Comment by ryankemper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryankemper | Hacker News Reader

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> Since racism is systemic[1]

> [1] If you don't believe this, you're in the minority now: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/11/21286642/george-floyd-protests....

This part was a little odd. It sounds like you're saying "because this belief is widely held by people, we should treat it as true"?

I definitely am in the minority, but I find a much more logically consistent view than the modern definition of systemic racism to actually be "there are systems of authority/control/oppression, which by their nature can be exploited by racists (or other groups) to advance their ends".

In other words - and I hope this isn't too off topic of a tangent - one of the primary goals of the BLM protest seems to be "racism is leading to excess death/imprisonment for black americans, so let's try to purge any traces of racism to eliminate these excess deaths". Which to me is missing the point: practices/systems like no-knock raids, the war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, etc give police officers an excuse to be able to violently invade someone's home (no-knock), violate 4th amendment rights (war on drugs wrt "I smelled weed in your car"), criminalize behavior that happens to be broken along racial and class lines (non-violent drug usage/possession/distribution). In other words, the problem is not that there are racist people in the system, but that we have these systems that give racist individuals the perfect excuse to achieve their nefarious ends. That's because we've built a system that justifies and encourages oppression, and we can see that without having to introduce racee.

Anyway, I'm not hear to debunk "systemic racism" since like so many of the new-speak definitions/words, as soon as you try to debunk it people claim that you're using the wrong definition. But I do think it should be noted that when it comes to looking at actual research literature on, say, likelihood of being shot by police in a given encounter broken down by race, the "systemic racism" doesn't seem to be borne out in the data. Whereas we can make incredibly important societal change without needing to introduce the idea of systemic racism, simply by addressing the actual systems of oppression we have set up that give police officers the ability to randomly pull a citizen over and harass them since at any given moment each of us is violating a nonzero number of laws.

This struck me as well. Systemic racism means (to me) that if you took the people out of the system, you'd still get biased outcomes based on race. In my view, it's a different matter to say that a system produces biased results because it is designed to do so, rather than it is systemic because the people operating it make biased choices where their discretion is called on.

Are there actual, current examples of systemic racism where an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-based biased outcomes?

There are plenty, such as the influence of religion and customs instilled by people in the past. Many people are assigned these cultural norms from childhood.

For example, the normalized Western image of something like a caucasian Jesus or a caucasian Santa Clause influences ways of thinking and who we see as our cultural betters.

> Are there actual, current examples of systemic racism where an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-based biased outcomes?

If you removed all racists from the economy, black people as a demographic would still be at a huge disadvantage for a very long time (or forever?). The playing field might not level on it's own.

If a system starts out with biased functions and runs long enough so that the distribution of the state is biased, removing the biased functions doesn't necessarily guarantee the state will return back to an unbiased equilibrium.

Removing explicitly racist laws doesn't remove the biases embedded in the system from two hundred years of slavery and terrorism. There is a complex feedback loop of education, economics, and cultural attitudes that have locked the imbalances in.

the term “systemic racism”, to me, sounds like parts of the system are actively racist. your argument is true (black people are economically disadvantaged given history), but aren’t poor white people/latino people too?

how is a poor black person any worse off than a poor white person?

Your idea of "justice" is based upon group membership, as unfortunately for many other people. I see absolutely no difference between a poor white person vs. a poor black person. Sure, there might be more poor black people, but so what? Do you seriously believe that rich white people would actively be trying to help poor white people and not poor black people? No, everybody wants riches for themselves, poor whites aren't given anything either.

This is what I tune out of the conversation whenever someone mentions "patriarchy" (the "modern" version, i.e. "men are in power" not "men own women") - I'm a man, but I've never received any benefit just because (most of) our presidents / businessmen are men (in fact, arguably (individual) women receive more benefits, because most of those men are heterosexuals).

> I've never received any benefit

You have, it is just that these benefits are so ingrained in society that you didn't notice. That's what people mean when they talk about systemic issues.

I am a man and worked in fastfood during my studies.

I was offered a permanent contract immediatly after my first month, while there were also a lot of women with kids working there who had been on temp contracts for years. Probably because I could work at night; the mothers worked during schooltimes. Any time someone got pregnant, their contract was not renewed.

In this situation I had an advantage because of my gender. This was not because the business itself was specifically sexist, in fact almost all of management were women. Instead, the systems in place made it so that financially smart decisions negatively impacted women.

> Probably because I could work at night; the mothers worked during schooltimes.

I mean, sounds it literally wasn’t sexism, you were just a better worker.

