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Remember when Pluto was demoted from planetary status and given the name \u201cdwarf planet,\u201d confusing everyone for whom the name implies that it is indeed a planet, albeit a small one?<\/p>\n
OK, maybe I betray my age.\u00a0 But it was a peculiar sort of label:\u00a0 \u201cyes, it\u2019s a dwarf planet.\u00a0 No, it\u2019s not a real planet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or on my Forbes site, I write about social insurance, and I say that it may have the word \u201cinsurance\u201d in its name, but it is not actually insurance, and that\u2019s confusing as all heck.<\/p>\n
And the same is true of \u201csystemic racism.\u201d\u00a0 It does not mean \u201cvery bad levels of racism,\u201d nor is it the same as \u201csystematic racism,\u201d that is, racism that is organized and structured systematically.<\/p>\n
Instead, near as I understand, \u201csystemic racism\u201d is used to mean the following:<\/p>\n
a state of affairs in which, in a given country\/locality, individuals who have been historically discriminated against are now disadvantaged and experience disparities with respect to such metrics as income, accumulated wealth, educational attainment, incarceration rates, health status\/life expectancy, and so on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Do I have a source document for this?\u00a0 See \u201cWhat is Systemic Racism?<\/a>\u201d by the Catholic Bishops, which doesn\u2019t spell this out directly but makes the meaning clear from the overall text.\u00a0 Can a state of systemic racism exist in a country in which there is no history of racism, for example, because an immigrant group arrives and, while not directly discriminated against, is poorer because they are less educated?\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure.)<\/p>\n
\u201cRacism,\u201d is, of course, different, referring as it does to direct mistreatment of individuals due to their race\/ethnicity\/skin color and\/or the holding of the opinion by individuals (individually or in an entire community) that another race\/ethnicity\/skin color-group is inferior\/should be subjugated.\u00a0 This can be in the form of the extreme racism of the Nazis (because the term \u201crace\u201d doesn\u2019t mean \u201cas defined by the U.S. Census Bureau\u201d but \u201cas defined in the mind of the individual racist,\u201d and the Nazis did indeed see the Jews as of a different race), or of the \u201cunconscious bias\u201d sort, to the extent that this is real (because, in fact, the Implicit Association Test itself is bogus).<\/p>\n
Here is the \u201cofficial\u201d definition from the Merriam-Webster dictionary<\/a>:<\/p>\n
\n1<\/span><\/span> : <\/strong>a belief that race<\/a> is the primary determinant<\/a> of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n
\n\n2<\/span>a<\/span><\/span> : <\/strong>a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles<\/span><\/span><\/div>\nb<\/span><\/span> : <\/strong>a political or social system founded on racism<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n3<\/span><\/span> : <\/strong>racial prejudice<\/a> or discrimination<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\nI suppose one might claim that the American political system is \u201cfounded on racism\u201d but that\u2019s been disputed, in the first place, in the various authors who have countered the claims of the \u201c1619 Project\u201d (see, for example, Lyman Stone\u2019s essay<\/a>, \u201cSlavery In America Did Not Begin In 1619, And Other Things The New York Times Gets Wrong,\u201d especially the section, \u201cAmerica\u2019s Story Is of Increasing Refusal to Tolerate Slavery\u201d), and in any case, it is an absurdity of a definition to claim that any \u201cpolitical or social system founded on racism\u201d continues to be racist in perpetuity (not to mention the grammatical mess of this definition).<\/p>\n
So what do you do with this differentiation in concept?<\/p>\n
Consider the example of the \u201cschools to prison pipeline\u201d:<\/p>\n
To the extent that black boys are being disciplined at a greater rate, and as a result they are more likely to end up incarcerated or otherwise involved with the criminal justice system and impeded from success in life, that\u2019s one constituent part of \u201csystemic racism.\u201d<\/p>\n
