Does Systemic Racism Really Exist?
Examining a common claim about our society’s ills
In conversations about racial disparities in housing, law enforcement and the justice system in America, it’s often said that the cause of those disparities is systemic racism. There are varying definitions of systemic racism, but Cambridge Dictionary describes it as follows:
policies and practices that exist throughout a whole society or organization, and that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race
This seems consistent with how social activists typically think of the concept.
How does this relate the systems of our society? To help answer this, we should establish what we mean when we use the word “system.” Dictionary.com provides the following entry for it:
System
1. an assemblage or combination of things or parts forming a complex or unitary whole
At the start of this article, I named a few systems of American society that are commonly stated to be affected by systemic racism. Those and other systems have been described as such, and research has reported that indeed there are racial disparities that emanate from them.
As Cambridge Dictionary explains, if racism is systemic in a society or organization, it includes policies and practices that function within that system. By necessity, it must also include the people who are part of the system since they put the policies and practices in motion. A system, in this case, is thus an assemblage of the policies, practices and people — the three P’s, if you will — that form a unitary whole.
That’s why I find it difficult to think that those systems are, in fact, systemically racist. Only a part of each system — the people who partake in it — has racism occurring within it, and only a part of that part is directly causing it.
To illustrate my point, let’s picture the system as a grocery business with around one thousand employees. The business does not have any racially-segregating policies, follows all legal regulations against racial discrimination and has its own procedures in place to address racism among its employees. The majority of those employees do not demonstrate any perceivable racism towards their customers. In fact, only ten employees, give or take, could be said to display racist tendencies.
Taking all these details together, is that grocery business systemically racist? Most of us, I think, would be inclined to conclude that it is not. Instead we would agree that whatever racism occurs among the employees is a problem with those employees alone.
Somebody might object that ten out of one thousand employees being racist understates the real scope of racism in our systems.
That could be true, but the point still stands: if only a minority of those taking part in the system show racial tendencies, the system itself should probably not viewed as racist. If otherwise its policies and practices give no preference to any race, at what specific point do we say that the system is racist?
Someone might further object that the people who take part in the system are the ones who make it exist, therefore those people are the system.
My counterargument is that if you put some random people in a space together and they don’t do anything, you don’t have a system. You just have a group of people who happen to be standing next to each other. A system also needs the policies and practices that help to form its structure.
One well-known example of systemic racism from the past is segregation. Among other things, segregation in the pre-70’s southern U.S. determined who could marry who and reserved separate facilities for white and black people. Those designated for black people were usually of inferior quality. Segregation was a system of racism in which its regulations, procedures and participants all gave clear preference to one race over others. Racism was encoded into the system.
In one of my previous articles, I discussed three modern manifestations of systemic racism. Like segregation, each is a system that gives preference to certain races over others. But whereas segregation was meant to maintain the superior position of one race, their purpose is to promote race-based equity by favoring disadvantaged racial groups for selection. For instance, when it was first enacted, President Biden’s debt relief program for farmers made non-white farmers automatically qualified for relief while white farmers had to apply for it.
These kinds of initiatives are well-intended but fail to treat people the way they should be treated, as individuals. As such they ignore the fact that sometimes white people do face worse circumstances — including racism — than non-white people. That is why I call them soft systemic racism, distinct from hard types like segregation and Apartheid in South Africa.
What does all this mean in terms of whether or not systemic racism exists in America? Returning to the definition given for “systemic racism,” if racism is systemic then it must involve the policies and practices that exist throughout a system. With regards to the systems of our society, the mere fact that discrimination sometimes occurs in them doesn’t necessarily mean that the problem is “systemic.” However, as noted in the last couple paragraphs, there are systems that do deliberately discriminate by race in this country, with good but nevertheless flawed intentions.
We should keep in mind that dictionary definitions are not likely to change people’s views. However, the definition provided in Cambridge Dictionary appears consistent with how “systemic” is used in common parlance. The way we usually say “systemic” implies being thoroughly spread or embedded in something. Some people use it interchangeably with “systematic,” which means that the thing is directly encoded into the system’s workings, the way racism was encoded into segregation. Even Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of systemic racism seems to allow for it to be systematic at the same time.
Now, if racial bias has a minor but still notable effect on how often black people get convicted of crime, or denied a mortgage, should that be called systemic racism? Well, racism might affect how well the system functions in those cases, and in that sense a person might call it a “systemic” issue. But again, “systemic” usually means that something is present throughout the system.
Certainly there are many businesses that have a number of less-than-friendly employees. It might even be the case that most employees are like that, but we still don’t call the business “systemically rude” because we know that the business is not designed to be so. Otherwise, how would that business hope to make a profit?
Semantics aside, there are reasons why we can confidently say that racism does not affect our systems to a degree that makes them systemically racist. Other factors besides racism contribute to the disparities between racial groups in our society, arguably more so.
Racism does still occur today and most of us want to prevent it from happening to our neighbors as well as ourselves. In doing so, we have to beware of letting our good intentions misguide our judgment. That means being careful not to make false allegations or exaggerations about what’s causing our problems.
Similarly, we shouldn’t paint the systems of our society as being systemically racist if they are not intended to discriminate by race and racism does not usually occur in them.