Obviously, it’s a problem that society doesn’t value people having children. But that’s an orthogonal issue to sexism, I’m pretty sure that if a father couldn’t work nights, he’d be treated exactly the same. Ideally the society would subsidize people having kids, or businesses employing workers with kids, or something...

In many cases, I don't think you can separate "people" from "the system" because the system is a human construct in which human discretion is called upon repeatedly. For example, studies which show that young white children react more negatively to black faces compared to white faces - is this "the system"? Is is it "discretion"? I'm not sure you can differentiate the two.

It's also important to note that just because you fixed a racist practice, that doesn't immediately endow an underprivileged group with the full fruits of equality. For example, redlining may now be illegal in the United States, but middle class white Americans have been benefiting from nearly a hundred years' worth of wealth accumulation through housing that black Americans were locked out of. This is a good example of how the "system" produces racially-biased outcomes without any racist human input in the present day.

It seems like you're saying momentum is racist.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, but if your implication is that I'm saying "(legal) progress towards racial equality is racist", then I'm not really sure how you got that from my comment. My point is simply that you can have greater legal equality and yet things that happened in the past can still cause racist outcomes in the present (see my example).

> For example, redlining may now be illegal in the United States, but middle class white Americans have been benefiting from nearly a hundred years' worth of wealth accumulation through housing that black Americans were locked out of. This is a good example of how the "system" produces racially-biased outcomes without any racist human input in the present day.

I think this is describing how the system includes momentum, and you're saying that the system (momentum) is producing racially-biased outcomes _without_ racist input today. That's true in the strictest, most technical sense, but is this supposed to be a motivation for reparations or something?

I don't think it's just the "strictest, most technical" sense. It's a significant example of how "if you took the people out of the system, you'd still get biased outcomes based on race." (or, if you prefer, an example of where "an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-based biased outcomes")

Ok, I understand what you mean. Thanks for being considerate, I usually don't express my opinion in these discussions, hopefully I didn't come across very rudely.

This seems to fit with the charge that you are arguing momentum is racist. They were born in a poor household. That household is poorer than it would otherwise be because of racism in prior generations (but which no longer exists today) leading to a lack of inheritance among other things. This is your evidence of systemic racism.

Along those same lines I suppose we also suffer from systemic genocide, systemic famine, systemic war, and every other crappy thing that happened to people in history and were not somehow complete corrected for by a counter redistribution of wealth and status.

That is one piece of evidence of systemic racism.

The problem with your counterexample ("systemic famine"/"systemic war"/etc.) is that those are one-off events in the past, and thus they don't cumulatively add up and compound to create very unequal outcomes today. A more appropriate hypothetical would be that the last 400 years of one's ancestors all experienced genocide, war, or other similarly "crappy" things.

Focusing on one piece at a time is how we do logic. You need to defend the weakest link in your case. Or are you suggesting that the various pieces of systemic racism are not themselves racism, until aggregated together?

As for one-off events, it seems like just a matter of degree, not principle. Though surely genocide continue to have negative affects on the victimized group to this day.

Regardless of whether you think it's a "weak link", this isn't a logical proof where you can disprove one statement rendering the entire proof invalid. Rather, you have to disprove each piece of evidence for systemic racism in order to disprove it exists.

Your argument is mostly "whataboutism" - you point out that terrible things have happened to groups of people in the past and those things have inter-generational effects. Of course it's true.

That being said, of course it's a matter of degree, but at that point you're just arguing semantics. Driving your car at 25mph vs 125mph is only a difference of degree, and yet one is totally permissible and the other is incredibly dangerous and would land you with a big fine. The key point here is that speeding becomes increasingly more dangerous as you drive faster, to the point that exceeding speed limits by a given amount becomes reckless driving because you're much more likely to cause injury and/or death to yourself and others. In the same way, racist systems create a compounding disadvantage that is almost impossible to rectify simply by changing the laws to make them "colorblind" in the modern day.

I'd call it reductio ad absurdum personally, an application of your logic elsewhere to reach absurd conclusions. And the existence of inter-generational effects are the undisputed facts I started with, not the conclusions reached via your logic, which are that the existence of these effects support the charge of systemic war/famine/etc. Whether it's just semantics depends on what you think the supposed existence of these "systemic evils" requires morally.

Not really. You've said that because the difference between the intergenerational harm caused by "other crappy things" and 400 years' worth of racism is only quantitative, the intergenerational effects of "other crappy things" ought to be considered systemic. Your logic implies that because driving your car at 5mph and 100mph is only a quantitative difference, driving at 5mph ought to be considered "speeding." Or because the difference between heating cold water 1 degree and 100 degrees is only quantitative, cold water heated 1 degree ought to be considered "steam." Quantitative differences eventually become qualitative differences; that much should be trivially obvious.