But is this because teachers make different choices in classroom management for their black and white students, due to actual racist actions and attitudes on their part?\u00a0 Or are black students more likely to misbehave?\u00a0 And if teachers\/administrators dialed back on their discipline, would this have further unintended consequences, such as the chaotic classrooms being reported in schools which have declared the answer to be the ending of such disciplinary procedures?\u00a0 The concept of \u201csystemic racism\u201d identifies this as a part of \u201csystemic racism\u201d because of the disparate outcome, regardless \u2014 and that\u2019s the case for all such disparities \u2014 are greater incarceration rates of black men due to their greater propensity to commit crimes or the greater vigor with which police pursue crimes committed by black, vs. white, men, and, if the former, is it due to lack of fathers in the home, greater poverty levels, or something else?<\/span><\/p>\n
Once you acknowledge that \u201csystemic racism\u201d and \u201cracism\u201d are two different concepts, then you also know that the demand being made of Americans is not \u201cchange your racist way of living\u201d but \u201cagitate politically for changes that will bring about equality of conditions, or at least vote correctly for those who will do so.\u201d (Yes, activists like to use the word \u201cequity\u201d which means, in practice, \u201cthe set of conditions which produce an end to these disparities.\u201d)<\/p>\n
And activists are increasingly insistent that measures which try to remedy disadvantages, such as federal or state funding for poor schools, are insufficient, that far more drastic measures must be undertaken. For some, this means restoration of affirmative action where it had been eliminated (e.g., in California<\/a>) and expansion everywhere (such as a recent opinion column in the Chicago Tribune<\/em><\/a> which argued that affirmative action was opposed because people \u201cdidn\u2019t want to give up the preferential treatment they received in every aspect of American life\u201d). For others, this means reparations, cries for which are growing (e.g., in the form of a new bill in California<\/a>), especially recently as, I suspect, a result of notions of money-printing so that one can imagine generous sums of money being directed at descendants of slaves, while imagining that it comes from no where in particular rather than from the taxes of Americans. For yet others, this means the extensive expansion of the social welfare system: government paid health care, tertiary education, etc. If, for instance, black families have less in the way of retirement savings that white families, then the proffered solution is for the government to provide more cash to retirees across the board.<\/p>\n
But consider reparations:\u00a0 when Ta-Nehesi Coates whatever wrote about redlining, I said at the time<\/a> that this is the best-argued case I\u2019ve seen \u2014 but, at the same time, whatever restitution-payments the government might owe should therefore be directed at those harmed by the practice, not every single resident of the country who descended from slaves.\u00a0 (I later commented<\/a> that claims that the United States as a whole profited from slavery made no sense to me, since the South, despite its slaveholding, was far behind the North in terms of development and, as a result, lost the war, but that any such claim is at any rate not contingent on others benefitting, as the federal government did not benefit financially from interning the Japanese during World War II.)<\/p>\n
At the same time, if one speaks solely in terms of justice, the best case for reparations-for-slavery would be made against individual states.\u00a0 The Northern states gradually freed slaves.\u00a0 The United States as a country was not indifferent to the question of slavery but instead there were ongoing conflicts over the question, including such issues as whether non-slave states might be admitted to the union despite the effect on the balance of power between slave and free states, and whether the federal government had the power to compel Northern states to cooperate with slave-catchers.\u00a0 There was no such thing as a federal government policy on slavery.\u00a0 At the same time, slave states actively supported slavery, for instance, by\u00a0restricting the degree to which slaves could buy their freedom or slave-owners could set them free, restricting their education because that would endanger they system, and the like.\u00a0 And, of course, Jim Crow laws were entirely at the state level and perpetrated injustices to a far greater degree than the federal government.<\/p>\n
Why don\u2019t reparations-supporters agitate for Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, etc., to pay reparations?\u00a0 Presumably, for the same reason as the bank robber robbed the bank:\u00a0 because that\u2019s where the money is.\u00a0 For a small number of states, already mostly poorer than average, to be faced with such a bill payable to some portion of its population as well as outsiders whose ancestors had formerly lived there, would be enormously divisive and destructive \u2014 and that thought experiment demonstrates that the concept itself is flawed.<\/p>\n