as an identically qualified white applicant or that despite being less likely to be found with contraband black people are twice as likely to be searched by police. 3. Would be laws and rules that do not target racial groups, but unfairly benefit or disadvantage racial groups. This would be local property tax based school funding resulting in poor neighborhoods getting inadequate funding for schools resulting in predominantly black schools being underfunded. This is also drastically harsher penalties for crack compared to cocaine.
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fallingknife 5y ago

True. I don't see how you can possibly deny the existence of systemic racism in a country where all the top educational institutions actively discriminate against asians.

dr_dshiv 5y ago
What do you think about Affirmative Action? Is it systemic racism or systemic antiracism?
- wsc981 5y ago
  > What do you think about Affirmative Action? Is it systemic racism or systemic antiracism? Racism of course. Since it’s selecting people based on race. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    In theory but there is effectively already in many cases greater affirmative action for white people already. Lets look at Harvard as a case study. 43% of white students at Harvard are legacies, athletes, or related to staff and 75% of these 43% wouldn't have been admitted on merits. Around 1/3 of white people at Harvard are there because of effectively white affirmative action. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-percent-white-students-are-legacy-athletes-n1060361 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-... A drive to pick people solely on merits would sound more meritorious if we applied it to white people first. I say this as a white man who believes in theory colorblind meritocracy in an imaginary world where such a thing can actually exist.
    - deleted 5y ago
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    - rayiner 5y ago
      So explain the drive to eliminate test based admissions at heavily Asian NYC and VA public high schools

prestigious 5y ago

Systemic racism no longer exists or at least I’m completely unaware of it. I find proponents of this theory like people who believe in big foot. Somehow he’s out there but they have zero evidence for it

breakyerself 5y ago
There is a mountain of academic study on the subject. I don't blame you for being unfamiliar with it, but without doing the research I don't know what you think you would have stumbled across by accident that would have proven things to you. Especially if you're already primed to think it's not real.
- open0 5y ago
  > * I don't blame you for being unfamiliar with it* I do.
danShumway 5y ago
Other people have linked direct stats in this thread, and I encourage looking around at them. But also, just think about your theory in the abstract for a second. Less than one full generation has passed since redlining was made illegal. It's been less than 60 years since segregation was ruled illegal across the board. Do you really believe that the entirety of society has been reshaped in that amount of time and every negative system has been eliminated? In what is essentially less than the lifespan of a single generation? People treat the civil rights movement like it's this very old event that we've all moved past. I don't necessarily blame people for having that perspective, because that's the way we're taught about it in schools. But the civil rights movement was very recent. You think we overhauled the entire housing market in 60 years? We have not yet had even a single president that was born after the civil rights movement. So from my perspective, even ignoring the stats and research on this subject, I keep hearing people tell me that when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the voting rights act of 1965 passed, all the racists just, I don't know, died or something. That they can't possibly exist anymore, and they can't possibly have taught anything negative to their immediate kids who went on to be CEOs and politicians.

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jollybean 5y ago

It's not just about explaining, it's about identity, ideology and activism. To posit the issues as 'merely explaining' is kind of to strawman people's legit concerns. CRT, for example, goes way beyond 'explaining' - on purpose. If this were an in issue of merely 'explaining to people who systematic limitations might work' - and being sufficiently nuanced about it, then I think this whole thing would be a lot less controversial. I think there's a way for us to talk to kids about the potentialities of systematic racism without using the language of activism.

jakelazaroff 5y ago
> CRT, for example, goes way beyond 'explaining' - on purpose. That is not true. Critical Race Theory is a framework for viewing legal and social structures through the lens of race and racism. I’m not an expert here, but this seems to be a fairly balanced summary: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
- jollybean 5y ago
  CRT is a form of activism and ideology that goes far beyond explaining. The link you provided is a nice reference, but it's a very small-c conservative description and avoids the harder parts of the issue. The notion that 'minorities face challenges that majorities will have difficulty perceiving' is not unreasonable. But CRT uses language such as 'White Supremacy' - reminiscent of Men in Pointy White Hats' to describe those 'majority systems'. Their stated objective is to 'deconstruct and destroy Whiteness', implying that the 'majority culture must be removed', and that those who do not realize this and actively participate are holding up structures of White Supremacy. So they use 'whiteness' in kind of an abstract way, something that 'stands in contrast to blackness' - but they also mean every classical cultural trait. Things like a 'focus on the correct answer', 'focus on literacy', 'objectivity' etc. - these are artifacts of 'whiteness and white supremacy'. The link you provided actually is fairly decent, if that text represented CRT then I think there would be controversy, but much less so. But CRT in practices uses the language of race war: 'Destroy Whiteness or you are a White Supremacist'. In that case 'Whiteness' is effectively an ethnicity, broadly 'Westerners' or 'White People'. Finally, even if we can agree on what CRT is, it plays heavily into ideological victimhood: 'the student failed to learn to read at a high level because that's a racist, colonial imposition, and shouldn't have to achieve literacy to graduate high school' etc.. When we're talking about 'systematic issues' then those who have a propensity for victimhood can view racism/sexism in literally everything. The 'truck' toy with the 'boy' on the front cover? Gendered language? Your company founders are white and male? It's all oppression. On one hand, while the notion of systematic racism has legitimacy, CRT ideology opens up an ugly pandora's box that allows people to take an activist perspective on the basis of conjecture about literally everything and it plays directly into, and validates people's worst bigotries. This article about how 'the sidewalks are racist' is not a joke. They make completely unsubstantiated and bigoted notions about how 'White people walk on sidewalks' at Northwestern U. This is the kind of crude, fantasy racist bigotry, supported and endorsed by CRT thinking. [3] From the University of Toronto [1] Wikipedia [2] [1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjKmOurrbfwAhXUaM0KHbKYDroQFjAAegQIBhAD&url=https%3A%2F%2Fhandbook.law.utoronto.ca%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fusers%2Falzner%2FAdditional%2520Reading%2520Resources.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0Tmc2-3NN-cEuHRua82eLx https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory [3] https://dailynorthwestern.com/2021/04/05/opinion/allen-are-the-sidewalks-at-northwestern-too-white-too/ https://dailynorthwestern.com/2021/04/05/opinion/allen-are-t...

lawnchair_larry 5y ago

It doesn’t exist.