Ah I missed that little gem. So genocide would be the safe slow driving extreme in this analogy?

> This is a good example of how the "system" produces racially-biased outcomes without any racist human input in the present day.

What is the end goal here though? The most wealthy ethnicities in the US are Asian-Indians, Jewish and East-Asians. Is that also systemic racism (against Whites) and these groups should be knocked down?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-asian-quotas-repeat-an...

Would you agree at some point this country was systemically racist?

Surely you would agree during slavery it was?

I'm going to assume you agree, so then can you explain when systemic racism ended? And what caused it to end? Can you also help me understand how you are so sure that the negative impact to Black people while this country was systematically racist does not still hurt people today?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the person you're responding to is in opposition to you.

Maybe I'm wrong but wouldn't their interpretation of chattel slavery in America be that it wasn't the beginning of systemic racism in this country, but purely oppressive system that was exploited by racists? It seems like an odd distinction to make even if I agree that there exists systematic oppression against many groups in addition to systemic racism.

>In other words, the problem is not that there are racist people in the system, but that we have these systems that give racist individuals the perfect excuse to achieve their nefarious ends.

Even this just doesn't fully explain away systemic oppression that impacts people on a day-to-day basic like Black people not getting job interviews due to their name sounding Black or job offers because the interviewers have unconscious bias.

> Even this just doesn't fully explain away systemic oppression that impacts people on a day-to-day basic like Black people not getting job interviews due to their name sounding Black or job offers because the interviewers have unconscious bias.

In this scenario, is it not the racist individual (the interviewer) impacting minority success, rather than the system itself?

(I take no position here as to the existence of systemic racism. I'm just not certain the example you have brought supports your argument.)

good question. The individual is racist, but he/she is probably just racist in the same way that almost everyone is: the society that they grew up in created associations in his nervous system that black people are more likely to be incompetent, unprofessional, untrustworthy, or whatever. Furthermore, the individual may be conditioned by society to believe that certain innocuous elements of black culture or mannerisms somehow indicate an inferiority - they may consider black speech mannerisms as a sign of lower intelligence, or they may consider black styles of hair to be unprofessional. These are all part of a cultural system that stigmatizes blackness and black people. It's not the same kind of systemic racism as racist rules/bureaucracy, but it's still part of a system of racist beliefs and customs.

The logic of your argument seems to be: "There was slavery, so there was systemic racism." Am I right? Then you extruded that argument into: "Because there was slavery, there is also systemic racism today." This is quite a leap, especially considering that slavery was ended on a particular date due to a civil war. Since then, several settlements has been made with racism (systemic or otherwise), some of the most important ones being during the 60's. These settlements have come both in the form of physical changes to the law, but also in the form of a change to the general zeitgeist and in the attitude of most people towards racism. What is happening today, however, is purely the widspread misunderstanding and politization of facts and statistics. On the whole, crime is going down, but if you look at this table from the FBI, the bias does in fact seem to be biased towards whites and not blacks.[1] What do you think about that?

[1]: FBI murder statistics by race from 2018, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-... 2018 was the latest year I could find such data on.

No I'm asking for you to tell me when systemic racism ended in this country because the crux of your argument is that it has ended and the effects of it historically don't linger today. Can you explain the fact the net worth of a typical white family is $171,000 and the typical net worth of a Black family is $17,150? Are Black people in this country inherently predisposed to making less money or are there systemic reasons for that?

It's odd you continue to focus on crime statistics, something I haven't mentioned at all, as a way to push back on the narrative of systemic racism. For anyone who is Black or a person of color, we know first hand systemic racism is much more than that.

[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...

> Can you explain the fact the net worth of a typical white family is $171,000 and the typical net worth of a Black family is $17,150?

how many young poor black mothers have children too early (16) with gang members who end up dying from gang violence? isn’t that a modern day common black narrative?

how is a poor white person any worse off than a poor black person? they have same access to all resources. it’s systemic poverty for poor people. it has nothing to do with blacks.

some blacks bootstrap themselves out and make it, most don’t. how broken is the system for those that make it out? not very.

>it’s systemic poverty for poor people. it has nothing to do with blacks.

This is a good point imo. Are they poor because they're black or because their family was poor before them?

I agree people put too much emphasis on more visible bias (ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation) and blame a lot of things which arguably may have originated from these bias, but are furthered by other factors (e.g. slow social mobility - all bias accounted for).

you have to adjust those FBI stats for the fact that black people are 13% of the US population

I agree that per capita numbers always tell a more accurate story. Anyway here's a great resource to make those adjustments: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?d=ACS%205-Year%20Estima...

> behavior that happens to be broken along racial and class lines

A huge coincidence.

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