This whole concept of "systemic racism" is 50-100 years out of date. We've had black people in the highest levels of our system--President, Supreme Court, Attorney General, mayors of large cities, prosecutors, DAs, police chiefs. That's great, that's what we want, but then how did it happen if the system is racist? And why didn't those people fix it if it existed? And if they didn't, what am I supposed to do about it during a Jets game because some sideline chick wants to pontificate about "justice"? Please.
Black people were systematically kept out of housing markets for a century following the end of slavery. Federal programs such as the WPA systematically and intentionally built neighborhoods to be segregated as a matter of explicit policy. This led to vast inequalities in the ways white and black families accumulated wealth. Furthermore, black neighborhoods tended to be more dense, less green, with fewer white collar jobs and more pollution. This led to the development of violent inner cities, with less economic mobility and a sense that the system had failed them compounded by more overcrowded classrooms. This was normal throughout the latter half of the 20th century. This leads to systemic poverty over the course of generations, even as public policy has become more equitable. Systemic poverty is a form of systemic racism.
These segregated cities have in turn led to less integration between white and black people, and a sense of 'othering' on both sides. This furthers implicit bias - people, including cops, including lawmakers, including black people themselves - implicitly tend to believe white people more, and think that black people are more violent. Implicit bias is unavoidable in a world with billions of people and millions of subgroups and divisions - it's a way that humans process large batches of information, and without the neurology of categorizing we would all be lost all the time. But the very denial of those biases is itself a form of systemic racism.
The fact that black people succeed in this society is not evidence of a lack of systemic racism until they succeed, proportionally, at roughly the same level as white people. In 2016, the median white family was
$154,000 wealthier than the median black family. If not for systemic racism, what accounts for that kind of number? Would your explanation be that black people are inherently worse at making money? Or do the systems that have existed in this country allow easier access for white people to have wealth?
Last but not least, 'the war on drugs' has systematically led to more black people being convicted of crimes than white people. I grew up in a mostly black neighborhood in Brooklyn. I knew, by the time I was 14, a significant number of teenagers on my block who had already been arrested for possession with intent to distribute, mostly from random 'stop and frisk' incidents. On the other hand, my high school was mostly white and Asian. People there passed around pot and pills with more frequency than I ever saw in my neighborhood. My high school class sent 47% of its graduates to Ivy league schools, including multiple kids who were caught with drugs on school grounds. This was in the 2000s, and was overt systemic racism.
Topic: #BlackLivesMatter (Read 354117 times)