What is Systemic Racism?
One of the most important things about the current conversation re Black Lives Matter is that what is being exposed by the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, and hundreds of other Black people is not simply the actions of individual racists or even a pattern of racism-motivated murders by police, but what has been termed structural or systemic racism.
Very often people try to deal with (read “minimize”) such horrors by treating them as isolated events. However, when a number of similar events occur over time, there is at minimum a pattern to be considered, and when a pattern persists over a long enough period of time and over a dispersed geography, it becomes evident that there is a systemic cause.
The United States can be viewed as a system (a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network). Despite differences in subcultures, dialects, political views, etc., there is an overarching culture that is distinctively American, as can be seen by numerous tweets and websites by people from other countries making fun of or criticizing that culture. For example, during World War II, American troops present in England came from all parts of the country and all walks of life. Nevertheless, there was enough identifying similarity for English people of that time to lump them together as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.”
Individual white Americans may be consciously or unconsciously racist, and may be racist in their speaking and actions to a greater or lesser extent. However, results from studies of unconscious bias and racism make it clear that none of us is free from deeply embedded ideas and beliefs that perpetuate racism. Why is that?
My parents were immigrants from a part of the world where they almost certainly never encountered people whose skin color was different from theirs. Further, they came to America in part because, as Jews, they were subject to bigotry and persecution in their own lives. I grew up in a small town (20,000+ population) that had maybe 50 Black families. In my high school class of about 250 there were three Black students — we played sports together, went to class together, but otherwise didn’t socialize. And, there was a “colored section” of town where all the Black families lived. I never heard my parents use the N word, but they did refer to our Black housekeeper as “die Schwarze,” and to Black people collectively as “Coulierte.”
I went to a prestigious University. There were students there of all races, though the vast majority of Black students were from Africa, not from the U.S., and while the student body was steeped in “Greek” culture, any Black students in fraternities were likely to be athletes, and I never saw Black women in sororities. Needless to say, the American Black students’ experience of university life was different from mine and reflected the racism that they grew up with. For example, my friends (among ourselves) and I told jokes that were blatantly racist, and when I got involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s and began to decline to participate in that “humor” I was derided and told that it was “all in fun,” “didn’t mean anything,” and “get a sense of humor.”
Where did those experiences stem from? Where did my parents’ or my classmates’ casual racism come from?
The Sufis have a saying: Three things are invisible: air to the bird, water to the fish, and human beings to themselves. Systemic racism is the air in which we fly, the water in which we swim, and as long as the system that inculcates us with racism from birth remains invisible to us, it operates us. Like a virus in the operating system of a computer it runs alongside the positive or healthy aspects of our being and contaminates them with racism so that even our most (seemingly) benign thoughts, feelings, and actions carry impacts that, while unintended, are no less hurtful or damaging for that.
This is why doing personal work on overcoming our individual racism is insufficient, and why responding to patterns while ignoring the system that underlies them is ineffective. That is not to say we shouldn’t do these things. By all means, wake yourself up and take responsibility for your actions and impacts. Defund or even eliminate the “justice” and “law enforcement” systems as we know them. But even if we were to eliminate police forces, if we do not examine and root out the perpetuation of incorrection assumptions, ideas and beliefs, about human behavior and especially those about Black people, People of Color, poor people, etc., that underlie those systems, we will ultimately fail. It is that perpetuation (e.g., people telling me to lighten up when you stopped telling racist jokes for example) that is the element of culture that carries systemic racism forward.
It’s fine to have a strategy to cure the ills of racism that beset the United States, but as Peter Drucker said “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” For any strategy to succeed we must give it a fostering culture in which to live. Right now that culture is racism. The United States was founded on racism. In order to enslave a people you must first make them deeply “the other.”
When the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown hit it took just a few weeks for the air to clear over cities that were notorious for their poor air quality — Beijing, Los Angeles, London, New York all saw preternaturally clear skies. In the same way the current Black Lives Matter uprisings need to be a springboard for white people to clear the air in which we fly, the water in which we swim. We can do this by committing ourselves to continuing to call out systemic racism in, but not limited to, the police and the government, and not allowing the current outrage do die down. Black Lives Matter cannot be allowed to be the progressive “flavor of the month,” to become quiet and then re-emerge with the next racist atrocity.
We cannot let things go back to “normal” and the culture be re-contaminated just when we had the opportunity to make real, systemic change. History will not forgive us, our Black brothers and sisters will not forgive us, and we should not forgive ourselves if we are uncaring enough to let that happen.
